61% seems strange to me. It's anecdotal but almost (more than 95%) all my friends in university tried at least once, and yet only roughly 15% became smokers.
Trying a cigarette once is something that is very very common, at least in France.
In 2014 34% of the french smoked I think it is down to around 27% but e-cigarette use is up so part of the decline might be down to that.
Going to the other end percentage who have tried smoking. This is harder to pin down because tobacco use by youth is illegal and its hard to ask kids to be honest about breaking the law even when its supposed to be anonymous. It looks like between 20%-30% self report trying tobacco in school here and in France although I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this was substantially wrong. Not as wrong as 95% is though.
I suspect you like most people don't really closely associate with enough people from your school days to be called a useful sample, you don't actually know how many of them tried nicotine products, and you don't know how many of them ultimately spent some of their life smoking. What you have tried to do is make a rough estimate of how many people you know and tried to bring to mind the ones you had seen smoking.
It's not shocking that a large portion of people that try a very addictive and at one time socially acceptable drug have gone on to become addicted.
