Nowadays many people think that smoking or vaping is cool, but in my personal experience is very bad, and it's worse when you start smoking or vaping from a pretty young age.
I’m 15 years old and I know a lot of people who are addicted to nicotine, one of them is my friend Andres Gonzalez, and he is a very good friend of mine. He plays soccer, and ever since he started smoking he is a very different player, now he doesn't have as much condition as he had.
He started smoking when he was 12 years old, and he hasn't been able to quit nicotine since then. He started smoking because he thought it was cool, he just tried once and he liked it. Then he started smoking with his friends on weekends. When he was 13 years old he already smokes a box of cigarettes a day. His friends started to tell him to quit smoking but he didn't listen to them. He kept smoking for a year, then he realized that the cigarettes were bad for him and he tried to quit but he couldn’t. At that moment he realized he was addicted to cigarettes. Then a friend suggested him to buy a vape. He bought one and finally quit smoking but the problem was that he became addicted to vaping, he didn't know that until a year later. I meet him when he was 15 years old, when we became friends he started to talk to me about his nicotine addiction and I tried to help him, unfortunately, I couldn’t.
He tried to quit nicotine because it was very bad for him. He made some research and found some devastating facts about nicotine addictions. He found that nicotine is very dangerous because is an addictive chemical and that will make you smoke more and when you smoke you got a high chance of getting cancer and also smoking kill neurons. He wasn't very concerned about that until he found that all of that information was tested and proven by smoke-free.
There was a research that proves that one-quarter of the teenagers that smoke became nicotine dependence. This study was proved by the NRT.
Nicotine is a very dangerous thing, don’t play with it. A lot of people have ruined their lives because of nicotine. Don’t smoke at a young age because if you become a nicotine addict your life will change forever.
You are still on time.
References:
Kane, G. P. (1991). Psychosocial factors and nicotine dependence. In The Clinical Management of Nicotine Dependence (pp. 28-35). Springer, New York, NY.
Moffat, B. M., & Johnson, J. L. (2001). Through the haze of cigarettes: Teenage girls’ stories about cigarette addiction. Qualitative Health Research, 11(5), 668-681.
Hoffman, J. (2018). How to Help Teenagers Quit Vaping. New York Times.
Adelman, W. P. (2004). Nicotine replacement therapy for teenagers: about time or a waste of time?. Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 158(3), 205-206.
Wagner, E. F., & Atkins, J. H. (2000). Smoking among teenage girls. Journal of Child & Adolescent Substance Abuse, 9(4), 93-110.