Cigarettes and Whiskey and Ivy League Women, They'll Drive You Crazy, They'll Drive You Insane

Thursday, cigarette #1

Three defenses of cigarette smoking have appeared in the Brown Daily Herald in the last month, which must be some kind of a record. One was entirely uninteresting ("If it weren't for smokers, you wouldn't know that you're better than everyone else"), but Debbie Lehmann's suggests that the tobacco wars might be moving away from the very boring libertarian question of "Is smoking a valid expression of individual freedom?" and towards the more interesting conservative question of "If smoking is an expression of something more substantive than just my freedom to choose stuff, what might it be expressing?":

David Gumbiner '08 had never smoked a cigarette before he spent a semester in India, China and South Africa last spring. But while he was abroad, Gumbiner started to smoke bidis - small cigarettes popular in South Asia - with some participants in his program. Gumbiner said it became "part of our friendship to sit around and smoke." [...]

Gumbiner said his continued smoking after his program helped him get through the jobless summer he spent taking classes he did not enjoy.

"Smoking was contemplative for me," he said. "When we would sit around and smoke, those were times of the day when we just sat back and thought about nothing. Cigarettes helped break up my day in that regard." [...]

Christine Ronan '09, who is currently studying in Paris, wrote in an e-mail that none of her friends have picked up the habit. But she added that smoking has been "brought up as an idea a few times as something to help 'fit in better.'"

But for students like Gumbiner, smoking was more of a cultural experience than a way to fit in. Gumbiner said he actually felt guilty about smoking, as his program was a public health program focusing partly on the effects of smoking in China and the role of cigarette companies. He added that some of the students in his program looked down on his practices.

Still, Gumbiner said he did not regret the hours he spent smoking bidis with his friends.

"It was what it was," he said. "Going abroad is a lot about exploring parts of yourself you haven't looked at for a long time."

In contrast to the poetic reminiscences of smoker-philosopher Gumbiner, Ronan's depiction of smoking as simply a matter of peer-pressure sounds shallow and philistine. Well arranged, Debbie Lehmann.

The third article ('The new statism: anti-smoking hysteria') gets top prizes for demonizing both the State (capitalization in the original) and anti-traditionalists:

Those who seek smoking bans are closet statists, if not outright ones, who have somehow concluded that the State is capable of moral action, and who have decided that all of its executive power should be mobilized to extirpate culture, tradition and "unhealthy" habits. [...]

Even a casual "smoker" (I prefer not to designate certain persons as smokers and others as non-smokers, but reluctantly use the phrase in keeping with modern parlance) has probably smoked a pack of cigarettes within the last month, which translates into twenty times when individuals have felt the presence of the State and its laws enforcing personal behaviors.

When classes are over for the day, and one seeks to enjoy a drink and a smoke to take off the edge, one must avoid smoking in certain locations where laws have proscribed the former (and sometimes even the latter). When writing a piece of poetry, prose or personal correspondence, one must seek inspiration through the tobacco leaf in a location other than the traditional cafe or restaurant, for the State - yet, strangely enough, neither the writer nor usually the owner - has deemed such behavior inappropriate.

These are interesting times, particularly in the United States, where the polar extremes of rampant obesity and a lockstep fitness culture are the two camps to which one must retreat. Long gone seem to be the days of a healthy degree of moderation, determined by the individual who lives in accordance with his own version of self-discipline. Alas, it appears that the only options that leaders and laws claim that we now have are alleged risky behaviors and habits, or top-down versions of healthy living. Smoking ban advocates rest their claims on the misguided belief that health is the sole prerequisite for a high quality of life.

When will our culture again reflect the eternal truth that living encompasses more than merely life and health? Even if tobacco is so incredibly dangerous - a premise, for what it is worth, that I do not completely accept - why have we chosen to exterminate traditional behaviors in restaurants, bars, and pubs altogether, without regard for their historical and spiritual contexts.

Remember, concensus-mongers: too much emphasis on agreement leads us to obsess about things we can agree on and shortchange everything more controversial. The only thing worse than watching someone try to spin prostitution as a public health issue is . . . well, smoking outside in a January snowstorm.

However, none of the Brown pieces are a patch on the YDN's, which began with the opening line "Because I want to die."

UPDATE: That school on the Charles enters the fray. "Unlike doctors, we do not have a professional responsibility to live healthily, but, as informed citizens, we should consciously work to be healthy ourselves and to reduce the harms of second-hand smoke." Goodnight, poor Harvard!