Toronto teen Latreice Keen started "borrowing" cigarettes from her mother when she was 11 years old. Her friend Jessica Vaughan used to light up in a park near home, delighting in the "high" it gave her at age 12.

Vaughan has occasionally wanted to quit — "sometimes the cigarette tastes nasty" — and Keen knocked off the habit for two years when she was 14. But now, at 18 and 17 years old respectively, they're both daily smokers.

"Now, it's a natural thing to smoke," Vaughan said.

"Before (quitting) was easier; now it's harder," added Keen, who said she wants to give it up again.

Teen smokers often try to quit and seriously believe they can, only realizing they're hooked when it's too late, according to a new study by Université de Montreal researchers.


 ‘Everyone realizes too late that they're hooked on something. That's what makes alcohol, tobacco and drug addiction so insidious.'

--Dalek Prime

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The study charted the course of nicotine addiction in teens over five years, establishing several common milestones. Adolescents make their first serious attempt to nix the habit after only 2½ months, yet frequently keep puffing anyway. It's usually not until nearly two years passes that their addiction dawns on them, and by that point their confidence to quit is shattered.

"Kids are experiencing symptoms of dependence with really low exposures to cigarettes, and beginning to experience this difficulty of quitting very, very early on," said Jennifer O'Loughlin, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the American Journal of Public Health. "For kids, there's no window of opportunity that you can kind of experiment with cigarettes and get away with it."

The physiological impact smoking has on the body and brain is likely the strongest reason these early smokers can't abandon the butt, suggests O'Loughlin, who works in the university's social and preventative medicine department.

"Some kids are actually escalating the cigarette use to quite an extent at the same time as expressing wanting to quit," she said. "It seems like a paradox."

The study — funded by the Canadian Cancer Society — followed 319 students ages 12 or 13 who had never smoked, but picked it up during the five years of the research. Every three months, the group answered a questionnaire about their habits.

More than 70 per cent expressed a desire to quit, but only 19 per cent managed to go smoke free for 12 months or more. Girls and boys were equally unsuccessful in their quitting attempts, although girls were more likely to want to try to stop.

"Everyone has thought that these people don't want to quit, they have no motivation to quit," said Tony George, chair of the addictions research section at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. "What it says is that we have an in with them."

Teens go through stages of smoking

Several stages emerged consistently as teens took up smoking. Only a couple of months after their first drag, teens declared in the questionnaire that they'd stopped forever. Yet nine months later, they were smoking monthly; 19 months in and they were smoking weekly.

The study found that daily smoking became the norm around the two-year point, when cravings and withdrawal symptoms are common.

Two further years and teens were staggering under the albatross of full-blown tobacco dependence.

"Kids really don't understand how quickly they can get addicted to nicotine and to smoking," said Roberta Ferrence, executive director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit.

Finances and health are possible reasons youth want to cease smoking, Ferrence said. However, she believes that individual-targeted quitting programs, based on building willpower in youth, just don't cut it.

"You can't tell 12-year-olds 'just say no.' It's just not a productive way of doing things," she said. "What you want to do is delay the onset of smoking to a point where kids are less likely till they're adults."

In the questionnaire, teens gave several reasons for not giving up smoking, including "everybody around me smokes," "I have too much stress in my life," "my cravings are too strong," and "I don't need to because I smoke so little now."

In Ferrence's view, policy-makers must boost taxes and control smuggling and contraband products, while parents should refuse allowances and ban their children from lighting up at home.