My first drug..... Tobacco

Drug use was commonplace on the council estate where I grew up. Kids as young as 12 would smoke cannabis, which was regularly supplied by their family who sold it.

Tobacco was my first drug. I was 14 and it didn’t start with cigarettes. Fred and I would put these reeds in our mouths and set fire to them. We were just messing around, pretending to smoke as we blew down these reeds and they burnt like cigarettes.

Fred wasn’t his real name, but people called him that because he looked like the cartoon character from Scooby Doo.

 

Fred

We’d often hang out in the woods, then one day he pulled a roll up out of his pocket and demanded I smoke it with him.

I was reluctant but easily peer pressured into doing want others wanted, in my desperate need for love and acceptance.

I took about 2 smokes of the roll up and thought nothing more of it.

Then the next time we met Fred had a pack of 10 Mayfair he demanded we smoke. When you smoke for the first time it doesn’t actually taste nice, imagine a dirty sick feeling as the carbon monoxide poisons your body and nicotine fills your brain.

His expectation was that we’d smoke the whole pack, I chain smoked as many of the cigarettes as I could, which was about 3 and a half, then went home.

I’d go off to the park lunch times at school with Scott who smoked. He was a grungy looking guy who didn’t really care what people thought of him.

One lunch time I asked him, “can I have a roll up?” and he said sure. From then on, we’d smoke together every lunch time and I was hooked.

My mum found out I smoked when I was 15. She disapproved, so I agreed to stop until I was 16, the legal age to smoke in the UK at the time. After that I started buying my own cigarettes and smoking everywhere I went.

Other kids would ponce roll ups off me and as weak willed as I was, I’d give in to them. 

Deep down I wanted everyone to like me but as troubled as I was growing up, that desire displayed itself through subservient, people pleasing behaviour.