I was 16, I believe...
on study leave and wandering the streets of Newcastle in a few hours' break with a couple of friends. We'd already been to Costa Coffee, as ever, laughed at a man in a kilt (the coffee stains were still on the window frames when it closed, some months later) and were prowling the record shops.
And there it was, outside Steel Wheels, lying on the ground, a whole, unsmoked fag. I was dared to take it, but none of us had a lighter, and in school uniform, we wouldn't get served, would we? It went into my blazer pocket with promises that it would get smoked, no, I wouldn't pansy out.
At home, it was shoved in a drawer and forgotten about.
I don't know how many days/weeks/months passed, but I was alone in the house and rifling through my drawers (minds OUT of the gutter), when it fell into my hand. I'd stolen a lighter off my sister, and since I was in the house alone, well, why not smoke it now? But where? I didn't want the house smelling of smoke when my parents came in.
I knew it! My brother's bedroom! He was at uni at that point, so nobody would go in there, and there was a massive sash window that I could open fully and lean out of to smoke it.
So I did. And once I'd finished, flinging the end right across the back yard, into the back lane, I felt...no different. I didn't feel relaxed, or get any rush people talked about. What was the point of that?
'Were you actually inhaling?'
'Yeah.' No.

Also, smoking a pen casing filled with paper, lit off a bunsen burner, is pointless. What else was there to do in physics lessons when the heating had failed and the teacher had done her usual trick of pretending to set us work then pissing off for the rest of the lesson?
(and now for someone completely different, Fri 21 Mar 2008, 18:08, Reply)