I feel like e-cigarettes are my salvation, my connection to a culture that lasted centuries, a culture that is dying in the first world, a culture that I love.
I smoked for 10 years. Started when I was 24. I loved it. It’s the most fun anyone can have on a daily basis with fire. I was a really good smoker, too. None of those light or bargain cigarettes for me – full flavor all the way. I smoked Nat Shermans, those funny cigarettes that they only sell at tobacconists.
That was some time ago, and I am still puzzled to meet people who don’t enjoy their cigarettes and who complain that they can’t quit. Invariably, they smoked lousy cigarettes, and basing a general opinion of tobacco on lousy smokes is like passing judgment on mayo based on the taste of fat-free mayonnaise.
Far from being anti-social or filthy, smoking has been a tradition in western society for more than 400 years. It symbolizes leisure, relaxation, fortitude, success, amorousness, nonchalance, and (more recently) defiance. Americans have been naturally inclined to think that smoking is glamorous quite simply because it is glamorous. Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote poems about it. Sir Walter Raleigh smoked. Errol Flynn smoked. Clark Gable smoked. Spencer Tracy smoked. John Wayne smoked. James Dean smoked. Gary Cooper smoked. Steve McQueen smoked. Franklin Roosevelt smoked. Ronald Reagan did a cigarette ad for Chesterfield. Who can picture Frank Sinatra or Humphrey Bogart without a cigarette? Harrison Ford smokes in “American Graffiti.” Paul Newman smokes in “Cool Hand Luke.” Clint Eastwood smokes in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Bruce Willis smokes in “Die Hard.” Mel Gibson smokes in “Lethal Weapon.” James Bond smoked in the original movies and novels. Even James Stewart smokes in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Note well: tobacco companies don’t pay for characters to smoke in movies; they pay to have their brand of cigarette associated with characters who already smoke. (And after all this, neo-puritans would still have us believe that smoking has resonated with westerners for more than 400 years because of the tobacco industry’s shrewd marketing.)
I know people (some of whom relatives) who have died of cancer after smoking their entire life. I suppose that they had some regrets. I hope not. It’s not like they weren’t doing anything riskier than anyone else was doing – it’s just that we’ve been taught to play extra-special-close attention to anyone who’s malady can be traced back to tobacco by a smear campaign that makes McCarthyism look mild.
The world is a dangerous place. A friend of mine in high school was paralyzed from the waist down in a fairly small car accident (3 other people in the car walked away). I know a guy who broke his back while helping a friend make an amateur film; he had to have his vertebrae fused, and now he suffers chronic back pain. I know a few people who don’t exercise that have already had heart attacks by the time they reach 50. I could go on and on. Huge irony: I can count on one hand the number of people who complained to me about second-hand smoke who were not morbidly obese.
Look, it’s difficult to talk about people who are close to us who die, but we are, after all, mortal. People die every day, and nobody spares every expense to prolong their life or improve their health or to avoid accidents. We live in a society where people are more concerned about whether children smoke than whether they get abortions. Kids sit on the couch all day playing homicidal video games, never lift a finger to exercise, eat nothing but potato chips and candy and big macs and junk food, and nobody bats an eye. But if anyone so much as hints that it’s OK for them to smoke, then there’s hell to pay. I’m sorry that people get sick and all, but I really don’t have any patience for all this blubbering about people who died who used tobacco.
When I hear people complain about the dangers of smoking, I tell them I’ve got a better idea: Why don’t we harp on the dangers of driving. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who dried driving. And driving pollutes our environment way worse than tobacco. We could post pictures of ugly people in ugly cars, and then everyone could take that tragic-but-self-righteous tone about how sad it is that people drive when it so obviously destroys lives and cheats our families out of time with their loved ones.
I know this is an argument I can’t win. People are far too brainwashed by the anti-smoking cult. But I love smoking, and I always refused to be a self-loathing smoker.
So why did I quit? I quit smoking many years ago because I started practicing a religion that forbade it. I enjoy practicing this religion. It provides peace and spiritual comfort that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Even so, I’ve always regretted that I couldn’t smoke and practice my religion. So until I found e-cigarettes, I was an ex-smoker with regrets and misgivings about the absence of smoking from my life.
Now, I'm an ex-smoker who couldn't care less about regular cigarettes. I love that I can be surrounded by puffs of vapor. I love the familiar shape refined through a century of mass production, holding it and fiddling with it and touching it to my lips. I love pulling the vapor into my mouth and feeling it exit through my nose. I’m surprised to find that I enjoy the variety of flavors that I’ve tried, because when I smoked I was very particular.
Most of all, I’m surprised to find that e-cigarettes are superior to cigarettes. I don’t much care about their health-impact compared to cigarettes. And I never concerned myself with the reactions of others to the smell or the ash. And it’s nice that religious devotion does not demand e-cigarette renunciation (most people don’t endure that restriction anyway). What I’m saying is that e-cigarettes are inherently better than cigarettes.
E-cigarettes are not temporally bound. Lighting a regular cigarette necessarily starts a timer – like when restaurants used to have smoking sections, and you had to calculate in your head whether the food would come before you finished the cigarette you were about to light. E-cigarettes wait for you, and they’re ready whenever you are. They’re an enjoyment that exists outside of time and space that you can pick up and leave as you please.
E-cigarettes give you a sense of permanence; they give you something to hang on to. A regular cigarette is a moment, and when the moment is over the cigarette is gone. One can love smoking in the abstract, but there’s no possible attachment to a single cigarette. An e-cigarette is a device, something you keep. It’s something that feels like it persists, and that makes it comfortable in a way that a cigarette can never be.
E-cigarettes bring the focus back to individual choice. Through targeted campaigns, first about “passive smoking” and then about “second hand smoke,” public health officials have sought for decades to recast smoking as an anti-social behavior, one that does not merely affect the individual but harms those around her. E-cigarettes turn this on its head. I can use an e-cigarette without impacting others, and that makes the choice, by right, my own and nobody else’s. Politicians and bureaucrats are scared witless of e-cigarettes because they know that they make a smoking-like behavior eminently and unquestionably social again.
E-cigarettes represent the triumph of man over his environment through the creation of shrewd technology. In e-cigarettes, we have a technology that empowers action by surgically removing its major risks, both to the individual and to those around her.
In all of these ways, e-cigarettes are uniquely suited to reconnect us with the rich heritage of tobacco use that dominated centuries of western civilization, a heritage that many would like to rip out root and branch.
But E-cigarettes aren’t some murky shadow of cigarettes, chosen because they do less harm. E-cigarettes represent what was best about smoking and move beyond all that to create a rich world of possibilities all its own.
I smoked for 10 years. Started when I was 24. I loved it. It’s the most fun anyone can have on a daily basis with fire. I was a really good smoker, too. None of those light or bargain cigarettes for me – full flavor all the way. I smoked Nat Shermans, those funny cigarettes that they only sell at tobacconists.
That was some time ago, and I am still puzzled to meet people who don’t enjoy their cigarettes and who complain that they can’t quit. Invariably, they smoked lousy cigarettes, and basing a general opinion of tobacco on lousy smokes is like passing judgment on mayo based on the taste of fat-free mayonnaise.
Far from being anti-social or filthy, smoking has been a tradition in western society for more than 400 years. It symbolizes leisure, relaxation, fortitude, success, amorousness, nonchalance, and (more recently) defiance. Americans have been naturally inclined to think that smoking is glamorous quite simply because it is glamorous. Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote poems about it. Sir Walter Raleigh smoked. Errol Flynn smoked. Clark Gable smoked. Spencer Tracy smoked. John Wayne smoked. James Dean smoked. Gary Cooper smoked. Steve McQueen smoked. Franklin Roosevelt smoked. Ronald Reagan did a cigarette ad for Chesterfield. Who can picture Frank Sinatra or Humphrey Bogart without a cigarette? Harrison Ford smokes in “American Graffiti.” Paul Newman smokes in “Cool Hand Luke.” Clint Eastwood smokes in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Bruce Willis smokes in “Die Hard.” Mel Gibson smokes in “Lethal Weapon.” James Bond smoked in the original movies and novels. Even James Stewart smokes in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Note well: tobacco companies don’t pay for characters to smoke in movies; they pay to have their brand of cigarette associated with characters who already smoke. (And after all this, neo-puritans would still have us believe that smoking has resonated with westerners for more than 400 years because of the tobacco industry’s shrewd marketing.)
I know people (some of whom relatives) who have died of cancer after smoking their entire life. I suppose that they had some regrets. I hope not. It’s not like they weren’t doing anything riskier than anyone else was doing – it’s just that we’ve been taught to play extra-special-close attention to anyone who’s malady can be traced back to tobacco by a smear campaign that makes McCarthyism look mild.
The world is a dangerous place. A friend of mine in high school was paralyzed from the waist down in a fairly small car accident (3 other people in the car walked away). I know a guy who broke his back while helping a friend make an amateur film; he had to have his vertebrae fused, and now he suffers chronic back pain. I know a few people who don’t exercise that have already had heart attacks by the time they reach 50. I could go on and on. Huge irony: I can count on one hand the number of people who complained to me about second-hand smoke who were not morbidly obese.
Look, it’s difficult to talk about people who are close to us who die, but we are, after all, mortal. People die every day, and nobody spares every expense to prolong their life or improve their health or to avoid accidents. We live in a society where people are more concerned about whether children smoke than whether they get abortions. Kids sit on the couch all day playing homicidal video games, never lift a finger to exercise, eat nothing but potato chips and candy and big macs and junk food, and nobody bats an eye. But if anyone so much as hints that it’s OK for them to smoke, then there’s hell to pay. I’m sorry that people get sick and all, but I really don’t have any patience for all this blubbering about people who died who used tobacco.
When I hear people complain about the dangers of smoking, I tell them I’ve got a better idea: Why don’t we harp on the dangers of driving. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who dried driving. And driving pollutes our environment way worse than tobacco. We could post pictures of ugly people in ugly cars, and then everyone could take that tragic-but-self-righteous tone about how sad it is that people drive when it so obviously destroys lives and cheats our families out of time with their loved ones.
I know this is an argument I can’t win. People are far too brainwashed by the anti-smoking cult. But I love smoking, and I always refused to be a self-loathing smoker.
So why did I quit? I quit smoking many years ago because I started practicing a religion that forbade it. I enjoy practicing this religion. It provides peace and spiritual comfort that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Even so, I’ve always regretted that I couldn’t smoke and practice my religion. So until I found e-cigarettes, I was an ex-smoker with regrets and misgivings about the absence of smoking from my life.
Now, I'm an ex-smoker who couldn't care less about regular cigarettes. I love that I can be surrounded by puffs of vapor. I love the familiar shape refined through a century of mass production, holding it and fiddling with it and touching it to my lips. I love pulling the vapor into my mouth and feeling it exit through my nose. I’m surprised to find that I enjoy the variety of flavors that I’ve tried, because when I smoked I was very particular.
Most of all, I’m surprised to find that e-cigarettes are superior to cigarettes. I don’t much care about their health-impact compared to cigarettes. And I never concerned myself with the reactions of others to the smell or the ash. And it’s nice that religious devotion does not demand e-cigarette renunciation (most people don’t endure that restriction anyway). What I’m saying is that e-cigarettes are inherently better than cigarettes.
E-cigarettes are not temporally bound. Lighting a regular cigarette necessarily starts a timer – like when restaurants used to have smoking sections, and you had to calculate in your head whether the food would come before you finished the cigarette you were about to light. E-cigarettes wait for you, and they’re ready whenever you are. They’re an enjoyment that exists outside of time and space that you can pick up and leave as you please.
E-cigarettes give you a sense of permanence; they give you something to hang on to. A regular cigarette is a moment, and when the moment is over the cigarette is gone. One can love smoking in the abstract, but there’s no possible attachment to a single cigarette. An e-cigarette is a device, something you keep. It’s something that feels like it persists, and that makes it comfortable in a way that a cigarette can never be.
E-cigarettes bring the focus back to individual choice. Through targeted campaigns, first about “passive smoking” and then about “second hand smoke,” public health officials have sought for decades to recast smoking as an anti-social behavior, one that does not merely affect the individual but harms those around her. E-cigarettes turn this on its head. I can use an e-cigarette without impacting others, and that makes the choice, by right, my own and nobody else’s. Politicians and bureaucrats are scared witless of e-cigarettes because they know that they make a smoking-like behavior eminently and unquestionably social again.
E-cigarettes represent the triumph of man over his environment through the creation of shrewd technology. In e-cigarettes, we have a technology that empowers action by surgically removing its major risks, both to the individual and to those around her.
In all of these ways, e-cigarettes are uniquely suited to reconnect us with the rich heritage of tobacco use that dominated centuries of western civilization, a heritage that many would like to rip out root and branch.
But E-cigarettes aren’t some murky shadow of cigarettes, chosen because they do less harm. E-cigarettes represent what was best about smoking and move beyond all that to create a rich world of possibilities all its own.
Last edited:
