Ian Paredes was strolling through Red Square when he bumped into a friend, who promptly urged Paredes to follow him to his “little spot.” At that moment in 2006, that friend merely had to catch sight of the cigarette in the UW alumnus’s hand, and it was a valid reason to tell him he couldn’t stand in the middle of Red Square. His cigarette had shackled him to one of the university’s designated smoking areas.

Of course, the logic goes that if he didn’t want his movements around campus restricted, he could have just kicked the habit and been all the healthier for it. Advertisements on television, health warnings on cigarette packages, and primary health education classes all drive home the same point: Smoking kills you.

Eventually.

For the young, those health concerns might seem too distant, and factors beyond the nicotine addiction keep college-aged smokers coming back for more.

Unhealthy, but justifiable?

In Paredes’ case, smoking was an escape. People approached him during his lunch break to ask for computer help, and he needed a way to avoid that. True enough, his job at Blanchet High School requires him to fix computers — just not during his lunch break.

“At least if I smoke, they can’t find me,” he said. “I’ll have that five minutes of peace.”

Graduate student and communication teaching assistant Fahed Al Sumait initially smoked because of that same need to take a break. He’d light up just to relax.

“I smoked like a chimney throughout my exams,” he said.

For both students, smoking also presented an attractive option for socializing. Al Sumait compared it to drinking with friends, oftentimes complementing a few beers with a few cigarettes.

“They’re just a good combination,” he said.

While health junkies might cringe at the thought of simultaneously polluting the lungs and damaging the liver, they forget the social benefits.

“A lot of times, if a conversation is really going somewhere, I’ll end up chain smoking just to stick around,” Paredes said.

As much as the two smokers could rattle off a list of smoking habits and social settings that a cigarette enhances, each man ended up in the office of Mark Shaw, director of health promotion at Hall Health, ready to admit those classic words: “I’ve got a problem.”

Finding that reason to quit

Shaw, who runs a free smoking-cessation program on campus, worked with both Al Sumait and Paredes to help them gradually cut down their cigarette usage. Al Sumait made it to zero cigarettes a day. Paredes didn’t.

For Al Sumait, the impetus to quit came when he and his wife started to plan for a child; their baby girl was born this past month.

“Now that we have a baby girl, any time I get the craving to smoke, I just need to think of her,” he said. “As I started planning to become a father, I decided I didn’t want to have that influence on my kids.”

Al Sumait had smoked about half a pack per day during the time he’d spent in Kuwait several years ago. In Kuwait, many more people smoke, and it’s viewed as a sign of manhood when a man can go out and smoke away from home, where here such an act would be frowned upon, Al Sumait said.

In a sense, the act of smoking parallels an American’s first tryst with alcohol; health concerns like lung cancer seem as inconsequential as liver cirrhosis might appear to a freshman choking down vodka for the first time.

Al Sumait knew smoking would hurt his health, but a compelling reason to quit just wasn’t there. Friends told him it was a terrible habit, but their “patronizing” words fell apart the next time he craved a smoke during a study break.

It was the prospect of fatherhood that finally gave Al Sumait the courage to uproot the smoking habit from his life and toss it aside, but he still craves the occasional cigarette.

“I still know smokers and occasionally take a drag off their cigarette,” he said — and that’s after he changed his habits, started chewing nicotine gum, and pledged to his wife and parents that he’d quit.

“If you’re quitting for someone else, what do they call that?” Shaw asked, pausing for a moment as he fished for the right metaphor. “A house of toothpicks.”

Paredes, who still smokes, saw his own house of toothpicks crumble when he realized not even his immediate family members could compel him to quit.

“My grandmother [died] in April,” he said. “It was one of her wishes for me to stop smoking, and I couldn’t stop in time. I felt really bad about that.”

Half a year later, Paredes smokes at his job and also puffs a few cigarettes outside Café Allegro, his nightly haunt.

“After that, I didn’t have any other reasons to stop smoking,” he said. “I felt like I really wasn’t doing it for myself.”

With his job still pestering his peace of mind, quitting, Paredes said, is for another day.

Reach reporter Andrew Doughman at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.