My child won’t smoke – what can I do?


My wife and I are at our wits’ end and could really do with some advice. We’re the proud parents of Gumpfy, our first child, and even though she’s a girl, we love her very very much. However, she’s now nine months old and no matter how hard we try, she refuses to smoke.

At first we thought she wasn’t used to the taste, so we tried different brands. She refused Gauloises, Camels and would only scream when we showed her a packet of Silk Cut. We’ve tried menthol cigarettes. We’ve cut the filters off her Marlboro Lights so she can get used to holding them in her hands, but she keeps dropping them. We consider ourselves pretty in touch with nature and so we’ve made her some blunts using only fair trade cigars and organically grown, single plantation marijuana, and she just spits those out and cries. My wife has tried blowing smoke in her face to get her accustomed to the smell (although we already smoke a packet of Lucky Strikes over her crib every day) but again, she just cries.

My parents say that for any child under the age of one, you should only use snuff, but when I asked our pediatrician about this, he looked at me like I was crazy, so we rejected this out of hand as an old wives’ tale. My brother-in-law swears by nicotine patches, and says they worked great for his kids, but we really don’t want to endanger our little one’s health by putting her in contact with pharmaceutical products like that.

Somebody else must have been going through this and found the answer – is snuff the right answer after all? Should we not let her have any spirits before trying to get her to smoke? (I thought it would be better for her motor skills to have her cigarette at the same time as her Bells: my wife thinks this confuses Gumpfy and we should start her on Special Brew instead of scotch, and only allow her a drink when she’s finished her smoke.) Please let us know what you’ve done!


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