News, Study Links Candy Cigarettes to Smoking. (quit, pressure, child)

[JD59]

Candy cigarettes predispose children who play with them to smoke the real things later, new research concludes.

The look-alikes made of candy or gum are marketing and advertising tools that desensitize kids and open them moreso to the idea of smoking later on, says study leader Jonathan Klein of the University of Rochester. Candy cigarettes cannot be considered simply as candy, Klein said.

Study Links Candy Cigarettes to Smoking - Yahoo! News (broken link)

[Katie1]

I ate candy cigs when I was a kid and at 52 I have Never smoked!

[PinkString]

I ate candy cigs after pretending to smoke them as a kid, and i did smoke for awhile, but quit 11 years ago.
I don't think it was the candy cigarettes that got me to smoking. It was more like both of my parents smoked, and I thought that's what we got to do when we grew up, to be an adult was to smoke. Now if my parents had never smoked, and I wasn't around that bad influence, chances are I would never have smoked.

[foma]

Hmm, I LOVED candy cigs when I was a kid! I don't smoke though. Well, I did for one summer when I lived abroad but that was only b'c everybody else in Taiwan smoked but I quit as soon as the program was over. I actually never liked it!

[SpeedyAZ]

I don't believe it. All of my friends and I used to pretend to smoke candy cigarettes when we were young. I don't think many of them smoke and if they do then I doubt it was because of that. I smoke to relieve my stress and pressure, not because of some damn candy I ate when I was young.

[nocturnal rooster]

That's a bunch of BS. I ate those candy cigarettes all the time and I don't smoke.

[Cattknap]

I loved candy cigarettes and ate them all the time when I was young...I'm almost 57 and have never smoked.

[Rickers]

Since I lost one of my lungs,

I had to cut my smoking in half !

Sorry, bad joke !

[lilypad]

Five kids in our family growing up, we ate them all the time. NONE of us smokes. And to really make a point, BOTH parents did.

Hmmm....alot of studies can be skewed, even bogus. Depending on the "agenda"...

[cclumbley]

I have to agree with everyone here, I loved candy ciggs and I did the typical teenage try to smoke thing, but that was years after the candy cigs. No connection in my book. I think James Bond and other Movies making it "cool" to smoke had more to do with it for my generation.