SMOKESCREEN: a treat instead of a treatment

One of the reasons I spend so much time on YouTube (OK, the COVID apocalypse is right now the main reason) is to scan the comments, particularly regarding a video which has been up for several years. Sometimes I even see one of my own comments from, say, eight years ago, and it gives me a funny time-machine feeling. The following was a comment on a three-hour documentary (the kind A & E used to produce before their content slid into the sewer) recounting the history of Big Tobacco and their successful coverup of the lethal nature of nicotene addiction. 

This had to be one of the strangest comments I've ever seen on ANY topic, and I want to pick it apart here because it rang a lot of bells for me - not as a smoker, which I've never been, but as a sober alcoholic who nearly drowned in her addiction to alcohol. In other words, I know the dynamics of addiction pretty well, I've lived it through my own heart and liver and brain, and I see all the earmarks of an addict in these strangely defensive, yet rhapsodic remarks about the now socially-taboo habit of smoking.

"I've been a smoker for about a year and a half, smoking about three cigarettes a week with additive free rolling tobacco and its probably one of the most enjoyable habits I've ever taken up in my life.  Here are 5 Thoughts on Why I Smoke Cigarettes:

 1. If you are not willing to even give me the time of day because I have a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers, and that's your only reason to not talk to me, then thank you for removing yourself from the equation and not wasting my time.

 2. There is something zen and meditative about sitting down with a bag of tobacco and rolling your own cigarettes. The mechanical muscle memory of making something relieves you of having to focus on other things.

 3. Almost everything seems better with a cigarette. Long drives in the car. Pulling an all-nighter. Coffee. Sex. Taking a poop. The only thing I can think of that it makes worse is a stuffy nose and a sore throat from a cold, and god dammit if I just don't soldier through that.

 4. There's something beautiful about the way that smoke curls through the air, interacts with sunlight, and vanishes like it never existed. It really makes me want to capture it in a photograph or draw it on a pad of paper.

 5. As far as addictions go, smoking cigarettes is probably the least harmful one that I have. Friendships will come and go. Relationships will start and end. People are born and then we die. But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes."

OK, so let me analyze these baffling comments one at a time.

I've been a smoker for about a year and a half, smoking about three cigarettes a week with additive free rolling tobacco and its probably one of the most enjoyable habits I've ever taken up in my life.  Here are 5 Thoughts on Why I Smoke Cigarettes:

This guy hits the ground running in what I would call the art of minimizing/rationalizing. "About three cigarettes a week" is kind of like saying you pee three times a week. As far as I know from talking to hundreds of smokers in AA, it just doesn't happen. Even if he's correct in telling us how moderate his habit is, his description of "additive free rolling tobacco" somehow makes it all sound a lot more wholesome, organic, and just plain safer than smoking those awful tubes with the filters in them. "Taken up" gives a sense of starting a new hobby, or a new religion perhaps, and certainly embracing the habit of his own free will.

 1. If you are not willing to even give me the time of day because I have a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers, and that's your only reason to not talk to me, then thank you for removing yourself from the equation and not wasting my time.

WHOA!  Settle down, fella! Nobody's out to get you here, so why the sudden cobra-strike before anyone has even said anything? I saw no direct criticisms of anything he had said in the comments. But that wasn't the issue. He was defensive, surly, even hostile before the conversation even started. It was: hello, I love smoking, and go to hell, you're wasting my time. Anyone who disagrees with him is dismissed with contempt before they even get to make their point. If these are five "thoughts", I'd like to see what he calls "insults". The description of an innocuous "pinch of dried leaves" is probably the most extreme example of minimizing I've ever seen. Hell, I used to drink a clear liquid that might have looked like an ordinary glass of water, except that it said Smirnoff on the label. 

 2. There is something zen and meditative about sitting down with a bag of tobacco and rolling your own cigarettes. The mechanical muscle memory of making something relieves you of having to focus on other things.

This is one of the most far-fetched (if poetic) defenses of smoking I've ever seen. I doubt very much that someone HAS to resort to rolling their own cigarettes to attain a meditative state. If it's muscle memory and the comfort of repetitive actions that provides so much comfort, peeling carrots might do the same thing. If you have the desire to "make something", take up carpentry or cooking or painting or sculpture. It's a lot more constructive way to use your hands, and you won't end up with rotting lungs or a stopped heart. I also wonder exactly what those "other things" are - never spelled out as either positive or negative, but definitely things he would rather not focus on.

 3. Almost everything seems better with a cigarette. Long drives in the car. Pulling an all-nighter. Coffee. Sex. Taking a poop. The only thing I can think of that it makes worse is a stuffy nose and a sore throat from a cold, and god dammit if I just don't soldier through that.

Let me get this straight. You smoke "about three cigarettes A WEEK". So you tell me. Then suddenly everything you do seems to require a cigarette: driving, staying up late, drinking coffee, having sex, even taking a shit! This sounds like the classic smoker's pattern: get up in the morning, have a cigarette. Drink some coffee, have a cigarette. Drive to work, have a. . . or walk the dog, or pee, or whatever-the-hell-it-is you happen to be doing. Smoking doesn't "make it better" either. It's just a reflex based on addictive craving. ANY excuse will do. One of the reasons it's so hard to quit is that you associate every single activity of your day with lighting up. If you truly smoke only three cigarettes a week, you must take very few long drives in the car (and a long drive - hey, wouldn't that maybe require MORE THAN ONE cigarette?). The George S. Patton-type stoicism about sore throats and colds is just a way to flaunt his immunity to such mortal weakness.

 4. There's something beautiful about the way that smoke curls through the air, interacts with sunlight, and vanishes like it never existed. It really makes me want to capture it in a photograph or draw it on a pad of paper.

You could light your fireplace, if you have one, or make a bonfire in your back yard. You could even burn incense (that would be even better, and would smell good rather than toxic and foul). There are ways you can watch smoke curling through the air, having a little dance with the sun rays, etc., without lighting one of your roll-your-owns made with tobacco out of your little drawstring bag. It just isn't poetic to lose a lung or die gasping for air in the COPD ward. It's even worse for your family to have to watch, knowing how preventable it was. You don't get much artwork done if you're dead.

 5. As far as addictions go, smoking cigarettes is probably the least harmful one that I have. Friendships will come and go. Relationships will start and end. People are born and then we die. But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes.

Here is an admission in plain type that this guy DOES have an addiction to smoking. He calls it "the least harmful one that I have", making me wonder just how many addictions he DOES have. In a sense, all addictions are the same - it's what goes on in the brain that is such a disaster, the dopamine rush and surge of artificial wellbeing - and the substance, such as "that a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers", is just the delivery device. 

But it's what he says after that which truly horrifies me. Friendships will come and go, relationships will start and end. . . This echoes very closely the MANY statements made in the original documentary by long-term smokers (many of them in the terminal stages) who actually cherished their habit, saw cigarettes as their "friend", and even saw mere human relationships as comparatively disposable.  The tone of his "you live, you die" comments is harsh and feels dismissive of life itself, but then comes the topper: "But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes."

Go to a gas station? Buy a new pack. . . But wait. Whatever happened to your little drawstring bag, the wholesome loose tobacco with no harmful additives, the three hand-rolled cigarettes a week? There's nothing very meditative about stopping at a Shell station and furtively purchasing a pack of Marlboros along with your Snickers bar and a bag of Cheetos. It's sad, because it's pretty plain to me that he is basically lying, and posting the elaborate comment publicly out of some need to defend something that he knows is clearly harmful to him. This guy is very likely a full-on smoker, someone who takes denial to the level of an art form, with one of the most elaborate smokescreens I have ever encountered. He deserves the Old Gold "Treat Instead of a Treatment" Addiction Denial Award of the Week.