Smoking

With the coronavirus lockdown I’ve been spending less time at the office and more time at home.  That means watching more TV.  Giving the Simpsons a rest after finishing Season 12, I’m picking up on “The Twilight Zone”, which started in 1959.  I’m vaguely familiar with it but never seen the whole series from start to finish.  So every morning I’m watching two episodes.   I’m barely into season 1, and I dare say I’ll write a blog when I finish the whole thing.

Barring commenting on the show itself, the major thing I noticed is the prevalence of smoking.  Practically every character on the show smokes.  Huh?   This is 1959-60.  The Tobacco Lobby was alive and well in terms of pushing TV to feature people smoking.  Here’s a brief discussion thereof, written by someone else: https://crazynate.com/cigarette-companies-sneaking-into-movies/

Myself, I have not smoked a single cigarette, cigar, pipe, or chewing tobacco in my entire 51 year existence.   I would normally have started at high school in Paris, but no one there pressured me to do so, and I would have refused if they had.  For that matter, I rejected offers of marijuana and LSD in college.   So far as I could tell, the only benefit to smoking was that it supposedly made you look cool.   That was not my concern in high school and has not been since then.  Marijuana’s benefit seemed to be to induce “recreational stupidity”, as I call it, and likewise no one managed to persuade me to toke up in college, despite being surrounded by peers doing it seven days a week. 

Risks.  By now we know that nicotine is highly addictive, and that smoking can and will kill you.  In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell stated that there’s actually a threshold point for smoking:  keep below that point (I think it was 3 cigarettes a day) and you are a “chipper”, non-addicted, but cross that point and you will be addicted for life.  Never had the urge to find out.

Who do I know?  Few of the people I know smoke.  My father did, centuries before I was born, and quit “cold turkey”, as he said, in the early 1850s, sometime before the Civil War.  I believe I have a cousin who started late, “when I should have known better”, as he described it.  My buddy Ed smokes.  I seem to recall some aunts and cousins on my father's side - from Brooklyn and Long Island - smoking, which added to their thick accents, added to their charm. That’s about it – so few I can name them specifically.

Benefits.  To this day, I’ve yet to hear the benefits of smoking, whether from an actual smoker, from an ad, from TV, or a movie.  No one has explained to me what nicotine actually does. 

Barring that, I’ve had to surmise on my own by observing smokers on TV and movies.   They appear extremely nervous until they’ve smoked, at which point they suddenly seem calm and relaxed.  But they participate in all sorts of normal activities like driving, working, etc. while smoking.  This tells me that smoking relaxes you and removes your stress without making you loopy or uncoordinated, as alcohol or marijuana might do.   If that’s the case, it’s a major benefit, one which might explain why people keep up the habit to the point of crossing that threshold and becoming addicted. 
  

Soldiers.  As noted multiple times, my hearing kept me out of the military and I’ve never served in combat.  Umpteen times I see US soldiers in movies and TV shows smoking.  I can’t tell if this reflects the reality of warfare or just another example of the tobacco lobby’s success at promoting smoking on screen despite a ban on advertising. Given the circumstances I’m inclined to conclude that soldiers do, in fact, smoke fairly heavily.  However, anyone facing combat has more to worry about than whether cigarettes will kill them 20-30 years down the line – so I’ll cut them a break. 

Note that US soldiers are not unique in smoking: other countries' soldiers recognized the same benefits.  On December 15, 1944, the Germans launched a surprise attack on US forces in Belgium, the so-called Ardennes Offensive, which eventually petered out later in December.  In the meantime, Germans managed to capture substantial US materiel.  Pictures show German soldiers wielding M1 Carbines in the snow, and enjoying American cigarettes.  It seems the Germans had a preference for our tobacco....

Even knowing that still doesn’t induce me to start at 51.  I’ll stick with beer (No DUIs as yet either – and I’m not an alcoholic).  My sole comment about marijuana is that it should be legal.   Given that MJ is non-addictive and cannot kill you – it is physiologically impossible to die from THC, and even with hashish and concentrates out there since Colorado paved the way for us, no one has died – I’d say our risk in trying “maconha”, as the Brazilians call it, is somewhat low.  But to each his own….