2 Inventor of the kind of electricity we actually use.
Reflections of a Recovering Nicotinic
FIRST PRINTED JULY 2000
MY NAME IS SPIDER, and I’m a nicotinic. It’s been one year since my last drag. Thank you.
I once went eighteen months without buying a pack. But I cheated often. I’ve quit smoking dozens of times in forty years…and whatever the duration, I always cheated, at least occasionally.
I haven’t had a single puff since Quit Day. Not one. On New Year’s Eve, I wandered into a restaurant washroom and saw a full pack of my old brand abandoned on the sink. Not a soul present. I did what I’d come to do and got out, without a second glance.
Twain said, “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times.” But this time is different, for me. This time I believe it’s going to take. (Knock wood.) I’ll always be a nicotinic, the way an alcoholic will always be an alcoholic…but this time I think I’m going to get over and forever remain an addict who doesn’t use anymore. It’s so hard to get that tiger to sleep, I don’t want to risk waking him again.
The thing is, I never was that smart before.
Why this time, then? One obvious answer is increasingly strident medical advice. But I had serious lung trouble much of my adult life, and it wasn’t enough to break my addiction. Neither was the surgery that finally corrected matters…even though it’s reputedly one of the most painful procedures a patient is apt to survive.
Sudden late-life onset of character is another possible explanation, I suppose. But I doubt it.
I assign the credit to bupropion, marketed in Canada as Zyban and in America as Welbutrin. Originally developed as an antidepressant, it had problems in that regard, and its makers were about to scrap it when they discovered that it seemed to help smokers kick. I’ve tried several vaunted stop-smoking programs, hypnosis, acupuncture, vitamin megadose, gum and many other methods. Zyban did it for me.
I began taking it with almost zero faith in it. I’d been on two other antidepressants, years earlier, and they’d done nothing to alleviate nicotine craving. Quite the reverse: they’d brought me back from a place where I was so despairing I couldn’t even be bothered to smoke. Also, both had undesirable “side effects.”
Zyban had no perceptible effects whatsoever. No ringing in the ears, no dry mouth, no funny smell in the urine, no dullness of affect, no erectile difficulty, no metallic taste—nothing. But I had a much easier time kicking tobacco than ever before. And even since weaning myself from the Zyban, I’ve had far fewer and milder cravings than usual.
Your mileage may vary. Two of my best friends, also longtime recidivists, quit the same week I did, using the same drug. One’s still clean…the other says he’s just about ready to try again. Also, I’d be a lot happier if the makers of the miracle drug had even a vague theory as to how it works—they still don’t. But I offer my experience for whatever help it may be, to you or a loved one.
So what’s it like to be tobacco-free for a year?
Downside first. To my surprise, my nose has not gotten even slightly better at detecting pleasant smells…but it is doing a vastly better job of acquainting me with unpleasant ones. I can barely stand the smell of my own body and excrement, now, let alone the many stinks of the world. (Irony: My first novel featured a mad scientist who enhanced everyone’s sense of smell until technological civilization collapsed.) The improved sense of taste I’d expected from previous quittings has likewise failed to materialize this time: food tastes no better than usual. Sigh. Yet I’ve somehow managed to gain the usual twenty-five pounds. Requiring the usual total-wardrobe-replacement. If I have any more wind than last year, I don’t notice it.
Upside: My chest never hurts anymore. My mouth never tastes like an ashtray. I never run out of smokes…or even pat my pockets to check. I’m saving money. I’ll live longer, unless I don’t. The federal and provincial governments have lost roughly twenty-five opportunities a day to rob me at gunpoint. Air travel is now an almost endurable torture. And the cataclysmic post-quitting clinical depression that antismokers never warn you about has, for once, failed to arrive. Is that because I began with an antidepressant this time? Perhaps in another twenty-five years the Guesswork-in-a-White-Coat that calls itself modern medicine will have an answer.
Best of all, I’m now more certain than ever of my motives in believing most antismoker zealots to be fascists. I quit in spite of them, not because of them. More than ever I despise their outrageous lies about the “deadly dangers of sidestream smoke”—and the venal weasels in government who, with their encouragement, have publicly gang-raped a legal industry, relentlessly mugged and insulted one out of every five Canadians and paved the way for endless further curtailments of liberty—and the medical establishment which has evinced zero interest in making cigarettes safer, preferring to punish the addicted. I no longer suffer personally at the hands of health Nazis, but I still want them horsewhipped out of polite society—quickly, before they do any more damage.
And they’ve done far more than poor old Joe Camel ever did. Ever since we foolishly began empowering them ten or fifteen years ago, the rate of teenage smoking has relentlessly climbed, year after year. Everything they’ve tried having failed, they now propose to do it harder. Here’s how clueless they are: they actually believe kids will be repelled by huge gross color photos of diseased lungs on cigarette packs! Or they claim to. Perhaps they’re just trying to assure themselves lifetime occupation, berating and bullying yet another generation.
If they had anything approaching a conscience, they’d recall the advice of Aesculapius to the would-be do-gooder—“First, do no harm”—and would (finally) shut the hell up. But I’m not holding my breath…
Mugging the Poor for Their Own Good
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 2000
I’D HOPED THAT BY QUITTING TOBACCO I might eventually be able to quit the anger that comes with the territory these days. Perhaps, I thought, all I had to do was foreswear heresy and the ongoing Inquisition would come to seem less odious. It hasn’t worked out that way.
Nicotine-free for over a year, I still feel my blood simmer when I read, in the Globe and Mail, of the World Health Organization’s new report urging every government on earth to massively increase tobacco taxation—to promote public health. This august body of humanitarians purports to believe “millions of lives could be saved” in the Third World by reducing poor people’s excess liquidity with a simple cashectomy: picking their pockets for their own benefit. I don’t think anyone bright enough to blink could possibly really believe that. Yet the report was delivered in a public place with a straight face. Imbecility seems far too kind an explanation; I think we have to go with insensate greed and/or monstrous hypocrisy.
The study was co-sponsored by the WHO and…the World Bank, that famed champion of the world’s poor. It was fed to the media at some assemblage of health-bullies and other busybodies calling itself the “World Conference on Tobacco”—in Chicago, where the international airport does not even permit smoking outdoors anymore. “By 2030,” the report alleges, “some seventy percent of tobacco deaths will be in low-income and middle-income countries. And in rich countries, smoking is increasingly concentrated among the poor and is responsible for much of their ill health and premature mortality.” Gosh, isn’t it good to know that someone in an expensive suit is looking out for all those poor peasants and fishermen, willing to take the time to protect them all from their own needs and choices?
How could these do-gooders help it, though? The logic is utterly compelling. Tobacco may be legal, but it is evil…because it’s addictive. Its users are helpless slaves, powerless even to moderate their intake. But—follow closely, here—we’re pretty sure they’ll learn to control this uncontrollable addiction, somehow, if you’ll just let us raise the obscenely high taxes on it even higher. And keep the money. For research.
We all know every time a drug bust temporarily raises the street price of heroin, poor
people stop using it. Right? They’ll often turn down an offer to take part in a major felony, specifically because they fear it might bring them so much money they’d be able to afford drugs.
Perhaps you’ve never been a smoker and can’t fathom why people would endure so much public abuse and expense to smoke something that doesn’t even get them high. Let me try to explain, and maybe you’ll see why the WHO/WB report is so wicked.
Tobacco’s secret, magic gift is solace. Simple solace. Smoking doesn’t make you feel GOOD, exactly; there’s rarely any real pleasure in it. What it does is make you feel just a little better. Not quite as bad as a moment ago. Reliably, 100 percent of the time, twenty to sixty times a day, you can light up a cigarette and maybe your problems and sorrows will all remain, but at least you’ve scratched that one urgent itch for the next few minutes. You’ve taken action and bettered your lot, however briefly or illusorily.
You can’t eat twenty to sixty meals a day, or even snacks, without becoming a blimp. You can’t have sex that often without dying, not at my age anyway. You can’t knock back beer in anything like that quantity and hope to have a sex life…or a job. If you smoke crack sixty times a day, you’ll be dead soon and useless until then. But tobacco takes decades to kill, doesn’t inhibit competence…and always does the trick: makes its user feel just a little less lousy than the moment before.
O World Bank and World Health Organization—ye patricians in grey suits and UN politicians in phony white medical coats—here’s a news flash for you: the poor have the greatest need for that kind of solace. They have damn little else. You make your living on their backs: you cannot persuade me you honestly believe raising the cost of that pitiful solace will brighten or lengthen their lives. You cannot convince me 42 million poor people will quit smoking, abandon the only comfort you have left them, if you raise the price by ten cents a pack. I resent the implication that I look that gullible.
I think some folks behind that report realize perfectly well that raising tobacco taxes even higher will accomplish exactly what it always has: massive widespread smuggling. I suspect they’ve concluded there’s serious money to be made by adding yet another front to the perpetually lucrative Worldwide War on Drugs—that far too much tobacco money is going to the people who merely cultivate, grow, harvest, cure, purify, blend, roll, filter, package, distribute and advertise the stuff—that every new black market is a bonanza for old white people and the young lawyers and cops who work for them.
I’m certain they know nothing about how to discourage kids from taking up smoking: the more money we let them extort for that purpose, the more teens light up, year after year. They know nothing about how to help an adult quit smoking—any progress in that field has come from pharmaceutical companies, by accident. And they demonstrably have less than zero interest in the one thing that a fifth of the world’s population (the people they claim to represent) earnestly want and desperately need: safe cigarettes. A better nicotine delivery system. Solace that doesn’t kill, even over decades, doesn’t require a life of crime to afford and doesn’t create a criminal subculture to seduce and destroy their children.
As songwriter Randy Newman had the poor cry to Heaven, “Oh Lord, if you can’t help us, won’t you please, please, let us be?”
Big Nanny’s New Clothes
FIRST PRINTED MARCH 1998
WHAT COULD BE MORE SATISFYING than the sight of the forces of righteousness and rectitude scurrying about like doomed rats, fleeing a lethal flood of escaped facts, frantically trying to slap together a levee of lies to protect their position as the Good Guys of Fascism? Can there be a sight funnier than an expert hemorrhaging credibility the way the Hindenburg leaked hydrogen, while stoutly denying he has a problem? Gasbags everywhere are presently in the process of deflation—and just try and find one with the intellectual honesty to admit it.
On March 9, 1998, the Vancouver Sun ran a small story on the leaking of a major new study by the World Health Organization. The seven-country study, run by two of the most respected scientists on the planet, and “one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking…and lung cancer,” clearly and unmistakably shows (like the majority of such studies) that so-called secondhand tobacco smoke does not cause lung cancer. In fact, it seems to have a slight protective effect. Understandably, the WHO, which has spent years and megabucks on anti-tobacco campaigns, decided to suppress these results and tried to limit publication to a single report in an unnamed scientific journal. But someone, apparently afflicted with a sense of personal honor, let the cat out of the bag.
Next day, the Sun ran a follow-up—on the second section’s front page, but above the fold—in which representatives of Big Nanny (as I call the worldwide conspiracy to Do Good At Gunpoint) counterattacked. The study was “misleading.” And had been “leaked by agents of the tobacco industry.” And contradicted “a mountain of evidence” to the contrary.
Particularly incensed, a fellow identified as a “Vancouver-Richmond Health Board associate medical health officer” told the Sun, “The connection between second-hand smoke and lung cancer is well documented by everyone from Health Canada to the US Environmental Protection Agency to the WHO itself…” He conceded that “a small number of studies came to no conclusion…but that’s quite different from suggesting they proved there is no connection.”
This chap may be competent, and he may be truthful—but in this instance it’s hard to see how he could be both. If he has even casually examined the subject, he knows perfectly well that the US Environmental Protection Agency has never conducted a single study of second-hand smoke. In arriving at its 1993 assertion that second-hand smoke causes “3,000 lung cancer deaths per year” in America, the EPA relied, instead, on thirty existing independent studies—none of them funded by the tobacco industry. Twenty-four of those studies found no statistically significant connection between second-hand smoke and illness, but the EPA chose to ignore those and add together the conclusions of the six studies that did. Of those, the worst purported to show that constant exposure to second-hand smoke posed a danger approximately equal to that of drinking two glasses of milk a day, and slightly less than the danger of living in an industrialized society.
This is the “mountain” of evidence the new WHO study contradicts. The new study is “misleading” only if you were determined to lead people into ignorance for their own good. And it was “leaked by the tobacco industry” only if you are capable of making yourself believe the World Health Organization is riddled with tobacco-company moles. Big Nanny could not possibly say such things with a straight face…unless she were emotionally committed to the position that she intuitively knows what is best for other, sillier people, and inconvenient facts be damned.
The truth is out, friends. The self-righteous swine who have persuaded you to gang up on a quarter of your fellow citizens have just lost their only valid argument. If you are enjoying the discomfiture of millions of addicts forced into constant withdrawal too much to stop now, by all means continue to harass them. But you can no longer even pretend you are doing so in self-defense. Have the decency in future to admit that you are doing it for the same reason our ancestors robbed and murdered Native peoples, the same reason we hound pot smokers and heroin users alike into lives of crime, the same reason the only thing anyone has ever gotten all the organized religions to agree on is the demonization of homosexuals—because it is primevally satisfying to attack a minority. Let’s face it: witch-hunts are fun.
But you might want to bear in mind that every time society agrees to legitimize a lynch-mob, it endangers itself. The disgusting weapons you’ve agreed to permit the anti-tobacco forces to employ cannot be reclaimed and put back in the armory after the pogrom is over. If governments and packs of lawyers can bully and rob one cartel, they can bully and rob any cartel. When the same noble thugs and vultures currently circling over the tobacco industry have finished picking its bones and turned their attention to other “morally questionabl
e” industries (alcohol, coffee, chocolate and refined sugar spring immediately to mind, along with certain segments of the music business), you may regret having given them carte blanche to run other peoples’ lives for their own good, because once given it cannot be recalled.
The same week the new WHO report hit the fan, the forces of Big Nanny issued a public invitation to get in line for the gang-bang—excuse me, the class-action suit—they have planned for the tobacco industry, and helpfully supplied a phone number you can call if you have ever been in the same room with a smoker and would like some free money. I can only hope you agree with me that, like a tired old hooker in the harsh light of morning, Big Nanny was a lot more seductive with her clothes on. Naked, stripped of her best lie, she is a pretty ugly sight.
Terminal Improvement
FIRST PRINTED MARCH 1997
WHAT’S THE ONLY THING a newspaper columnist wants more than a week in Key West in March? A legitimate excuse to mention it in his next column. Add an opportunity to ride one of his favorite hobby-horses, and you have a happy man.
Back in 1997—back when I was a smoker—I was that fortunate fellow. And I felt like it…until I boarded the aircraft.
Oh, I knew I had a long ride without a cigarette ahead. But as I sat there in the Benson & Hedges Smoker’s Lounge in the new Vancouver Airport, gulping my last puffs, I reflected that at least the journey was not non-stop: there’d be an opportunity to stoke my nicotine reserves back up again during the change-over in Chicago, and that would get me through the long second leg.
The Crazy Years Page 4
