Cigarettes: Gateway Drugs or Warning Signs?
How childhood smoking relates to later drug use
A lot of people think marijuana is a gateway drug. But I can't entirely agree. My childhood friends and I cut our teeth on a different substance. Beginning in about 4th grade, Tobacco was our starter addiction.
That may seem young to be smoking, but it’s practically a law of physics that boys in elementary school are drawn to things that are dumb, dangerous, and disapproved of by responsible adults. For example, they will use any scrap of wood to build a makeshift bicycle ramp. They’ll take anything dowel-like and create a pair of nunchucks. And they’ll take nearly any piece of flat metal from a father’s workshed and make it into Chinese Throwing Stars.
Smoking cigarettes fits in nicely with other things boys naturally want to do. In fact, if my friends and I could have smoked cigarettes while riding a bike over a ramp and swinging nunchucks—we’d have been in Boy Heaven.
Monkeying around with cigarettes
We would have denied it, but our smoking was a form of play-acting. We imitated adult smokers with our mannerisms, flicking the lighter on just so and cupping one hand over the cigarette while we lit it. Long, slow draws with robust inhalation proved we were real smokers. Smoke rings were a sign of distinction, as was a clever toss of the butt before extinguishing the cigarette beneath our shoes. [And then, picking up the evidence so a parent wouldn’t find it]
Smoking was our version of pickin’ up steeeks an’ wahterin’ tha grahss.
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How did you even get cigarettes?
Given that the age of majority for tobacco was 18—and we were somewhere between 9 and 11—we were opportunistic smokers: a few loose ciggies from this kid’s dad, a pack from that one’s, and an occasional windfall from a brave raid on a cigarette vending machine accessible to grade schoolers. We were not above picking up half-smoked cigarettes from the ground, either.
In some areas, it was possible to purchase cigarettes from a store—as long as you said you were picking them up for a parent. After requesting a pack of Virginia Slims, a clerk in Sand Lake, Michigan, stunned me by asking which variety I would like to purchase. (I didn’t know there was more than one kind). Not the best liar in the world, I told her my mom was starting out and didn’t know which Virginia Slim variety she liked, so she—the store clerk— could just pick one.
The clerk didn’t bat an eye at my blatant fib. And soon, I was puffing away with a neighbor girl.
(And, no. I did not generally smoke Virginia slims, but that was the brand the girl next door wanted to smoke, and she was financing my act of fraudulent tobacco purchasing. She who pays the piper calls the brand.)
Do you have what it takes?
Clandestine Operations
The forbidden nature of cigarettes was part of the allure, as was the challenge of obtaining them. But getting the cigarettes was only part of the operation. Next, my friends and I needed to smoke the cigarettes without getting caught.
Smoking inside the house was a no-go. A parent might come home anytime and detect the smoke in the air. Outside was good. Behind things was better. Sheds, garages, and woodpiles were all excellent things to smoke behind, except for that time when Doris Richmond—my Across the Street Neighbor—saw us smoking behind the woodpile. I caught sight of her through her kitchen window and saw her wave her index finger back and forth in the well-known “no-no” pattern.
We fell to our bottoms—backs against the woodpile and put out the cigarettes. Hidden from her view, we looked at one another and imagined what the rest of the afternoon would look like. She’d call my mom, who would call the other moms. Our stash of cigarettes would be confiscated. Scoldings, lectures, and goundings were inevitable, or so we thought.
She never did call my mom. And we found other places to smoke.
And then came adolescence
As teens, my friends and I eventually graduated to beer and marijuana. Our cigarette smoking was to drinking beer what T-ball is to baseball—a warm-up for the real thing. There were some similarities between both transgressions, but drinking beer required more from us than smoking. The scheming to obtain alcohol is schemier. The covert locations must be more covert. The length of time unsupervised time must be longer, too. A cigarette can be smoked in a matter of minutes; you need an evening to get plastered.
In fact, to get plastered, you need
A place to drink for the evening that is free from adult monitoring,
A discrete way to dispose of the cans, bottles, and other evidence of drinking
A place to sleep where parents won’t interrogate you between the front door and the bedroom and
Finally, the place where you sleep should either be parent-free in the morning or have parents who can’t detect the tell-tale signs of a hangover.
Lacking any one of those things can get a teen caught and lead to consequences for drinking.
How we turned out
Overall, my friends and I were quite proficient at hiding our cigarette smoking and drinking. We pretty consistently avoided detection. Anyone of us could have made a career out of substance abuse. But, most of us did not. The number of substances we used widened slightly. But no one did cocaine, meth, or opiates.
So cigarettes may have been a gateway drug to booze and a few other substances, but they weren’t an “open the floodgates drug.”
What does it all mean?
Rather than being a gateway or floodgate drug, tobacco is probably more of a warning sign. It signals that children have more freedom than they can handle and are drifting a little too far from the shore.
I think it is fair to say that our smoking suggested a breakdown of paternal influence. I can’t know whether the source of the breakdown was us or our parents. But, we weren’t like other kids who would find an excuse to go home when the cigarettes came out.
These were kids whose relationship with their parents was so close and loving that they wouldn’t dare risk their parents’ disapproval by smoking. We pitied these kids, calling them “babies” and “scared-y-pants.”
If someone had suggested we were jealous of them, we would vigorously deny it. And I don’t think we would have been lying. Only in retrospect can I see that we were on the losing side of the parental closeness continuum.
I’ll close with a video that visually demonstrates something of the mindset that drives precocious smoking. Looking at this short clip of a kid with nunchucks, I see me and my friends. He’s older than we were when we started messing around with cigarettes. Still, he’s also play-acting—trying to mimic an outward behavior that he thinks makes him look older but is actually unrelated to becoming a competent adult.
A sad and compassionate feeling comes over me, and I think, “This dude needs some more father-son time.”
That’s a pretty fair assessment for me and my elementary school tobacco buddies, too.
What do you think? Is smoking a gateway drug or a warning sign?
Super interesting, I wonder if it has anything to do with mentality. Those with addictive personalities for example are more at risk of developing a tendency. Really well written!