Your First Experience With Tobacco

[Rossi320]

Many years ago I had a friend that chewed and smoked cigarillos we hung out alot and did alot of crazy things, one day I decided to try it on my own. I stopped off at a gas station bought a can went for a run,decided to it is time to put one in and see what it is all about had a old carton of orange juice to spit in,it didn't last long..(miss that car and my old friend) but I put another dip in later that day now that experience had brought me to smoking a pipe which I enjoy and collecting

 

[warren]

A neighbor lad, certainly no friend, hand me a Pall Mall. I've burned up tens of thousands of dollars, to my embarrassment, over the ensuing years. Love the nicotine but, damn!, what I could have done with those moneys over the years.

 

[Sobrbiker]

With a neighborhood pack of kids on the south side of Indy, when I was five or six, getting sick on a shoplifted plug of either Man O’ War or Days Work in a storm drain outlet on Pleasant Run creek…

 

[VDL_Piper]

In one of the barns with what ever Dad was smoking and one of his pipes he had laying around. Funny I now remember a timber box with brass corners that had his old lighters in……..Ronsons and many others plus some pipes. I need to find that box

 

[SmokingInTheWind]

My first major experience, other then a few drags off from cigarettes, was at what I now call The Great Chew Off of ‘78. Me and my two cousins were freshmen in high school. We walked into the small town drugstore like we owned the place, and each grabbed our chew of choice. None of us had ever chewed tobacco before and we decided to sample the different genres. One cousin picked out a pouch of Red Man leaf. The other chose a can of Skoal dip. I chose a plug of Apple Jack. We payed without incident and headed to a path in the woods that led back to my cousin’s house. We then proceeded to make ourselves sick as hell. Let’s just say that dinner at my cousin’s house later on was interesting. This event was soon followed by The Great Smoke Out of ‘78 involving some exquisite Swisher Sweets, and other fine cigars. This went much smoother for us, ha ha.

 

[Kobold]

I think I was around 11 years old and I took a cigarette out of my dad’s mouth and took a few puffs. He laughed as I proceeded to nearly cough up a lung.

 

[SSGT.]

Back in the days you could pick up coke bottles from the side of the road and return them for a nickel and cigs were 25 cents a pack, I traded my bottles for a pack of Luckies and went to puffing. thought I was BMOC and then one of the older kids taught me how to inhale.

 

[SBC]

Sitting in a friend's garage one summer day during my college years, I mentioned for some reason that I'd always said that I wouldn't smoke, but that if I did it would be a pipe.

He said, "Oh I think I have an old corn cob lying around here somewhere. I tried it a few years ago. Didn't stick with it."

He scrounged around and found an old cob and some leftover Half & Half.
I tried it and disliked it.

But here I am.

 

[Jwebb90]

Me and a buddy in the 5th grade swiped a pack of Marlboro lights from his mom’s carton. We snuck off to the woods to do the deed. I took one puff and immediately threw it to the ground. I went home, called my mom, and told on myself.

 

[Sig]

Similar to @Sobrbiker ,a friend and I stole a can of Hawkens from the local convenience store.....it was 1983, we were 12.
Shortly after that the same kid and I stole an entire carton of Marlboro Reds from his parents. We just hot boxed half a pack before his dad came storming into the woods where we were. He smacked the heck out of both of us.....and my dad THANKED him for doing it!!!
Then I started dabbling in pipes, but was mostly off the sause until pipes and cigars in 2001 while in the Army.
If you're keeping track of the dates here, yes, I joined the Army at 30 years old.

 

[TheIronMonkey]

My first exposure to tobacco was through cigarette smoke from my father—he chain smoked Pall Mall (and for a period, if I recall correctly, Chesterfield Kings). He also smoked pipes. I had no desire to smoke cigarettes. When I was in the sixth grade (circa 1976), my friend, Ralph Peterson, and I bought some apple flavoured chewing tobacco from an Optimo shop in Brooklyn. We thought it might be cool to chew like some baseball players. We each tried some—I still remember the burning sensation the chewing tobacco created at the back of my throat and spitting the tobacco out while salivating profusely. I took up cigars around 1991, then a pipe in 1993 (although my first pipe was a tiny cob, which I still have, that I bought in the ’70s that I used for more illicit substances).

 

[ashdigger]

September 13, 2011. I was 48 years old. I was in a little convenience store that was attached to a tobacconist in a hotel in Lexington KY. I was at a conference and needed more caffeine.

The clerk was smoking a pipe. The smell reminded me of my grandfather.

I bought some tobacco, a cob and I sat in the tobacconists little smoking area, drinking bourbon, smoking the cob, and making every mistake a newby makes.

I literally burned my tongue and face off.

Probably why I hate cobs.

But here I am. Years later. Too many pipes and too much tobacco.

I love it.

 

[SmokingInTheWind]

Similar to @Sobrbiker ,a friend and I stole a can of Hawkens from the local convenience store.....it was 1983, we were 12.
Shortly after that the same kid and I stole an entire carton of Marlboro Reds from his parents. We just hot boxed half a pack before his dad came storming into the woods where we were. He smacked the heck out of both of us.....and my dad THANKED him for doing it!!!
Then I started dabbling in pipes, but was mostly off the sause until pipes and cigars in 2001 while in the Army.
If you're keeping track of the dates here, yes, I joined the Army at 30 years old.

My Dad told me that when he was in the Army at Fort Sill, that lots of guys who never smoked before took up cigarettes because some of the sergeants wouldn’t let you take a smoke break unless you were actually smoking. So, of course they wanted to take a break from the Oklahoma heat, instead of carrying artillery shells, or cleaning the Howitzers.

 

[PaulRVA]

Very first was a pack of Camel Non Filters that I copped from my dad’s desk.
He kept a giant brandy snifter full of several cartons worth of Camels in the office and I knew he wouldn’t miss a pack. I was probably 6 or 7 and by 12 I had a pipe and Borkum Riff / SWR in my tackle box for when I went fishing. A-few years later it was off to the races with Lucky Strikes and then during the Gulf War my love for Capstan developed.
@Sig very similar circumstances with me but I went in at 17. We’re approximately the same age as well. Funny how times have changed.

 

[The Benedictine]

Reading while at a diner in Ohio. My first experience with tobacco was when a friend nicked a pack of Gauloises off the headmaster.

 

[username]

Freshman year of Highschool and I wanted to fit in with the "cool kids" so i bummed a smoke and tried to inhale I felt like i was dying from coughing so much. They thought it was super funny,

 

[Sig]

My Dad told me that when he was in the Army at Fort Sill, that lots of guys who never smoked before took up cigarettes because some of the sergeants wouldn’t let you take a smoke break unless you were actually smoking. So, of course they wanted to take a break from the Oklahoma heat, instead of carrying artillery shells, or cleaning the Howitzers.

I never smoked cigarettes, but different people and retailers would send boxes and boxes of cigars to us in Afghanistan. I never really realized until I got home just how nice it was to have boxes of Davidoffs, Pepin Garcia, Padron, Opus X, Fuente, Don Carlos, Macanudo....and many others. When I got home my budget was more in line with Indian Tabac, Rocky Patel, and various seconds from those big makers.

 

[MidnightPuff]

I started out on Grandma's Marlboro lights. I've dipped, chewed, snused and smoked just about everything that's tobacco available on the U.S market and a few that aren't. I've settled on snus and pipe smoking but nicotine pouches have become a more prevalent for me since snus has become more difficult to obtain in the U.S.

 

[Waning Embers]

When I was 13 back in 1987. The farmer that I worked for gave me one of the twists that he'd been curing and I loved it.

 

[PaulTheScandinavian]

when I was 13 or was it 15, those were my dad cigarettes he had brought home from sails to overseas, camels and Luckie strikes , the latter unfiltered ones were my favorites along with French gauloise and gitanes