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www.smokersclubinc.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3138
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Starting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your psyche

Friday, April 28, 2006

SPOT1: The foremost step in understanding the mystery of tobacco begins
with acknowledging the reality of its unreason. That's why cigarettes are
so compelling. Smoking has far deeper meaning than the anti-smoking
establishment will ever come close to understanding SPOT2: As the state
and the dominant values of modern society condemn smokers as criminals
or the followers of the devil or simply irresponsible citizens, smokers are
uniting underground. Shared brands of cigarettes smoked become the
password for a secret bonding in an environment hostile to smokers

In its quest for Westernization, Turkey is doing well, very well indeed. With
Levi's shops we have our own urban cowboys with 501s, with KFC and the
ever-reproducing McDonald's we have our brand-new national palate. We
have our rock stars and rap singers, new concepts like “total quality
management” and “smart girls” who carry Cosmo. Centuries later we have
reclaimed Santa Claus as an honorable citizen of Asia Minor, and we know
more about Madonna than we ever did about Mevlana.

  It was time that we, as Turks, became aware of the dangers of smoking.
We were warned by the U.S. surgeon general, after all, that smoking is
very dangerous. Now, for the last couple of months bills are being
discussed in parliamentary commissions. These bills include banning
smoking in public places such as Turkish coffee houses and taxis. Others
are bills that regulate the depiction of smoking in TV shows and selling
cigarettes to minors. And on our way to the EU, we have the huge warning
labels on our cigarette packs now, reminding us that cigarettes cause
heart disease and will reduce our sperm count.

  But, of course, the fact that tobacco is the greatest health hazard ever
documented is not something new. With the exception of lung cancer,
almost every adverse effect of tobacco use had been noted long before
the advent of the mass-marketed cigarettes.

  Sir Francis Bacon was probably the first to argue that smoking by
pregnant women caused birth defects. The dangers of passive smoking
were known to Indians living in the region now belonging to Panama in the
16th century. The British Parliament recognized the health hazards of
passive smoking in the Railway Bill of 1868, which mandated smoke-free
cars on British railways so as to prevent injury to smokers. And the
cardiovascular dangers of tobacco were the subjects of entire books in the
18th century.



Breathing new meanings:

  Smoking has turned into a political issue worldwide. Numerous campaigns
depicting amputees or repellent graphic illustrations of lungs with cancer,
with horrific slogans reminding us of hideous forms of death, aim to make
us feel like Jews in concentration camps. These are not simple posters on
health issues or innocent interventions in the lives of compliant citizens
who cannot make sound decisions on their own. These campaigns are
simply plain censorship.

  The anti-smoking campaigns are not only imposed by the people at the
top of the establishment. The modern age has created a perfectly running
cold war between smokers and non-smokers. The special rooms for
smoking in workplaces are designed to impose a feeling of guilt on
smokers, that they are doing something criminal, undesired and low.
Although the odor of garlic or onions is met with sympathy, the cigarette
smell is always intolerable. Even the familiar argument about how we are
killing ourselves and others as well has a uniform and boring tone. No
matter when or where we are come up with it, it gives us the feeling that
this argument was generated by one person and distributed throughout
by this originator.

  Like every other thing that has been censored throughout history,
smoking has a substantial cultural significance and a pleasure principle that
is quite hard to be monitored. It may be, as Richard Klein puts it in his book
on the history of tobacco, “Cigarettes Are Sublime,” that cigarettes do
constitute “the only decisive advance in the knowledge of pleasure that
modern (i.e. 19th century) culture had achieved over antiquity.”

  Cigarettes, tobacco and smoking embody a complexity of cultural
significance. The extraordinary attractiveness of tobacco as a recreational
drug should never be overlooked. None of us smokers ever need the
excuse that smoking is good for us.

  Why tobacco took hold in modern culture, not like cocoa, tea or coffee,
can be explained through historical contingency, and why no state could
succeed – or did not want to – the production and circulation of tobacco
can also be explained. Money is an important reason, of course. “I will
certainly forbid it at once,” said Napoleon III of the vice that brought in lots
of money every year, “as soon as you can name a virtue that brings in as
much revenue.”

  But the significance of smoking lies beneath the human depth of
attraction, its enormous role in the modern psyche. The foremost step in
understanding the mystery of tobacco begins with acknowledging the
reality of its unreason. That is why cigarettes are so compelling. Smoking
has far deeper meaning than the anti-smoking establishment will ever
come close to. Through “remystifying” smoking, we can accept its
aesthetics and the experience of negation it provides.

To die for:

  The vulnerability and seductiveness the cigarette and smoking represent
were long ago discovered by Hollywood. Thêodore de Banville, the great
19th century aesthete, called the cigarette “a little work of art.” The
contemporary French existentialist writer and philosopher Sartre said
that “a life without smoking was not worth living.” And as Mallarmé put it:

     “The whole soul summed up

       When slowly we exhale it

    In several rings of smoke

    Abolished in other rings…” Cigarettes epitomize something horrifying
and shocking, something that lies next to death. Like the vampires of
Gothic literature and early Hollywood cinema, the cigarette becomes the
unnerving connection between life and death. Addiction and poison are not
the consequences of the habit. They are the core of its troubling beauty.

  In the last decades, smoking and cigarettes have created their own
subcultures. “Camel” and “Parliament” have become ways of life, not
simply cigarette brands. It is more than the taste and aroma and money
that lead a person to select a particular brand. Due to its forbidden nature,
smoking creates a more intimate bonding, realized only among minorities
alienated from society.

  Subcultures have always been mere reactive forces to the mainstream. As
the state and the dominant values of modern society condemn smokers as
criminals or the followers of the devil or simply irresponsible citizens,
smokers are uniting underground. Shared brand of cigarettes smoked
become the password for a secret bonding in an environment hostile to
smokers. The fashionable non-smoking school provides people with the
ideal(ized) role of the responsible citizen, mother, friend, boss.

  The growing trends towards clean, healthy living also serve the
ascendancy of anti-smokers, as if they will enjoy eternal good health.
There is something death-defying about the contemporary opposition to
cigarettes, a kind of rage that anyone would not choose 2.2 years of a
healthy life over a somewhat shortened and pleasurable existence, a
resolute resistance to the intimations of death. But please, let us die in
peace.

www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=41963