Tobacco: Samsara's* Drug Of Choice
Harold Hark
25 February 2004

Were alcohol to suddenly be removed from the earth by some divine hand, chaos would result. For awhile.

The same cannot be said of tobacco. The resulting chaos would knock the planet off course and send it spiralling into the sun with physics-defying speed.

Which would suit Apocalypse-o-maniacs, those folk, peculiarly Umeruhcan, who would rather die before they wake. Anti-smoking fascists would be cheering the last days too, much like the US Army officer in Vietnam who destroyed a village to save it from communism. One thing is certain: without tobacco, 90 per cent of creative artists and thinkers would put down their tools and minds to stare with rapt inattention into amorphous space. A world of severe Protestant purity based on sacrifice to mandane toil would be at hand...for a little while at least.

Not to worry. The end may be nigh for civilisation, thanks to the continued presence of cretinous demagogues like George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John W. Howard, Jacques Chirac, Ariel Sharon, and former dictator Saddam Hussein, but not for tobacco, no matter how far into the paddock smokers have to go to enjoy their death-defying fix.

Tobacco is here to stay.

Some people, frequently referred to as heroes, do quit the filthy habit. I know one personally. Or did. Heroic bloke just watches TV and sleeps any more. But for most tobacco junkies, the only solution to nicotine-addiction is to eschew samsara and seek nirvana. This amounts to something like gazing cross-eyed at one's nose in order to slip through the diamond-reflecting mirror and down the golden road to nihilsville, where, of course, one's essential mind is known to reside. (I should mention that this "essential mind" is beyond religious affiliation. Moreover, the attached body is not required to toil assiduously in order to gain credibility.)

But that won't work if you're a schizophrenic. The reason you always see schizophrenics chain smoking is because they need a coping mechanism to relieve stress and give them a sense of well-being.

As do us "normals" who smoke.

Once upon a time when I was a cigarette smoker, and during a period when I was "on the road" like Jack Kerouac, there was no doubt that when it came to assessing how to spend the last couple of dollars before entering the "bleak, blook, void" of destitution, a packet of Pall Malls won every time over something to eat. What good was a full stomach if I had to lose my bestest ever friend, that soothing cancer stick?

Cigarettes are also what keep people up all night yakkety-yakking. Usually accompanied by tobacco's best friend, alcohol, a room full of friends or strangers, or just two, will cover every subject known to mankind before, in this case, dawn's ghastly hour arrives. They may be killing themselves, but they are more interesting than their non-smoking brethren who, fearing substance abuse, are bored out of their skulls and go to bed.

Of course, there is nothing more revolting than a drunken cigarette smoker. Head bobbing up and down, cartoon eyes with little x's for pupils, facial muscles gone slack, speaking slurred gibberish, elbows slipping off the table...it's not a pretty sight.

Cigarettes stimulate the mind...and destroy the lungs. Go to any hospital emergency ward and you will find a poster naming the most prominent of some 4000 chemicals in every last fag. Arsenic, Benzene, Formaldehyde, Ammonia, and so on.

Jim Bacon, the Premier of Tasmania who has been forced to retire from politics because of lung cancer brought on by years of smoking cigarettes, sums it all up: "It's a stupid, stupid habit," he said. "I have not listened. I have kept smoking. I now accept that I am in large part paying the price for that stupidity. The message from me to everyone is please, don't be a fool like me. Don't keep smoking. And if you are young and you haven't started, don't start."

I believe we can say, without fear of being accused of hyperbole, that tobacco companies who advertise directly to adolescents are guilty of crimes against humanity.

Yes, I smoked coffin nails for 18 years, having lost count, after some 50 attempts, of how many times I tried to quit. Thanks to cigarettes, my lungs used to feel like twin slabs of cement. Over time, I perfected a cough that sounded as if glottal props were whipping up a yogurt of pale marbled phlegm garnished with seven-league chunks of bile. By the time it passed my horrified lips, the cough had taken on the richly modulated basso of an impassioned wino coughing and gagging in smorzando. The dying resonance, a sure Oscar winner, sounded like the first hint of a sun-baked corpse ready to unzip.

That's what smoking cigarettes can do for you.

Then I discovered pipes. Like cigars, pipe tobacco is not meant to be inhaled. The nicotine enters the blood stream by osmosis without allowing the tar to fuse the alveolae. The lungs remain pristine. A win-win situation, as they say. I haven't inhaled (tobacco) for some twenty years.

Still, I wish I didn't smoke. Pipes are a hassle, with lots of cleaning and reaming paraphernalia to deal with. I can't even claim to be cool, since they have been out of fashion since the 1940's when puffing by the fireplace like a Brit movie star was considered to be...cool. Worse, they, like cigarettes, represent an addictive need I am bound to.

Oh well, once an addict, always an addict. Without that nicotine I am unable to put two thoughts together to form a third. True, the extra boost of energy allows me to take aimless walks in endless parks, as well as rabbit on to my wife about whatever pops into my head, but the drive to create simply goes missing. And I'm too perverse to become a Buddhist.

I suppose six months without it would cure me. That's what they say, anyway. But who's got six months to throw away on self-liberation? Besides, my wife can't stand the psychotic look I get in my eyes.

As the French playrwright Jean Racine was overly fond of saying: hélas. At least I beat the cigaretch.

samsara - noun (Hinduism and Buddhism) the endless cycle of birth and suffering and death and rebirth.