This is an IHeart podcast.

This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from IHeart Radio.

These days, a pack of Marlboroughs could set you back $13.

If you actually want to smoke them, you've got to stand in a designated area 25 feet from the building's entrance,

and the package will contain the most dire warnings of illness and death. Overcoming these hurdles

requires a true commitment to the habit. It's enough to ask, who is still smoking?

My guest today, Dr. Lynn Kozlowski, is here to shed some light on this question.

Dr. Kozlowski is an expert on tobacco use and nicotine policy,

and is Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of Community Health and Health Behavior at the University at Buffalo.

He is also a founding member of the Society for Nicotine and Tobacco Research

and has contributed to four U.S. Surgeon General's reports on smoking.

I wanted to know if Dr. Kozlowski was ever tempted to pick up a pack himself.

I certainly tried to be a smoker. So in high school I experimented in college.

I had roommates who were devoted heavy smokers. I tried to smoke.

There was no moral sense it got in the way. I just kept getting sick from

smoking, so it wasn't worth it to me. So it's fair to say, I was tempted, I tried, I had experimented

with packs of cigarettes and pipes and cigars and so on, but I never became a regular smoker.

I smoke, never heavily, never habitually. I'd smoke, usually when I was shooting a film,

because filmmaking is such a boring process. You work for 10 or 15 minutes, then you go away for an hour while they get ready for the next angle and so forth.

And I smoked out of boredom on the sets of films and so forth. And whenever the project was over and I went

home, quote unquote, I stopped smoking because the people in my life wouldn't tolerate that.

So when you were smoking, how early in the morning did you have your first cigarette? Probably in the

...