Smoking

I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces of coercive conformity. As far as I see it, the path to the grave is lined with compromise after compromise until, at the moment of the final rattle, one has become a travesty, physically and spiritually, of the person one used to be. Not that I would want to overdramatise the whole thing, mind. I more usually tend to present my dis-avowal of smoking as a kind of glorious epiphany. One moment I smoked, the next I didn’t. And in a sense that is true: no doctors were involved, there were no health scares, nor was I nagged to give up by those close to me. I went to bed one evening – at 23.

A new study released this month reveals that prolonged social isolation may be worse for your health than regularly smoking cigarettes. The research paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Aging, found that psychological factors can deeply impact the aging process. Subjects who reported suffering from a poor mental state, such as being depressed, unhappy, or lonely, were biologically 1.65 years older than their peers. Comparatively, being a current smoker was found to only add 1.25 years to a subject's biological age. "The detrimental impact of low psychological well-being is of the same magnitude as serious diseases and smoking," the study's authors conclude. The results are timely considering the impact of the Covid-19 lockdowns on the social lives of Americans.

When the COP26 climate change conference hits Glasgow at the end of October, the media will be out in force to discover how world leaders are going to meet their ambitious carbon emission targets. It will be on the front pages. Edited highlights will be on television. Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon will be elbowing each other out of the way to get in the limelight. Extinction Rebellion will be performing their doomsday japes outside. But when COP9 begins in November, few will notice. Admittedly, this event is being held online this year, but it would have flown under the radar even if it had been held in the Hague, as planned. It always does. Like COP26, it is a United Nations conference, but that is where the similarities end. You probably haven’t even heard of it.

My first memory of my Aunt Mary involves a rattlesnake and a meat cleaver. I was maybe seven years old when my cousins and I found the rattlesnake near a stack of cardboard boxes in her garage. It was barely 9 a.m. and we ran inside to find her already in full makeup and a silk housecoat, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She grabbed the cleaver and walked up to the recoiling viper — as entranced by her severe face and big red hair as we were — and chopped its head off with a nimble clank. ‘Wait till it stops wigglin’, then go toss it over yonder,’ she said through a cloud of smoke, and motioned toward an embankment at the end of the driveway. My last memory is from a little over a decade later.

Young people are now more likely to consume marijuana than to smoke tobacco. The social acceptance of tobacco is falling, just as the popularity of weed is getting higher. A 2019 Gallup poll found that 12 percent of US adults (and 22 percent of those aged 18 to 29) said they smoke marijuana. It won’t be too long, I predict, before we look back in horror at the widespread acceptance of cannabis use. It’s easy to forget that anti-tobacco researchers had to plod on at tortoise pace for years before they were able to prove what they had long suspected to be true (and what we all now take for granted): the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Tobacco was so rich and powerful that its lobbying suppressed the true dangers.

The owners of my local grocery shop, a mile or so from my house, very kindly sell me cigarettes in blocks of 200 at a time — and they have also delivered them to my house during this lockdown. This is useful for several reasons. Most importantly it aids my self-isolation programme. But it also minimises the risk of me being caught in the shop by a lurking Matt Hancock or perhaps a chief constable of the police, anxious to punish people who may be purchasing goods which they do not consider ‘essential’. If anything is essential during this time of compulsory boredom, it is cigarettes and alcohol.

Squinting through the penumbra of blue smoke that is nearly always contiguous with my person, I was surprised — no, scandalized — to see a silly little remark about G.K. Chesterton stud the pages of the National Review this week.Chesterton, that many-sided genius, once had the gall to defend the practice of torching a nice clump of tobacco and inhaling the fumes. Here is what he wrote, many years ago: '…to have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to take certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute.