Track Mangoes

The recent upheaval of anti-smoking regulations on campus has forced a few of us, smoker and non-smoker alike, to ask “why?” Why do we smoke and, as such, why are we so cynical about not being able to do so within whatever-it-is feet of doorways.

The answer to all these “whys” resides in the first cigarette. Every smoker remembers his first cigarette with fondness. This seems strange when one considers that tobacco, at first, induces nausea and dizziness. Cigarettes require that one become addicted to them before they induce pleasure.

And therein lies their mystery. Unlike heroin, ecstasy, alcohol and cocaine--all of which are rewarding from the first dose--addiction precedes tobacco's pleasure. Once hooked, each cigarette provides a small dose of nicotine that satiates the desire for itself, like a knot that constantly winds itself up only to be untied. So the question is not “why do people smoke?” but “why do people go out of Their Way to start?”

The simplest answer, meaning the one that non-smokers will give you, is that it looks “cool.”

Why, they ask, are smokers trading their health for a vacuous image? But it is not this simple and one living off mac’n’cheese might do better to interrogate his own health. There have been countless anti-smoking campaigns that attempt to do dislodge tobacco from its romance with “coolness,” yet teenage smoking abounds in ever increasing numbers.
People might start smoking to look cool, but it’s certainly not why they continue. At some point you’re addicted and, as my friends say, the party’s over. You look bad. You smell bad. Your mouth tastes like tar. People continue smoking to alter they way they perceive, not to alter the way they are perceived.

I have often joked that when I quit smoking I will do it cold turkey--with the exception of cigarettes after sex, during European films or long baths, when angry, drinking, inside a Wisconsin diner, and/or, finally, in pensive solitude. Once addicted, a cigarette punctuates with pleasure the occasion you take to smoke it. Some might call it a system of “rewards.” Just like school children who make tick marks in their notebooks, counting down the minutes until school’s out, so do smokers stratify their life into sections.

There is one other constituency that also does this: prisoners.

Prisoners tick away the days with chalk on the walls of their cells and, as the theory goes, by chopping the days into perceptible units of chronometry time moves faster and less oppressively. Likewise, it is not the cigarettes themselves that bring happiness to the smoker, but the way in which they change the smoker’s perception of time. Non-smokers expereince time sequentially. Smokers experience time relatively, that is between occasions. The Greeks called the former chronos, which was is quantitative and continuous, and the latter kairos, which was qualitative through relativity.

It is not the pleasure itself that is most appealing; it is the tick of addiction’s clock and the way it structures our lives. We’re addicted to kairos, not nicotine. And this is why the patch is the most effective way to quit smoking: it delivers a continuous stream of nicotine, thereby robbing the smoker of kairos while also satiating desire.

Anyone who is paying attention feels that time is tyrannical, especially the college student. He is imprisoned in school, at home, by his bubbling hormones, his roommates, his family, his teachers, and a system that can neither understand nor accommodate him, but to which he is forever in servitude. Life moves for the college student as it does for the inmate: slowly, grueling, never ending. This is why smokers trying to quit will tell you that the days drag on, that they feel stupid, fat, and bored. For ex-smokers, the life they live is simply a dull progression towards death. Non-smokers, then, are the lucky few who were born too daft to need cigarettes.

Considering smoking’s prevalence among the working class, I would like to set aside the bourgeois paternalism implicit in these new smoking regulations. My labor is to illustrate that there is a way to persuade students to quit smoking, and that way is to make their lives more bearable. Unfortunately, I have never known this administration to be concerned with such trivial pursuits and would certainly never hold them to the task of making our lives worth living.

So the next time a smoker politely asks “mind if if smoke?” you will know that the correct response is not “care if I die?” but “sharesies?”

***

This is an updated version of this article: http://trackmangoes.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-get-teenager-to-quit-smoking.html

"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana [1 ounce = 28g] in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy."
-William F. Buckley

It is traditional for Buddhist monks the shave their head on the quarter moon, a day of cleansing and renewal, devoted to the deity Vajra Satva. However, in a bout of laziness, I asked my Tibetan tutor at the monastery at Mirik if this was necessary. He responded by saying that if you have trouble remembering to shave your head on the quarter moon then you should try to do just that, but if you always feel compelled to shave your head on the quarter moon then you should try your best to shave your head when you feel like it.

So today I implore you to take a moment of self reflection, of reconsideration. If you are an avid marijuana user, step back and try to remember why you started in the first place. If you feel your children are at risk of becoming stupid, why not step back and try to remember that they could out-Facebook you in any state of mind. If you worry about "gateway" drugs, try to remember the things you did you feared at first. If you feel you have friends with whom you might never smoke, reconsider. If you feel you have friends with whom you are high more often than not, why, isn't today the best of days to take that sober walk? down the street and through the air, catching whiffs of the smoke plumes as they pass under your nose?

The sober moo about purity. The hazy moo about that state which one might define as "chill." But what are we to do with the man in between: a cow who barks, not knowing what is expected of him.

I had my first cigarette when I was 16 years old. My father had a party at his apartment in Portland the night prior and the next morning I found a pack of Camel wides underneath the sofa while I was looking for my cell phone. I remember feeling the utmost sense of intrigue. I didn't quite know what to do with them. I couldn't smoke them, that would be an obscene breech of parental trust. Would he be able to smell it? What was even the correct way to smoke a cigarette? I hadn't the slightest clue.

We didn't have any matches in the house, but my father lit incense every morning as part of a religious ritual with a wind resistant barbecue lighter. So I stuffed that in my jacket pocket and headed outside. I rounded the block and lit up on a corner with the miniature blow torch. Does anyone inhale their first cigarette? I did. I think. The only reason I believe I inhaled my first time, not for lack of wanting to sound like a pubescent pariah, of course, but I believe this because I got sick. Collapsing on my sofa when I returned home I thought I would never smoke again. I wondered why anyone started. I felt alone and weak and full of poison.

One might think that such an unpleasant experience would exist in my mind as the stuff of nightmares. But I've been smoking ever since, and I can only recall the memory with the utmost fondness. Unlike the heroin addict, who is constantly trying to recreate her first high (a time she will, unfortunately, never manifest), the smoker remembers their first cigarette as the beginning of a great era of ill famed joy.
The interesting thing about cigarettes is that they don't actually give you pleasure until you've become completely addicted to them. Every smoker must go through and initial period of disgust before the fun starts. People report nausea, vomiting, dizziness, uncomfortable rise in heartbeat, etc. So this beckons the question, why would one start? Why would anyone subject themselves to the rigorous task of becoming an addict? It isn't pleasant. It isn't fun.

The simple answer (given by anyone who has never smoked before) is that smoking looks "cool." It enhances your image. Makes you look more mature. Non smokers, with their do-good chicanery, chastise smokers for adhering to, or perhaps buying into an image. The non-smoking soccer mommy (inside her SUV, bleached hair held back in a furious pony tail sticking out of the back of a Nike cap, her hands clad in leather gloves clenched tightly to the steering wheel, her Pearline teeth grinding when the man in the Volvo cuts her off) accuses the smoker for selling out!

There have been countless attempts by anti smoking campaigns to counteract the "cool" image smoking supposedly provides; and yet, teenagers continue smoking in ever increasing numbers. What about maturity? As long as kids have a reason to believe that they aren't respected as adults (read, eternity) then they will, I suppose, continue to smoke. But these justifications are far too simple. For sticking that dollar bill in that bucket isn't really about wanting to help people in Haiti, is it?

What is more, every day there are constant real-life reminders for kids of how closely tied to class smoking is. The chef standing out back during his smoke break or the janitor having his morning cigarette is a far more powerful and persuasive image than a smoking camel, despite what paranoid cultural theorists would have you believe. The child, on his way to school, is more intrigued by the the bus driver. The waiter. The college student. These are things children are far more likely to see and deeply internalize as parts of their cultural milieu. Not Audrey Hepburn with her ivory cigarette holder. Not Sherlock Holmes with his Kabash pipe. Not stuffy old men in humidors. No. It is the malcontent working classes and angry youth subcultures that convince children to buy a pack.

But what is it about these classed images that is so persuasive to children? What do they see in these people that makes them want to forgo that initial period of disgust? Why do kids start smoking? What is so intriguing that they will temporarily suspend regard for their own health in order to experience something they can't yet understand?

These adults on their smoke breaks or the hipsters outside the concert hall represent a human experiencing a particular state of being, a particular sensitivity to an alternate perception of time movement. When the child spots his father at his desk toiling away, buried by paper work, she sees a man oppressed by chronology. But when she sees her school teacher furtively sneaking out for a cigarette she sees a woman reveling in occasion. For the primary purpose of a cigarette is to deliver a single dose of pleasant nicotine.

What is it about the state of being addicted to something that is so desirable? Forget the image. What does addiction bring to a kid's life that isn't already there? Is it that there is some desire for addiction itself operating here?

I have often joked to friends that when I quit smoking I will do it cold turkey, with the exception of my cigarette after after sex, during European films, long baths, inside of diners in Wisconsin, when angry, when drinking, when around other smokers, and in pensive solitude. (I suppose you can be celibate over and over, but you can only be a virgin once.) Everyone has their preferred moment for smoking. Sure, you can step outside and take a moment to yourself, but to punctuate that moment with a pleasurable indulgence of one's addiction causes the mind to forge an association with celebration in the midst of a grueling day.

Just like prisoners who tick away the days on the walls of their cells with chalk, each cigarette serves to stratify day's hours. Wake up. Have a cigarette. Eat lunch. Have a cigarette. Go home. Have a cigarette. Make dinner. Have a cigarette. Watch a movie. Have a cigarette. Go to bed. Dream of cigarettes. By chopping the hours into perceptible units of chronometry the days move faster and less oppressively. Indeed, it is not the cigarettes themselves that bring happiness but the way in which they change a person's perception of time, which is perhaps why it is said that quitting smoking is tougher that quitting heroin.

This is why the patch is simultaneously the most and least effective way to quit smoking. On the one hand it delivers a massive dose of nicotine that is spread out through the day in a continuous stream. On the other hand, it robs the smoker of rhythm. For it is that rhythm, the tick of addiction's clock, that is most appealing to a smoker, not the pleasure of nicotine itself.

Anyone who is trying to quit (myself at present) will tell you that the days drag on without cigarettes. The ex-smoker begins to gain weight and feel fat. Smoking causes a shortness of breath that gives a rush of blood, causing a smoker to talk rapidly and with urgency. A quitter, then, reports feeling stupid and slow. The unsympathetic non-smoker will say "Get over it." But if the non-smoker felt fat and stupid they too would sulk around the house in a bored stupor. The smoker's fundamental perception of how time moves is essentially less boring and more fun. The ex-smoker can only remember such a happiness. A non-smoker will never really understand that. So, if a smoker has ever told you that she doesn't want to quit because cigarettes make her happy it's because They Do. When a child sees a smoker, she sees a person indulging in a truly happy moment. What is more persuasive than that? It's a miracle more kids aren't smoking! Perhaps the solution is never to start.

So, the question as posed in the title still remains open. How do we get kids to stop smoking? Making cigarettes look cheap, immature, and ugly simply won't work. We must ask Why, child, do you feel a need to change your time perception as such? What is so terrible about your existence? Unfortunately we cannot ask this because the child's response will not matter to us. The ubermensch is so because he chooses not to listen to the morality of slaves. He tramples over the meek just as adults write off the sorrows of children as immaturity, teenage angst and moroseness. But to the youth, it never feels so abstract. As adults we cannot remember the rawness that immobilizes the teenager to a mopey mess. As adults we tell children to enjoy their childhood while it lasts, just as "professionals" tell college students. But how can they when their existence is characterized primarily by suffocation?

The child feels the need parse out the hours of the day because, to him, time is tyrannical. He is imprisoned in school, at home, by his bubbling hormones and the intensity at which he experiences the world. Life moves for the child as it does for the inmate: slowly, grueling, never ending. The adult smoker smokes because he must, because otherwise he might off himself. For smokers, life without cigarettes would be unmanageable. For ex-smokers the life they live is not life at all, simply a dull progression towards death, not the hurdling existence they once knew. Non-smokers then seem to be the lucky few who were born too dumb to need cigarettes, too deaf to hear the violence of their surroundings, to blind to see the reality of the world they're living in.

So, in order to get the child to quit smoking we must eradicate his desire to smoke and in order to do that we must make his life worth living. And that is an impossible feat, to be sure.

On testing the toxicity of LSD-25 on animals during the late 1930s:

Cats, mice, chimpanzees, spiders, all weathered massive amounts of LSD-25 without apparent physical damage, although there was considerable behavioral oddity. Spiders, for instance, created webs of remarkable precision at low dosages, but lost all interest in weaving at higher ones. Cats exhibited a similar variability, ranging from nervous excitability to catatonia. But the most prophetic test, although no one realized this at the time, was with the chimps. One day [Ernst] Rothlin injected LSD into a lab chimp and then reintroduced the animal to its colony. Within minutes the place was in an uproar. The chimp hadn't acted crazy or strange, per se; instead it had blithely ignored all the little social niceties and regulations that govern chimp colony life.

Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven