Sparkly, I was referring to two things. 1. My friend’s husband who is a Rosh Kollel and a Talmid Chacham told me that he smokes once a week because smoking once a week is not addictive and is mutter. He is not a poseik, but he is a Talmid Chacham and the way he said it, it sounded like it was something that he had looked into it and knew for certain that it was okay.
I am not saying that anyone should necessarily rely on this; my point was that we should be dan l’kaf zchus people who smoke and not assume that anyone who picks up a cigarette is a rasha.
2. A yeshiva bochur I know was told by his Rosh Yeshiva that it’s healthy for bochurim to smoke. I assume what he meant by that was that teenage boys need an outlet, and better they should smoke than do other things.
L’maaseh, for this boy, smoking was something he did for a particular tekufah, I think even during that tekufah, it was something he didn’t do on a regular basis – maybe just bein hazmanim, he never got addicted, and from the beginning his intention was to stop, certainly before he was shidduch-age. L’maaseh, he has already stopped by now even though he’s not in shidduchim yet. His mother even told me once that he expressed shock when he heard about someone who continued smoking after he was married; for him it was always clear that this was something he was doing as a “teenage outlet” (kind of his way of being able to be a little bit “rebellious” since he is a really good boy and this is the worst thing he would ever think of doing).
I’m not expressing my personal opinion on this. I don’t think there is any reason for me to have an opinion on this, and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to have an opinion on it. My point was really that we should be “dan l’kaf zchus” particularly in Elul. This is something that each person in the situation has to make his own cheshbonos and figure out what the right thing for him to do is. He has to weigh the different factors in his life and figure out if for him right now it would better to smoke or not (for example, what would he he be doing instead if he didn’t smoke? It’s not like a clear-cut halacha such as negiah which is absolutely assur.