Smoking

Denial is a powerful tool – an all-purpose shifting spanner that can tighten the nuts and bolts of an untenable argument, allowing it to withstand a cyclone of common sense and evidence to the contrary. When the cyclone is cancer and early death, a lot of denial is needed to prop up the tin shed of smoking. The air may now be sweeter atop my non-smoking high horse; however this lofty perspective was earned after ten years’ service in the Smokesmen’s Infantry. Today’s effort is intended to help non-smokers understand why people smoke despite the obvious drawbacks.

At first puff, smoking seems not so bad – with increased memory, alertness and reaction time among the useful side effects. Native American shamans used tobacco not only for health reasons, but to consult the spirits of their dead; the headspins generated from my first few smokes testify to this. As we now know, anything pleasurable swiftly becomes addictive and, much like masturbation, the occasional thrill of smoking quickly becomes a chafing ritual that must be completed several times a day.

Without trying to shovel the blame upon America; America was to blame. The impoverished colony of Virginia faced famine in 1612 and it was saved by the entrepreneur and husband of Pocahontas, John Rolfe, who introduced a tasty new strain of tobacco from the Caribbean. Although Europe had tasted tobacco before this time, it was hard to come by and this new cash-crop from the colonies fed their new addiction and, with the help of another innovative concept – slavery - helped Virginia become the most prosperous colony in the New World.

Moderation is the key to contentment.

Not all of Europe embraced this new practice; King James I even wrote a book named A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604, labelling it “a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the…smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.”. Pope Urban VIII even issued a Papal Bull threatening excommunication for smoking in holy places in 1624. Even then, it seems, god was on the side of big tobacco companies and the ban was overturned a hundred years later.

When two German scientists found evidence of that smoking led directly to heart disease and lung cancer in the 1920s, it took another thirty years of effective denial before the findings were taken seriously. The father of an old ex-girlfriend used to plough through three 50g packets of rolling tobacco each week – unfiltered – yet doctors told him he still had the lungs of an eighteen year old. Smokers need ammunition to support their denial, such smoking success stories are of great benefit in the face of irrefutable facts.

Even though they (once we) are killing themselves, spare a moment for smokers. A memorable scene from Supersize Me comes to mind, where the protagonist asserts that it is socially acceptable to point to a smoker saying “You’re killing yourself!” yet such slurs cannot be directed to the obese. What was once the Benson and Hedges World Cup is now the KFC Twenty20. Tobacco is a vice that everybody can lay into without retribution; however isolation and scapegoating is no way to serve a marginalised minority that is hopelessly addicted.

State-sponsored restrictions and community resentment aside, smoking is enough of a battle for those without the willpower to kick the habit. Rest assured, that for the smoker, the gentle harshness on the back of the throat with every puff brings a mixture of pleasure and self-awareness; the inescapable knowledge that damage is being done alongside the proud display of a middle-finger to people who think they know better. Until society dolls out equal criticism and limitations to gambling, alcohol and obesity, allow smokers to quit in their own time or let them die trying.