Tobacco use is America’s leading cause of preventable death and disease. Especially to people who don’t smoke, it can be difficult to understand the reasons why people started smoking in the first place, considering its preventability and the stated physical and mental risks it could cause. To essentially the entire world, smoking is widely accepted to be unhealthy and bad for your mind and body; therefore, the question remains: why smoke? If smoking has been proven time and time again to be so horrible, proven to cause cancer, disease, and death, then why do so many people–approximately 1.3 billion people worldwide according to the World Health Organization–still continue to smoke?
Smoking initiation is caused by a number of different factors. In fact, the initiation of smoking by young teens has long been a widely discussed topic and although the overall smoking rates worldwide have been steadily decreasing since the mid-1960s, the amount of teens and young adults at risk for smoking initiation is still worryingly high; in fact, people between the ages of 15 and 20 are at the highest risk of starting to smoke than in any other age group.
This fact may or may not be attributed to the fact that young teens and adults have less experience and, therefore, less knowledge about what is good and bad for them than older age groups, making them more susceptible to influence. However, it is still important to understand the true causes of smoking initiation among teenagers and young adults so that we can perhaps better understand the environment in which we live and how to effectively enact methods of avoiding smoking initiation in this risky group.
Out of all the known causes of smoking initiation, perhaps the one least talked about is how genetics plays a role in one’s risk of becoming nicotine dependent. “Genetic factors account for approximately 40–75% of the variation in smoking initiation, 70–80% of the variation in smoking maintenance, about 50% of the variance in cessation success, and 30–50% of the variance in risk of withdrawal symptoms,” according to the European Respiratory Journal. Genetic variation can be a useful predictor in smokers, which can be useful when considering the options for interventions and overall prevention that would target the people at the highest risk of smoking initiation.
The addiction to nicotine is contributed to by modifications in signaling cascades during the inhalation of nicotine, which makes it such an addictive substance. Nicotinic receptors in the human brain are highly variable, and these variations in genes can alter the way nicotine is accepted in one’s brain, making them more or less susceptible to becoming nicotine dependent or starting to smoke.
Beyond the scientific and genetic causes of smoking, the initiation of the use of tobacco and its methods of consumption are largely environmental as well, as people are highly influenced by the things and people around them that might inhibit or encourage their use of tobacco and cigarettes.
In September of 2013, a questionnaire was completed by 100 people over the age of 15 that were avid smokers in Chennai, India in the time in which the survey was completed. The three major reasons for the smoking initiation of these individuals were: surrounding influence, which accounted for 44% of participants; stress, which was allegedly a cause for 42% of the participants; and fun, which was 40%. The majority of participants (68%) had tried quitting at least 6 months before the survey was conducted, but all of them failed.
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