I managed to inveigle my first pack of cigarettes when I was twelve years old from my Grandfather. During the summer months prior to Eisenhower’s first term for the presidency, “Eisenhower for President” and “Stevenson for President” cigarette packs in colors of red, white, and blue could be purchased at tobacconists. I told my grandfather that I was collecting campaign memorabilia and wanted packs for my collection. I don’t know why he fell for that line, but he bought me a pack.
I was clever with my collection. So as not to be found out, I used a razor blade to cut a neat flap on the underside of the packs to ferret cigarettes. To casual inspection, the packs sealed in cellophane wrappers, appeared untouched. But in fact, scrutiny would have revealed the packs were empty of their contents.
Smoking and coming of age
I think important to mention that at that time the social definition attached to cigarettes was different than today. Cigarettes were “grownup” and connoted sensuality, embodied masculinity or femininity, knowledge about the ways of the world, and, in a word, sophistication. To smoke was to enter the adult world –no matter if you coughed and your lungs rebelled from the hot noxious fumes. But you knew as a child that initiation often required sacrifice and courage to overcome obstacles.
Smoking was cool and its paraphernalia. Pouring lighter fluid into the cotton-filled wells of stainless steel, spring-loaded, wind-proof Zippo lighters was a rite of passage. At the Catholic high school, I attended, during lunch time, students were permitted to walk about the football field adjacent to the school yard. Students would lie down on the turf to smoke, legs outward, to form circles, so that each member of the circle might look in a different direction to warn of impending approach of a teacher or monitor. Clouds of smoke would arise from these gatherings that peppered the field, like smoke from beach campfires. When and if a teacher were to approach the group, the tobacco from cigarettes would be dispersed and the cigarette paper rolled into tiny balls least the teacher ferret evidence of smoking. Such was the “field procedure” norm, much in the same way that GIs during WWII and the Korean war, eliminated evidence of occupation, so the enemy would not find their hiding places.
Cigarettes were only 25 cents a pack, so the habit was not difficult to support. But in impoverished neighborhoods, smoking was such an addiction that fellow addicts would search for half-smoked cigarette butts on the street to light-up. In line with addiction, impoverished adolescents of my acquaintance would carry used cigarette packages filled with “roaches”, partially consumed cigarettes retrieved from ashtrays and sidewalks.
Even during my youth not all my peers smoked. Perhaps, the non-smokers had less need to be “cool”, had better guidance, and less need to find a cultural icon with which to identify.
Cigarettes, cigars, pipes
My father was killed in WWII, and so when I was ages 6 to 10, my 90-year-old, great grandfather, Alphonse, was the bearer of family tradition. He smoked a pipe. He would sit on his veranda with his pipes laid out on the porch railing. He would “never drink water” when he could “drink wine”, or so he said. Alphonse kept a kennel of hunting dogs. Heads of deer and elk hung in his dining room. The grand old man was born in Belgium before the turn of the century, living in America the life of a 19th century European patriarch.
As I matured or whatever the process is called between childhood and nominal adulthood, I expanded my tobacconist experience and cravings. During late adolescence, following inspiration from my great grandfather, I took up pipe smoking. I was in good company because movie heroes smoked pipes. These were lionized heroes, and numbered Yule Bryner, Orson Wells, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and James Stewart, among others. My adolescent fantasy was to open my own upscale tobacco store with thick green carpets, burnished mahogany counters, and private smoking rooms.
Through college and my early professional life, I cultivated pipe-smoking, and sampled the range of fine English tobaccos with particular preference for Balkan Sobranie and every Dunhill blend from Baby’s Bottom to Three Year Virginia Matured. Earlier, in line with San Francisco’s anarchist Bohemian culture, I added to my repertoire Tosca cigars, thin, wicked, twisted shards that bespoke worldly decadence.
The sensory experience of smoking
Other than the social mystique attached to cigarettes, pipes, and cigars, was there something more to my addiction? The experience of smoking, as such, is only occasionally portrayed in literature or art –perhaps because the experience of smoking is addictive. I don’t mean the experience of repulsion from noxious smoke when first inhaled by a neophyte, but rather the experience of a seasoned addict.
Smell and taste are primitive, unmediated, quick to dispose, heighten, interest, or repel. Olfactory and taste receptors intermediate quickly, even directly to the brain and association areas connected to emotion and action. Olfaction and taste trigger survival tropisms, hunger, disgust, and arousal.
Pipe and cigar smoke are rarely inhaled, rather tasted, a gustatory and olfactory experience. Like food and drink, tobaccos vary over a topography of quality and taste analogous to the divide between lunch meat and roasted duck, soda pop and brandy. Premium English and American tobaccos have no chemical additives or fillers and do not leave nasty aftertastes and parched tongues. These are not the chemicalized products sold as cigarettes at 711 stores. Cigarettes that particularly focus and embellish consciousness are artisan products, in my experience Sherman’s, Dunhill Black and Golds, Turkish Specials, and an occasional Gauloise. If there were a metric, the smoking of premium pipe and cigar tobacco yield gustatory and olfactory stimulation near the limit of such experience.
As a rule, pipe and cigar smoke are not inhaled but permitted expulsion from the mouth to the nasal cavity and nose. The aroma of seasoned, aged, and blended tobaccos experienced in this way consumes attention. The savoring of aroma stabilizes mood and feeling, focusing affect and association. Pipe and cigar smoking favor reverie, relaxation, and deliberation.
Smoking premium tobaccos heightens awareness through the pathway of the intimate sensation. Olfaction is sensed within the head and elicits immediate attention. Smoke overrides competing emotions, vague feelings, anxiety, perhaps even depression. Smoke is reliable, a friend, a bedrock for fantasy, escape, and focused attention.
Existential facets of smoking
American Indians view tobacco as a sacred herb employed for healing and ceremonial purposes. Tobacco smoke embodies the fleeting of life’s moments. At the same time, its earthy scent communicates grounded nature and forest. Thereby, tobacco smoke symbolizes the transitory and the permanent, the physical and spiritual.
As smoke is inhaled, the lungs are filled. The sensation is to take into the body ephemeral substance. The periodic pulsing of smoke, filling the lungs, blowing forth clouds or rings, drifty lazily upward, random, subject to currents, dissipating, dying, evanescent, livens the moment, provides a signature to the present. Smoking is hunger for the now. Smoking is a validation of presence, an encapsulated somatopsychic meditation.
Smoking bequeaths a sense of control even when little else seems within control. Under conditions of threat to life or well-being, the urge to smoke becomes automatic, intense, and seemingly necessary. Whenever life serves an off-flavor, smoke moderates displeasure.
Quitting the tobacco habit
My love/slave affair with tobacco ended when during a transitional period of life, I traveled to the Bahamas for a teacher training course in yoga. Ashram residents arouse at 5:00 AM with bedtime expected by 9:00 PM. The entire day was devoted to hatha exercises, communal work, and meditation. No smoking was allowed. When I returned to New York City and work, I had been smoke-free for more than a month. That was that. I had quit –simply because I had no opportunity. In the weeks that followed my return, whenever the temptation arose to smoke again, and it did from time to time, I didn’t smoke, I ate pistachios. I shelled and ate them one by one. The task and the reward were sufficiently engaging to distract and replace my urge to smoke. After another six weeks and as many pounds of pistachios, I had nibbled my way to tobacco abstinence. The urge to smoke had vanished.
I understood for years that cigarettes were unhealthy, but the lulling of emotion, the quelling of unwanted feeling, sensory delight, and the affirmation of self-agency vanquished competing intent. Addiction can be overcome by happenstance or by reality. I followed a path of happenstance, but I have heard from other tobacco addicts the role of reality. One day they are told they will die if they do not stop. One day, they realize that they are just too old or too weak to indulge the habit
The downside of the habit
For a while when I was a smoker, I limited my cigarettes to five per day in the belief that no harm would occur, that my lungs would easily rid themselves of the noxious chemicals. Years later, I found in my review of the literature that a large-scale meta-analysis of 55 studies found that smoking even one cigarette a day increases the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke in comparison to non-smokers by 40 percent.
The consequences of smoking are all too frequent for scores of people, coughs, emphysema, bronchitis, peripheral artery disease, stroke, high blood pressure, liver disease, and cancer. My mother died at 72 years old from lung cancer attributable to her Pall Mall habit. Although few studies exist on COVID-19 and smoking, research in a Chinese Medical Journal, found among 78 patients with COVID-19, smokers were 14 times more likely to develop pneumonia. In fact, killer diseases are more lethal for smokers. Members of this clan are simply more vulnerable to a range of infectious and environmental challenges.
When this information is readily available to know, as it is today, how is it that persons still smoke at all? The determinants could be one or many. Some possibilities are:
- Ignorance: This occurs with children and adolescents but becomes less likely with adult maturity. Among adults, whatever the cause of the ignorance, ignorance suggests a lack of interest or disbelief in scientific and socially sanctioned information.
- Exceptionalism. The person may know but take the view that he or she is the exception.
- Rebelliousness. Smoking is statement of non-conformity to scientific and social beliefs connoting exceptionalism. This includes membership in peer groups that adopt outsider norms.
- Parental/ cultural identification. This is kin to peer group conformity like a ghostly template that predisposes to future choice and actions.
- Hopelessness. A form of slow suicide, behaviors consistent with desires to exit from life’s travails.
- “A plea for help”. The smoker presents as needing a direction.
- Living in the past with beliefs that smoking is glamorous, seductive, sexy or manly.
- Strong addiction. Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography that he found it harder to quit cigarettes than heroin. Persons are physically hooked before knowledge, experience, and reason might determine a different path –that’s why tobacco and vaping companies appeal to the young.
No doubt these determinants usually act in concert. Not one, but all may be operative, “overdetermined” in the language of psychoanalysis. The more overdetermined, the more difficult to shake addictions. If persons really want to quit, they do well to cover all the bases.
Whatever the reasons for smoking, smoking compromises the health and well-being of the smoker. Often, they die earlier. Only smokers do not question the motivation of other smokers.
How does this play out socially? For the non-smoker, Habitual smoking calls into question the adult smoker’s awareness, values, and will power. This may not be front and center for appraisal, but unless the smoker is unusually gifted, doubts or concerns about character contextualize social judgment. Stereotypes of smokers manifest in the workplace, social groups, and intimate relations*. The cost of the tobacco habit may not be just in health, but in failed opportunity and loneliness.
*The habit produces tobacco breath and restricts choice in the partner market.