VOX
10.03.13
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M A G A Z I N E
THE VOICE OF COLUMBIA
SMOKER CONFESSIONS OF A QUITTER
NO IFS, ANDS OR BUTTS I LOVE SMOKING. AND I QUIT. BY EDWARD HART
12 VOXMAGAZINE.COM • 10.03.13
PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEXANDRIA ANTONACCI
“Let’s chat about you and tobacco,” my smoking cessation coach tells me. That would be nice and all, I’m thinking, but at this point, I’ve gone 36 hours without a goddamn cigarette, and I can barely form coherent thoughts, let alone sentences. I’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day since I was 16, I tell her. I love it, and there’s nothing finer than having a cigarette with your coffee in the morning. Then she asks why I’m quitting. I’m doing it for a story, I explain. I’m trying to quit smoking for 30 days and write about it for Vox. I’ll chronicle my weeks and my life without cigarettes and maybe, at the end of it all, stay off cigarettes for good. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I want to be a smoker for the rest of my life or anything. I’ve been trying off and on to quit after I became hooked in high school. Society has been pressuring me to quit my entire adult life. Think of how far we’ve come since the days where you could designate whether you wanted to sit in a smoking or nonsmoking section of a restaurant. When Columbia City Council passed a ban on smoking in all bars and restaurants in 2006, it barely eked through. Nearly seven years later, MU caused little controversy when it implemented a smoking ban on its entire campus this summer. Sure, society’s done much to eradicate smoking from our daily lives, and at 23, I’d be better off if I dropped smoking for good. But this four-weeklong project wasn’t about cigarettes, at least not entirely. What I needed was the clinical distance to grasp how deeply enmeshed smoking had become in my daily life and how much my dependence on nicotine shaped my perception of the world. Metaphorically, I had to clear the air around me so I could really understand my addiction, why I enjoyed smoking and why I’d been unable to quit for the past six years.
CIGARETTES HAVE BEEN MY ACHILLES HEEL FOR SEVEN YEARS, AND I CAN’T LET GO.
KLONDIKE BARS AND SUNFLOWER SEEDS ARE MY LIFE LINE.
LOVE OF THE IRISH LED ME TO THIS GOD-FORSAKEN HABIT.
WEEK 1: SUNFLOWER SEEDS AND KLONDIKE BARS I once read that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atomic bomb, said he couldn’t think without a cigarette in his hand. I can empathize with Oppenheimer and that line. Without smoking, I felt cut off from myself; I was intellectually castrated. I couldn’t think, couldn’t write, couldn’t even form intelligible sentences. My ability to pay attention was the first thing to go. People would talk around me, and all of a sudden it was like I was in a haze. Then came the inability to string together basic sentences. I would stutter through my words and lose myself in a babble that didn’t make any sense. Then the mood swings finally came, the chronic petulance and anxiety and need to lash out at the most benign things. Only a day into the experiment, I’d already started compulsively chewing sunflower seeds. The constant split-chew-spit rhythm helped me focus. I craved sweet foods and gorged on the Klondike bars I’d forced my roommate to stock in our freezer. It was the little things about smoking, the need to just slow down and notice, the pace of my breathing — inhaling and exhaling as if I were whistling — that would stave off bouts of anxiety. A co-worker, seeing me methodically spit salty shells into the Shakespeare’s cup in my hand, asked me what was up with the sunflower seeds. I told her, “These seeds are what’s keeping me tethered to humanity.” That’s when, barely 35 hours into this project, I realized I couldn’t make it alone. So I went to the MU Wellness Resource Center in desperation. There
GET THE MESSAGE?
I could get nicotine patches for free so long as I attended coaching sessions, which is to say, I had to talk about my addiction with a complete stranger. Our whole relationship was entirely transactional: I give up smoking; you give me adhesive nicotine. I don’t know what I was expecting. I probably thought I’d be met by some undergraduate psychology major who had never smoked and was just doing this to pad her résumé for graduate school. But by this point it didn’t matter; I just needed something to lessen the nagging withdrawal symptoms. I didn’t get the undergraduate I was expecting. I got Tiffany Bowman, my cessation coach and a Wellness Resource Center coordinator. Tiffany understood. She knew because she had been a smoker herself shortly after college. She was a social smoker for only a short time, but that gave her much more credibility in my book. So when Tiffany talked, I listened. And I think I was better off for it. A lot of people don’t recognize that a major reason most of us start smoking is because it’s enjoyable. She didn’t try to lecture me or give me some spiel about how quitting would improve health. She didn’t try to jolt me with all the scary anti-smoking rhetoric plastered in pamphlets all over this country. Instead, she told me that it was OK if I failed and had a cigarette. She said I should view it as a momentary lapse that didn’t have to doom the whole expedition. And I would fail repeatedly throughout this project. I would fail when I was drinking. I would fail when I was sober and just really stressed. I would fail because I’m human, and I’m an addict. But her advice made it much easier for me to right myself after my biggest defeat.
Anti-smoking labels from around the world PHOTOS COURTESY OF WIKI COMMONS
CANADA
14 VOXMAGAZINE.COM • 10.03.13
INDIA
NEW ZEALAND
SPAIN
UNITED KINGDOM
I had gone almost one week without buying cigarettes when I left home for work one Tuesday morning. On my walk to the newsroom, I smelled the acrid scent of burning tobacco from some nearby smoker. I intuitively reached across my body to feel my patch, but it wasn’t there. I’d forgotten to put it on that morning. I was screwed. About four hours into the day, I caved. I walked to the nearest convenience store, bought a pack of Camel Turkish Royals and huffed some down. By the end of the day, I felt levelheaded (and guilty) enough to realize what I’d done. I relinquished the pack to one of my editors on this story. That afternoon was a reminder of how easy it is to lapse and the shame that accompanies not being able to control my own cravings.
WEEK 2: IRISH GIRLS AND EPIDEMICS
“Do you mind if I ask how you started smoking?” What smoker hasn’t heard that question? Or its twin sister: “How old were you when you started smoking?” You have to admit you want to know how a privileged white kid — a kid who went to the right kind of schools, hung out with the right kind of people and grew up in the right kind of upper-middle-class household and who had also been immersed with the anti-smoking, D.A.R.E.- esq rhetoric as far back as his memory extends — ends up becoming a smoker at age 16. It wasn’t because all my friends were doing it. It wasn’t because I had a Freudian death wish or was using cigarettes to conquer some sort of adolescent tedium. It sure as hell wasn’t because I thought it would make me popular. The truth is, I picked up smoking because I had a crush on an Irish girl. When I was going into my sophomore year of high school, I participated in a kind of abbreviated exchange program. Every year this program would bring over a group of Catholic and Protestant teenagers from Northern Ireland in order to facilitate cultural understanding. We discovered we all had at least one thing in common: We were a bunch of hormone-ridden teenagers. But what we didn’t share was that almost all the Irish girls smoked. The boys didn’t, for the most part. They said it interfered with sports, but almost all the girls enjoyed smoking. In order to quell my own curiosity about Irish girls and smoking, I would sit with them as they smoked and casually take drags off their Marlboro Lights. At first the burning tobacco seemed foreign and provoked coughing fits that I tried to suppress for ego’s sake. But as my lungs grew accustomed to the feeling, I discovered I actually enjoyed it. By the end of the first week, I had developed a bit of a fling with one of the girls from Belfast. At a mixer near the end of our Irish guests’ stay, she and I snuck outside. My memories of that night are blurry, but the sensory impressions are still vivid: pressing against each other outside the building, her tongue ring, the taste of cigarettes on our lips. She left after two weeks. The cigarettes stayed. I had become a teen smoker. Although smoking among all age groups has generally been on the outand-out for decades, teen smokers have persistently been one of the trickiest groups to curtail. So much so that last year the U.S. Surgeon General declared teen smoking to be an epidemic in this country. The issue is of especially pressing concern because of two simple data sets. First, nearly one in four high school seniors smoke. Second, almost 90 percent of adult smokers started the habit before they reached age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In essence, if we really want to curb the number of smokers in this country, teenagers are the crucial age group to reach because once addicted to smoking, you’re more or less hosed. The science behind when symptoms of addiction start occurring is kind of fuzzy and not entirely understood. A study from the University of Massachusetts from 2007 suggests that symptoms of addiction can start manifesting themselves after only one cigarette. And so I became an addict. No one can say the exact moment it happened, but smoking had become an indelible part of the architecture of my day. My mornings began with a cigarette as soon as I sipped my coffee; my evenings ended on my back porch with one last draw of smoke before bed. “So what are the odds of quitting now,” I ask Tiffany during the second week of my project. How many people actually follow through when they start coming to the Wellness Resource Center for cessation counseling?
LUNG CANCER 128,900 (29%) STROKE 15,900 (4%) OTHER CANCERS 35,300 (8%) OTHER DIAGNOSES 44,000 (10%) CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE 92,900 (21%) ISCHEMIC HEART DISEASE 126,000 (28%)
443,000 DEATHS FROM SMOKING EACH YEAR IN THE U.S.
SOURCE: CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
THE QUITTERS Although they try (and try again), smokers have a hard time putting out the flame
70 50 40 7 3.5
Percentage of smokers who want to quit altogether Percentage of people who relapse into smoking while intoxicated Percentage of smokers who will try to quit this year Percentage of people who will succeed at quitting on their first time Percentage of smokers who will successfully quit cold turkey SOURCE: AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY
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About a quarter, she says. That doesn’t bode well for my attempt. But I guess the bright side is, according to Tiffany, people who quit cold turkey have an even worse shot at it. Only a small percentage are able to quit for good (3.5 percent, according to the American Cancer Society). I guess that explains why I’d fared so poorly every time I’d tried to quit in the past. The odds have never been in my favor. They still aren’t.
WEEK 3: AKRASIA AND QUITTERS
By the end of the second week, I found a nice equilibrium. I’m not going to sit here and spin you a tale about what a saint I had become. But it felt like the patch was working, and I wasn’t thinking about smoking much during the day. The cravings would come, though, especially when I passed a smoker on the street. So what if a couple pitchers of margaritas on a Friday night caused me to beg a couple smokes off a friend? I had effectively quit smoking by my measure, and that was the best I’d accomplished since I picked up the habit. In the past, my efforts to quit generally had followed a similar arc. I would finish off my remaining cigarettes and resolve to abstain from smoking from then on. Generally, I would cave within three days when the cravings were the strongest. But were I to make it past that point, I would undoubtedly confront some stressful situation within the next two weeks that would immediately send me speeding to the nearest gas station for a pack of Camels that I would smoke frenetically. And because I’m an addict, I couldn’t not smoke the pack of cigarettes I had in my possession because I lacked the strength to say no to the cigs I adored. So I would finish that pack. And not wanting to go through the nasty experience of withdrawal again, I would immediately buy another pack. Quitting quickly established itself as a regular routine throughout the end of my high school and early college days. I would quit, put myself through a lot of unpleasantness and start back up again within two weeks. This time, I was going strong into the third week. Unbeknownst to me, two friends, both editors at this magazine, also quit days after I did. Like any life change, quitting is easier done as a group. But if my quitting had a domino effect on the smokers around me, it also worked to our collective disadvantage when a group of us went out on a Saturday night to Shakespeare’s on Ninth Street. Our friend’s boyfriend was visiting from out of town. A pack-a-day smoker (who shares my affinity for Camel Turkish Royals), he pulled out his cigarettes on the patio. I’m sure you could see the glint in my eye. The other two jittery addicts I was with were also eyeing his pack wistfully. When he offered to share, two of us demurred. But when the third said yes, we immediately changed our minds and asked for a cigarette. So there we were, three people who were nominally trying to quit smoking, ruefully taking drags of cigarettes we didn’t
have the strength to refuse even if we knew we that we should. The Greek philosophers had a term for this weakness of willpower: akrasia. It roughly means doing something even though we know that it’s harmful to us. Plato held that no man would knowingly choose to do something that’s to his detriment. Any smoker knows that Plato was dead wrong. From the time we’ve started smoking, we’ve understood the detriment. There isn’t a single smoker today of sound mind who believes that cigarettes are healthful for him or her. All of us will admit we know it’s posing a significant risk to our well-being. Many of us have our old standbys, the predigested arguments that we’ve come to rely on to justify our smoking. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve cited “a new study” that shows people who quit smoking by the time they’re 40 generally see no long-term ramifications to our health and live almost as long as people who’ve never smoked. But maybe the answer is that we’re just generally weak-willed and prone to take risks. Maybe we’re just incapable of confronting that part of ourselves. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points out that most smokers share a certain impetuousness and weakness. We also have a greater sex drive than the average adult population and “tend to have greater levels of misconduct and be more rebellious and defiant.” Gladwell goes on to say: “They make snap judgments. They take more risks. The average smoking household spends 73 percent more on coffee and two to three times as much on beer as the average nonsmoking household.” Maybe the reason the three of us sitting at the table that night couldn’t say no was that we’re more physiologically or psychologically hard-wired to say yes.
WEEK 4: RITUAL AND WORSHIP
The last time I met with Tiffany before my month was up, she was curious whether I would keep coming back to her office after my story ran, whether I was committed to staying off cigarettes. I’d like to, I told her, and I know that part of me would never have taken this assignment if I didn’t believe it was the spark plug that would eventually get me past the two-week mark and force me to quit for good. But part of me doesn’t want to quit smoking, even if everyone else does. The culture wars are over. Cigarettes have been vanquished in the public eye. Gone are the days when big tobacco could hawk its products by advertising that “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” No, no. We live in a society that has so entirely shunned cigarettes that even we smokers are a little embarrassed about it. We know they’re going to kill us eventually, and we know no one wants us smoking. But we persist anyway. Because we’re weak.
She can’t stop, and she won’t stop. But we beg, Miley, please.
Barack Obama’s glory days of pipes, puffs and pot have lost their appeal in the White House. 16 VOXMAGAZINE.COM • 10.03.13
Katherine Heigl can quit Grey’s Anatomy, but she can’t kick the habit.
We were glad Jack saved you from the Atlantic, Kate Winslet, But then you broke out the cigs.
And you thought Gatsby had a decline? When Leo picked up the e-cig, his sex appeal went down.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FLICKR
TRASHY OR CLASSY
Some make us flick the Bic, and others make us slap on the patch. Check out pop culture’s smoking studs and duds.
Because we enjoy them. Because we’re addicted. Tell me that a cigarette isn’t absolutely ambrosial while you sit on your back porch on a clear October morning, and you light up as you sip your first cup of coffee. Tell me smoking isn’t gratifying once you’ve tried a cigarette with a pint of beer. And dear Lord, tell me that there is nothing better after a full steak dinner and many bottles of wine shared with friends, when you’re all satiated, content and a little sleepy — tell me there’s nothing better after that, than having a cigarette with your after-dinner espresso. There’s something so sublime about those moments that it’s spiritual. The feeling of the smoke pressed against the roof of your mouth. The slow inhale and long satisfied exhale. The beautiful repetition and symmetry of it all; there’s something spiritual about that. Of course, tobacco has always been associated with the divine. It’s said that more than 3,000 years ago Native Americans used tobacco to commune with the Creator. For me, though, smoking has been about being able to take the time to commune with myself as much as it has been about enjoying smoking. It’s time away from reality, even if it’s only five to 10 minutes every couple hours, in which you can step outside for time alone. The writer ZZ Packer summed up this blessed solitude of smoking rather nicely in an interview a few years back: “There’s really no chance in society to have a moment to oneself. If you were outside a building and just sort of there and quiet for 10 minutes without doing anything, people would ask you, ‘What’s wrong?’ But if you were outside a building smoking a cigarette, people would know that this is your time to think, and that’s sanctioned. And I could see how everybody needs that.” One of the things I’ve struggled to fully understand over the past month is how much I need that time to myself each day, how much I need to give myself a regular reprieve from the normal contours and currents of everyday life. These are the things I’ve missed the most about smoking. Although it might be the addiction or my weakness talking, there’s a part of me that never wants to quit smoking entirely. The better part of me, the part that’s not overcome with akrasia, knows that I want to reach the point where I don’t have to wear a patch just to keep the nicotine coursing through my bloodstream. Part of me wants to make it through, not just hours, but months without thinking about a cigarette. And I want to cling to that instinct that one day I will no longer have to call myself a smoker in the present tense. So I told Tiffany the truth about what will happen after this story runs: I don’t know.
THE NICOTINE PATCH, MY ONE SALVATION, FAILED ME COUNTLESS TIMES.
*Editor’s Note: Edward has gone six days without a cigarette, and today he will start a reduced level of nicotine patches.
Only Don Draper can make cheating, drinking and smoking sexy.
High school is a big popularity contest, and James Franco smokes the competition.
Marilyn didn’t mind living in a man’s world—as long as she could have a smoke in it.
Carrie Bradshaw made sex and cigs two of our favorite things.
James Dean: The ultimate in smoking badassery.
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