At age 14 Cody Diehl and his friends were bored. Bored of eighth grade, bored of youth, bored of doing the same old stuff. So they stole a cigarette from a friend’s mom. And then they thieved another. And another. They thought smoking was sophisticated, fun, cool, exciting, everything middle school was not. The best part: they relieved boredom with every drag.

“We’d be like ‘Oh we’re so buzzed. This is fun,’ and then the buzz would go away and we’d just sit there and go on with the rest of our day,” Diehl, senior, said. “Then after a while we started doing it more when we got more and more bored.”

Although scared to smoke at first, Diehl found that smoking had no immediate effect on his health, debunking his earlier suspicion that he would feel noticeably worse after a cigarette. When that notion proved false – he felt fine – Diehl decided he would take up smoking.

The initial buzz, a rush of blood accompanied by dizziness, sustained Diehl’s new found love of nicotine until freshman year when addiction kicked in, creating effects even better than the fading thrill.

“[Smoking] started relaxing me when I would get angry or just frantic about something,” Diehl said. “It keeps me calm, chills me out. I also like the look of it a whole lot.”

What pleased Diehl about smoking was not only the relief he felt, but the transformation he saw in himself. A previous critic of smoking, Diehl learned to appreciate the practice after taking it up.

“Everyone in my family except for my mom and dad smokes. I was always looking at them like ‘I’m not going to be the one doing that. I don’t want to [smoke],’” Diehl said. “Then once I tried it, I basically fell in love with it.”

But Diehl knows the pleasure of smoking does not come without both health and social drawbacks. As Diehl has not yet experienced smoking related health problems, he has not found the motivation to quit, but that does not mean he is not worried about the future.

“If I get a sore throat I start thinking ‘Uh oh I could be starting to get throat cancer.’ If I bite my tongue and it doesn’t stop swelling for a few days then I’m like ‘Uh oh maybe I have cancer in my tongue,’” Diehl said. “I just get really scared sometimes and I start freaking myself out about it. I’m not trying to end up dead or get cancer or anything.”

For Diehl that means quitting after high school or during his first year of college, as Diehl thinks it is better to quit sooner than later.

Socially, Diehl worries about the negative impacts his label as a ‘smoker’ has on him. Diehl feels that cigarettes sometimes hold him back from making better relationships with people who prematurely dislike smokers. But again, this annoyance is not enough to make Diehl quit.

Diehl may not recommend smoking, but for now he is balancing the negatives of cigarettes with the positives.
“I could’ve saved a whole lot of money if I never started smoking. I did it as something to do and then it turned into a dependency,” Diehl said. “But, it hasn’t really hurt me yet. I just enjoy it. I like having that feeling; I like having something I can depend on.”