THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408070036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: A CULTURE IN RETREAT
[First part of series on tobacco]
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 157 lines
Daily, one-fourth of the adult population of America applies flame to the clipped end of a paper tube filled with the cured, chopped leaves of the tobacco plant.
They draw breath through the other end and inhale a stream of smoke that is at once noxious and intoxicating. It relieves stress. It heightens awareness. It settles jangled nerves. It feels very, very good.
It also makes most of them cough, and it will kill or otherwise harm many of those who indulge.
Nearly every smoker asks himself, sometimes daily, ``Why don't I just quit?''
Some answer that question easily: They give it up, cold-turkey. Others find that tobacco, after lengthy use, has become a part of their very being, that its loss would be as troubling as the loss of a limb.
Smoking has been under attack since explorers hauled the first sack of tobacco back to Europe. A mere curiosity at first, it backfired across the continent as a nasty habit that even 17th century physicians abhorred.
But for much of our lifetime, smoking was cool, as many degrees of cool as there are shades of blue: James Dean cool, Humphrey Bogart cool, Bette Davis cool. Even Sheriff Andy Taylor, the wisest of television's fathers, would stretch out on the porch after supper, with Opie at his knee, and blow a long, slow feather of cigarette smoke into the humid Mayberry night.
Edward R. Murrow smoked on camera, while he was reading the news.
Now, banished to alleys, banned from kicky new restaurants, told in many cases not even to apply for job openings, smokers are the new lepers of a society that is as conscious of class as it is of health.
Many smoke on the sly, hiding the habit from disapproving bosses or spouses, from guilt-loading offspring who parrot grade-school ``Just Say No'' philosophies that equate cigarettes with narcotics. One simply cannot smoke in front of the little darlings and force upon them the horror of knowing that mommy or daddy is a junkie.
Cigarettes are rarely seen on television now. In movies, where once they defined Bogart's sexuality or James Bond's savoir-faire, cigarettes are a prop used by directors to define the lesser elements of character, a moment of tension, a foreshadowing of doom.
Smoking is no longer elegant. The cigarette is becoming a short, killing thread of paper that separates the upper classes from the lower, the intelligentsia from the unlearned, the strong from the weak.
So why don't I just quit?
The easy answer - with considerable truth - is that nicotine can be intensively addictive, that many smokers cannot wean themselves from the physical support cigarettes give them.
That attraction can be dismissed lightly only by those who have never been addicted to cigarettes. The nonsmoker has no frame of reference to understand the narcotizing impact of that first lungful of tobacco smoke. The hit is instantaneous. For one lustrous moment, nerve endings respond as if they're being stroked by an ermine glove.
But nicotine's addictive allure is not enough to explain why people continue to smoke in the face of ostracism and indisputable health evidence. Many of those who've quit say that defeating nicotine was least of the difficulties.
Far stronger forces, complex and psychological, come into play.
Richard Klein, a professor of French at Cornell University and a smoker since age 12, set out to define those forces as a means of defeating his own cigarette habit.
The result was ``Cigarettes Are Sublime,'' a compelling scholarly work whose title alone says volumes about why it is so difficult to simply quit smoking.
``Just knowing cigarettes were bad for my health did not seem to be enough to get me to stop,'' Klein said in a telephone interview. ``I needed a better understanding of the habit, . . . of the advantages and benefits of cigarettes for which I would have to find substitutes if I was going to give them up.''
Klein's book is a strange and esoteric history of tobacco's role in art, philosophy, literature and daily life. It also offers a nearly operatic celebration of the many benefits of cigarettes: their ability to fill moments of boredom, to quell hunger, to add satisfaction to the close of a meal, to both dampen a soldier's terror before battle and calm the nerves when the guns have silenced.
``What I try to do in the book,'' Klein said, ``is explain why cigarettes not only have been tolerated in society, but celebrated throughout the world, where almost a billion people smoke cigarettes every day of the year.
``They are the consolation of the most miserable people on the most miserable streets of the world,'' he said. ``They are one of the last sources of satisfaction and beauty that a lot of people have in their lives: When there's nothing else, cigarettes can seem more important than food.''
Beauty is a word seldom applied to cigarettes. Not even a tobacco baron would try that in today's climate. Klein's ultimate conclusion, though, is that a form of beauty is the cigarette's strongest lure - but it is a dark beauty, a negative aesthetic pleasure, that tempts and traps the user.
Their very danger, he believes, is part of what makes cigarettes irresistible. He even argues that the mandatory Surgeon General's warning on every pack may actually add to their attraction.
``There is incontrovertible evidence that smoking is on rise among young people,'' Klein said, ``particularly among young women. That's despite all the ranting - I would say as a result of the ranting.
``I suspect that the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packs probably sells as many cigarettes as it discourages their use.''
But ``all the ranting'' that Klein refers to is having impact: Per-capita use of cigarettes by adult Americans peaked in 1963 at 4,345 per year and has dropped fairly steadily ever since, according to the Tobacco Institute. By 1992 that number was 2,629 per year for every person over age 18.
The scourge attached to cigarettes is giving rise to a new class of smoker, the ``social smoker.'' They will not admit to having a nicotine habit and they are not likely to smoke at home or at work. But the social smokers see nothing wrong with lighting up in a bar or a dance club, or at a party.
``It's just part of the scene, part of the party image, I guess,'' said Jeffrey Ingalls, a young Navy man, after borrowing a cigarette at a local pool hall. ``Here, or at a party, that's about the only places I smoke.''
He never smokes in uniform, not even to kill the boredom of sea duty. ``Proficiency ratings,'' Ingalls said. ``They say smoking doesn't affect them, but I'm not so sure.''
A recent report in The Wall Street Journal said there are a lot of young people, like Ingalls, who smoke only on social outings and look down their noses at the true cigarette junkies.
``A lot of people smoke but don't think of themselves as smokers, don't want to think of themselves as smokers,'' Klein said. ``That seems to be the illusion that people need to give themselves in the present climate.''
That climate will only get worse for smokers. Within weeks, California and Maryland will enforce tough new laws against smoking in public. Maryland's is the meanest: It includes taverns on the list of public places where the smoking lamp is permanently out.
``I'm convinced that if they try that,'' Klein said, ``before you know it we'll have `smokeasies' '' - not unlike the speakeasies of the Al Capone era.
``People who smoke want to smoke when they drink and drink when they smoke
Whatever happens, it won't affect Klein. After years of research and 30 turn-down letters, his book was published to acclaim, including kind words in The New York Times Book Review. It is being translated into 10 languages.
And he quit smoking, a month after he finished his manuscript. Klein may not be the most well-known former smoker in America, but he probably knows more about why he smoked and why he no longer does.
``I was 50 when I finally stopped,'' he said, ``when I finally discovered that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day just hurt my body more and more as I got older.''
Kicking the nicotine addiction was not the hardest part, he said: ``After three days and some Valium, I got through that.'' But the lesser-understood attractions of cigarettes, the ones that make them ``sublime,'' still pull at him after three years.
``You know, about every 20 minutes I see myself going back,'' he said. ``It's like an alcoholic, you take it day by day, hope and pray today will not be the day when I'm back on it.
``Not that I think its the worst thing in the world. But I know how my body feels at my age when I'm smoking. It's painful.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Photo subjects, clockwise from top left: Bette Davis, Humphrey
Bogart, Steve McQueen, Lauren Bacall.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
John Wayne smokes a cigarette as he talks with Jane Wyman in 1953.
KEYWORDS: TOBACCO by CNB