Intelligent teen smokers please reply?

i just have to ask this, and i am not asking it to put my opinion on anyone else, or to look down on anyone, but i just have to know, for my own curiousity..
why, in this day and age of communication and information, would a young beautiful person, knowingly put a substance in your bodies that is a known cancer causing agent?
i grew up in the 70's and god knows what we did to ourselves, cause i sure ain't tellin..but, we figured it out, that although it was fun, it wasnt worth the possiblity of dying for. or putting people we love in a situation where they would slowly watch us die in pain for. at least some of us did....
when the cigarette was promoted, back in the days of my parents, there was no known danger to your health..it was cool, with no side effects.
wrong...
why do you continue, what would it take, nothing barred, to get you to stop?
it truely breaks my heart..i watched my mom die of lung cancer, she just couldnt stop...
serious answers sure would be appreciated..

i realize that once it is started, it becomes an addiction, as i said, my mom died because she couldn't stop..
but why start, start to the extent that it becomes an addiction..
and although intellegent teen smokers sounds likd an oxymoron..there are intellegent kids that get caught up in it..
thanks again for all of your input..

I'm not a teen - but I was a teen in the 70's just like you. We knew darn well what cigarette smoking could do to you. The surgeon general told us in 1964. I was 8 years old.

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/30yrsgen.htm

But - during your teen years - you feel pretty invincible. I lived in South Carolina (where tobacco is as wholesome as green beans) and I smoked from the time I was 16 until I was 38. There was even a smoking section at our high school!!! At about 22 was when I started trying to quit. Sometimes I was successful for a year or even two. I've been quit for 12 years now and will never start again. Addiction is a horrible thing.

And - just for the record - there is no such thing as an "intelligent smoker" These days - it's just plain stupid to light up.

it kills so many people and the tobacco companies are so evil

Sorry, you can't get an answer to your question. You ask for intelligent teen smokers. There is no such thing. An oxymoran if ever there was one.

I'm a little bit older than a teen, I'm 21, but I started smoking when I was 13. I always watched my mother and father smoke. I thought it was cool and I actually tried to get addicted to it. Now I am trying to quit and I am like, what the crap was I thinking? But when you are an adolescent you don't think anything bad will ever happen to you.

its call an addiction,n like any other drug it kills

when you're a teenager. you think you're invinceable. and there is no such thing as death or growing up.