My mother went nuts when I came home with candy cigarettes and forbade me to have them. It was some sort of huge horror for her. I liked the taste of them and would gladly have had the same candy in some other form. (I have no idea what they taste like now. This was the 1950s. They had the bubble gum cigarettes then, too, but they were inferior bubble gum, and I was particular about my bubble gum.)
Somewhere in my head I wondered if she were confused and didn’t understand that they were only candy. I knew the difference, of course: to me, pretending to puff on a minty white candy stick with a pink tip was no different from pretending to shoot a toy cowboy gun or pretending to swordfight with an old curtain rod. All I was able to say at the time was “They’re not real,” thinking that if she got it, she wouldn’t mind. The fact that she did still mind was evidence that she didn’t get it.
So I did what any kid would do. I sneaked them. Felt guilty but sneaked them anyway. And what I learned from that is that it is possible to put up with guilty feelings and not let them interfere with what I wanted to do.
After a while I lost my taste for them and moved on.
I don’t think they had any effect whatsoever on my decision to smoke (in college), or, later, to quit.
With my own kids, the question never came up. If they’d brought home candy cigarettes, I think I would have asked for one with some sort of nostalgic comment, snapped it in two, and munched on it as the candy it was, emphasizing by my behavior that it was just molded sugar and no big deal, certainly not grounds for a major moral battle.