Relishing the Joy of Smoking

For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die.

--Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

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The sun is not yet up over Chuck Gero’s home on Brewer Lake in Maine. He is in the kitchen, waiting for the coffee pot to fill. When it does, he pours a cup, sits down with the morning paper, lights his first cigarette of the day and takes a deep drag.

The effect is wonderful.

The nicotine surges into his lungs and rushes to his brain, where it stimulates chemical messengers that release enzymes. His heartbeat and blood pressure increase. His body feels both alerted and calmed. His concentration is sharpened, as if the cobwebs of sleep have been cleared away. The lingering taste is pleasing. He is relaxed and clearheaded and he takes another drag.

“Coffee and that first cigarette, they’re a reward for getting up in the morning,” says Gero, 61, an ex-Marine and retired salesman. “Nonsmokers, after all the stuff they’ve read in the press, think, ‘Geez, how can anyone possibly enjoy those things?’ They don’t understand. They really don’t. They don’t understand how pleasurable smoking is.”

Thirty-two years after the surgeon general linked cancer and smoking and 20 years after Utah passed a then-radical law banning smoking in some indoor areas, Americans still are lighting up. Those who do are smoking more than ever--an average of 27 cigarettes a day. Cigar sales are surging, teenage smoking is rising and cigarette sales, which dropped 2% to 3% a year during much of the last decade, are holding steady at about 487 billion a year.

Although smokers have become a shrinking minority--half the nation’s adults smoked in 1950; less than a third do today--they still number 48 million to 50 million. That’s more people than voted for President Clinton in 1992 and about equal to the combined population of the 78 largest cities in the United States. On a per capita basis, Americans are the world’s 11th-heaviest-smoking people.

Given what we know about the hazards of tobacco, does that make any sense? Probably not. But for many of the world’s 1.1 billion smokers--nearly half the world’s men still smoke--the fact is that life without a cigarette would seem kind of empty and scary.

“Simply put,” says Richard Kluger, author of “Ashes to Ashes,” a widely acclaimed book on “America’s hundred-year cigarette war,” “hundreds of millions worldwide have found smoking useful to them in myriad ways, subconscious or otherwise.”

For smokers, cigarettes are a seductive mistress, at once spiteful and delectable. They break the tedium of the day into manageable units of pleasurable anticipation. Like a friend, they are there in moments of reverie and depression. And with the tiny “hit” produced by each puff costing a penny or two, they are--whatever the ultimate costs--our cheapest, most accessible opiate, quieting uneasiness, soothing stress, dulling pain, honing focus, both sedating and exciting, depending on the intensity and number of inhalations.

That’s why condemned men were allowed a last cigarette and gentlemen in evening clothes, according to legend, smoked on the deck as the Titanic went down. It’s why Gen. John Pershing declared tobacco “as indispensable as the daily ration” in World War I. And why Sigmund Freud (after numerous operations for jaw cancer) said he owed to the cigar “a great intensification of my capacity to work.” Mark Twain quipped that he “came into the world” asking for a light. “Smoking is fun,” author Fran Lebowitz wrote in 1981. “Smoking is cool. Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult.”

‘I Really Like Smoking’

Burleigh Harwood, 66, who lives near Biloxi, Miss., quit smoking in 1956. Two years ago, about the time he retired from the Mississippi shipyards, he took up the habit again. He plays tennis two and sometimes three times a day--whipping players half his age--and figures he’ll smoke until he’s 70, then quit again.

“What’s nice about smoking?” he asks. “Nothing I can clearly put my finger on. Mostly, it’s just something my wife and I can enjoy together. We don’t smoke in the house or in the car. We have a place set aside in the garage. If it’s warm and sunny, we’ll go out to the porch or the swing in the backyard. We just sit there and have a smoke and shoot the breeze and talk about old times. It’s special.”

In Atlanta, Melissa Rolley is taking a break at the hair salon where she works. She is in a back corridor, lighting a cigarette. When she was 20 and had bronchitis while living in the Ohio Valley, doctors told her she would die by 30 if she didn’t quit smoking. She ignored the warning.

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” says Rolley, 40 and healthy, inhaling deeply. “It’s the reward for working two, three hours. To tell you the truth, I don’t know that anything could make me quit. I really like smoking. Basically, I believe the health warnings, so I don’t know how I rationalize it. Maybe I just haven’t faced my own mortality yet.”

Nicotine is what makes cigarettes addictive, but in itself it is not terribly harmful. Some studies show it may even protect against Parkinson’s disease, strengthen the memory and help Alzheimer’s patients. A poisonous alkaloid that has been used as an insecticide, it is in tobacco--and several plants, such as tomatoes--to deter insects from eating the leaves.

A Dangerous Mixture

The problem is that nicotine keeps bad company.

All smoke, whether it’s from car exhaust, a barbecue grill, factory fumes or a cigarette, contains dangerous chemicals. With every puff of a cigarette, smokers inhale a dense soup of 3,500 compounds that finds its way into the bloodstream and is circulated throughout the body. About 400 of the compounds are capable of damaging the DNA of cells and causing cancer, government scientists say.

“It’s a tribute to the resiliency of the body that every smoker doesn’t immediately get cancer,” says Terry Pachacek, an epidemiologist with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“Most smokers don’t understand what these chemicals do. When we studied them, we started asking, ‘My God, how can anyone smoke?’ These are frightening compounds. We don’t know how much exposure it takes, but for the average smoker it’s a question of how many times do you want to stand on the rail facing the train, hoping to jump out of the way?”

The risks--and social acceptability--of tobacco have been long debated. In the 1630s, the Massachusetts colony banned all smoking in public. A decade later, Connecticut required smokers to obtain a permit. In 1798, a Dr. Benjamin Rush cataloged 87 maladies he believed were related to tobacco use, including cancer, insanity, hemorrhoids and drunkenness. In 1886, the Annapolis (Md.) Morning Star said in an editorial: “Something heroic must be done for the suppression of this monstrous evil or the coming American man will be a pygmy and a disgrace to their race.” By the 1890s, 26 states had banned cigarette smoking.

Although polls show that as many as 70% of smokers say they would like to quit--and about 45 million have done it--dedicated smokers offer a variety of reasons for continuing to puff away: We’ve all got to die of something. Everything you enjoy in life involves risk. Quitting is too tough. I’ve smoked so long, the damage is done. My father smoked and he lived to 89. Japanese men smoke more than we do and they live longer. The French are heavy smokers and they don’t seem to be dying out. Claims about smoking’s harm are exaggerated. Why give up something I like?

“If you told me to quit it’d be like telling me to shoot my best friend in the head,” says Jody Brown, 42, who owns a Montpelier, Vt., art supply store. “Smoking’s so relaxing. I love every cigarette. But at the same time, yeah, I feel guilty, thinking how stupid I’m going to feel when they diagnose me with emphysema or lung cancer.”

“Am I a guilt-ridden smoker?” asks Jim Helliwell, 62, a film producer in Easton, Md. “Heavens no. How are you going to sit down and write without a cigarette? In most places now the greatest danger in smoking is pneumonia--having to go outside to light up.”

Deferred Risk

On average, the government says, smoking will shorten a person’s life by six to seven years. But smoking is a deferred risk. Its effects typically appear late in life, when unrelated cancers and other illnesses can also strike, and its impact is by no means certain: About 90% of smokers will not get lung cancer; 75% will not be struck by a tobacco-related fatal illness, various medical studies report.

W. Kip Viscusi, a professor of law and economics at Harvard Law School who has studied smokers’ behavior, says that most smokers are not in denial about health hazards and actually overestimate the risks. In his surveys, smokers estimated the chances of a tobacco user getting lung cancer at one in three and the chances of dying because of smoking at nearly 50-50. They exaggerate the life-expectancy loss as well, he says.

“So I don’t think you can make the case that these people don’t know what they’re getting into,” Viscusi says. “They are making a trade-off and people do that all the time. For instance, a story in the paper last week said Americans are more overweight than ever before. In being overweight, you are accepting certain risks. Smokers are doing the same thing.

“Also, what smokers may be telling us in these studies is that there is an annoyance factor at work because of being bombarded with all the shrill risk information. I think much of the objective of government policy is not to inform people but simply to stop them from smoking. And at some point people may resent the government’s role in telling them not to do something.”

Although smoking is popularly viewed now as being dumb rather than glamorous, polls show that most Americans are generally tolerant of smokers as long as they indulge in segregated areas--which for the most part has been accomplished through various restrictions nationwide.

But each restriction, some smokers say, further emboldens anti-tobacco reformists who want a prohibition-style ban on all smoking. Last month, for instance, the village of Friendship Heights, Md., banned smoking on five of its seven streets and the city of Norfolk, Va., began debate on prohibiting firefighters and police officers from smoking at home.

Anti-Smoking Crusade

“We’re living in a time when there’s a sort of cultural war going on and we are all very critical of each other,” says Bernard Peck, a sociologist at Northwestern University. “Some people are offended just seeing the evidence there are people who disagree with them walking around in the world.

“And I suspect some of the hostility toward smokers has to do with the rapid successes anti-smoking forces have had recently after years of nobody listening to them. I think it’s not so much puritanism as a kind of triumphalism. They’re saying: ‘Well, you had us down for so many years. Now it’s our turn.’ ”

“I think there’s a lot of lying about the statistics, especially secondhand smoke,” says a widely known Hollywood writer-director who felt being quoted by name could harm his career. “People just get crazy about it. But if it were the threat they claim, the most dangerous occupation in this country clearly wouldn’t be stunt flyer, Indy driver or whatever. It’d be being a bartender or a barmaid. And it isn’t.”

Indeed, it was a 1993 Environmental Protection Agency report linking secondhand smoke to the deaths of 3,000 nonsmokers a year that added a major political dimension to the tobacco issue and gave credibility to the need for more restrictions on smoking. The Congressional Research Service--the independent research arm of Congress--responded two years later that “statistical evidence does not appear to support a conclusion that there are substantial health effects of passive smoking.”

Still, few smokers would encourage their children to smoke. Many boycott smoke-free restaurants, and although some have become more militant in exercising their right to smoke, the vast majority have quietly, if painfully, accepted the fact that never again will they be able to light up anywhere they choose. According to a Los Angeles Times poll in September, 53% of smokers believe restrictions on smoking in public places are set at the right level, and 12% believe they don’t go far enough.

Patty Ogden, 65, a state employee in Las Vegas, kept smoking after heart bypass surgery in 1976. Her cardiologist dropped her as a patient when she refused to quit. “I thought of smoking as a form of security,” she says. “I’d always been in stressful jobs--casinos, politics--and a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, they were just part of my life.”

Nine years ago, after a second heart operation, she finally quit, and eventually got over the ensuing edginess, the restlessness, the hunger, the loss of concentration.

An Unrelenting Urge

But she still misses smoking, still has to remind herself why she stopped, still wonders whether it was the cigarettes or the polluted air in the Las Vegas valley that imperiled her well-being. The irony, she muses, is that her 88-year-old mother--bedridden after a stroke--never smoked a cigarette in her life.

Last month, Ogden went to her original cardiologist for a checkup. She got a clean bill of health.

Ogden looked him in the eye and in a remark most smokers--and a lot of ex-smokers--would understand, said: “If you’d just told me I had six months or a year to live, the first thing I would have done is gone out and bought a pack of cigarettes.”

* ANTI-TOBACCO ACTION: Massive fraud suit cleared to proceed against industry. D1

* LIGHTING UP THE WEB: The Smoker’s Home Page advocates the habit. E1