© Numero Unoma
I remember my first cigarette. It was a St Moritz Menthol, and I was in my late teens. The nausea of those first few puffs of nicotine caused me to throw up a certain brand of orange juice I had just drunk, and which after that I have never been able to drink again. So if smoking made me feel so sick, what made me go back for more? Why did I become a smoker? My short stint as a smoker on campus was an act of rebellion, and had something in common with the stunt pulled off by the so-called Father of Public Relations, Edward Bernays, about whom I knew nothing at the time. Similar to the underlying psychology he used to capture the fallow 50% of the market who by virtue of their gender were not “allowed” or supposed to smoke, namely women, my smoking represented an act of defiance, a middle finger up at ‘authority’, whoever or whatever that was. In my case it was first and foremost my very strict father. It was the police who killed my fellow students on a peaceful protest in Ile-Ife many moons ago. It was the Nigerian patriarchy, and especially the Igbo branch that rendered me unqualified to inherit any part of my father’s estate by virtue of my gender, ugh! I had a lot to prove.
It didn’t last long though, because soon enough I was married and expecting my first child. Happily, I stayed away from cigarettes for several years before returning to that filthy habit under the excuse of needing them to cope with the marital issues I was experiencing. I am one of the lucky ones whose stints never lasted more than a few years, though at my absolute peak, I was smoking a pack a day. I think about it now and am shocked at the amount of time and money consumed on that awful habit. Apparently the average time it takes to smoke a cigarette is 6 minutes. Average, got that? That means it can also take longer sometimes. Therefore at my peak as a cigarette smoker, I was losing at least 2 hours a day to just smoking. And while we are calculating time, let’s not forget how much smoking takes off your lifespan too. It’s old news, but the 1998 book “Dying to Quit” reckons that “the amount of life expectancy lost for each pack of cigarettes smoked is 28 minutes, and the years of life expectancy a typical smoker loses is 25 years.” I cite that old book to demonstrate that we’ve known this stuff an awfully long time.
When I was young you could smoke on flights. I shudder today at the thought of the health and safety issues that presented. Kudos to the Australians for being the first to ban inflight smoking in 1987, a move that ultimately led to today’s widespread ban on smoking in public spaces, inside and out. I remember during my very last stint of cigarette smoking, having to huddle outside in the cold, hurriedly puffing at my expensive little cancer sticks, so as to get back inside soon, where it was warm. I lived in the UK at the time, and I approve of the government making smoking an uncomfortable habit by banning indoor smoking in increasingly more public spaces at the time. I also approve of the heavy taxes placed on tobacco (and alcohol) in that country. The price of a pack of 20 cigarettes has tripled since I finally quit smoking in 2000, to £15.18 today, if you smoke Marlboro. And I had thought cigarettes were already exorbitant at the time, imagine! One of the ways I incentivised myself to stop, was to save £5 a day in a piggy bank, so as to ultimately spend on some nice reward, the money that I would otherwise have literally burned on fags. 2000 was a leap year, and 366 x 5 =1,830. To put that in perspective, a return ticket to the Caribbean cost £350 then.
These days I smoke cigars. They are ultimately less dirty, I have convinced myself. For one, you
don’t inhale cigar smoke. Moreover ,they bring back happy childhood memories of when my
world was intact and father was my hero. He is now with the ancestors, and I don’t anywhere recognise the Nigeria I’d grown up in, so you can imagine the comfort factor. I also enjoy phallic oral fixation (I studied psychology so I am allowed to have me a Freudian Parfait once in a while). Feminists might hate me for this , but for me there is something sexy about burning a fat phallic symbol by sucking fire into it and puffing out the smoke. But maybe that’s just me. And the thought that my cigar is a bunch of the finest tobacco leaves rolled into shape on the thigh of a Cuban woman is ultimately more appealing than the industrialised mass-production of chemically enhanced and shredded tobacco, stuffed into bits of paper with synthetic filters. The expense of a cigar alone is prohibitive to making them a daily or even weekly habit. They are a luxurious guilty pleasure, to be savoured once in a while to mark an occasion, or reward an achievement. There is a ritual to cigar smoking that distinguishes them from their unceremonious peasant cousins, the cigarettes.
That said, I do not wish to be seen to be glorifying smoking of any sort. So let’s move quickly to smoking health facts, including the latest trend, namely Shisha, sometimes aka hookah, and of course the 21st century latest addition to the family, vaping and e-cigarettes.
If a smoking gun is “a piece of incontrovertible incriminating evidence” (according to the Oxford Dictionary), then let’s take a look at the smoking cigarette, shall we?
Now that the West has through prudent legislation, been able to cut that massive portion of their health costs that was caused by cigarette smoking, the afflicted tobacco industry has shifted its gaze to less regulated countries. Today China, India and Brazil are the lead smokers of the world, and even Nigeria has a shiny British American Tobacco facility in Ibadan, as well as an older one in Zaria. These callous capitalists are making gazillions of profits on the future misery of families who will likely lose their breadwinners in time (and others exposed to passive smoke) to all manner of cancers, while having little or no health insurance to cover the hospital costs. BAT is laughing (not coughing) all the way to the bank. Possibly their own bank, since they were bought by Zurich Insurance, who does farming insurance and life insurance among other things, and we all know about the Swiss and their banking, don’t we. Ha! Talk about keeping it in the family! Even the Nigerian government is a member of that family, ICYDK. Under their NTC banner, they merged with BAT 22 years ago. SMH
BAT understand that new technologies and even older ones which have recently become new trends, pose potential threats to their bottom line, and are muscling in on the action. According to China Daily “Electronic smoking devices present new opportunities. London-based British American Tobacco has invested an undisclosed amount in China Materialia, a Shanghai-based venture capital fund which will help the cigarette company develop smoking alternatives that do not burn tobacco.”
There is also the ancient practice of shisha or hookah smoking, which originally dates back to 16th Century India, and which became a prominent part of the Persian and Turkish cultures in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively. Today it has taken over the youth of Nigeria in a way that cigarette smoking never has. Many wrongly believe that it is less deadly than cigarette smoking. According to the British Heart Foundation:
“Like cigarettes, shisha can contain nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide and heavy metals such as arsenic and lead. Many people think that drawing tobacco smoke through water makes shisha less harmful than cigarettes, but that’s not true. In a shisha session (which usually lasts 20-80 minutes), a shisha smoker can inhale the same amount of smoke as a cigarette smoker consuming over 100 cigarettes. Even if you use tobacco-free shisha, the smoke still produces harmful levels of toxins which can be either just as bad for you or even more harmful than smoke from tobacco-based shisha and cigarettes.”
And as for vaping, Johns Hopkins Medicine tells us that not only are e-cigarettes and vaping no less addictive than cigarettes, but the exact chemical composition of what you are inhaling is not as well known as with cigarettes. Vaping is just as bad for your heart and lungs as traditional smoking, and instead as serving as a cessation tool, e-cigarettes which are in greater demand than traditional cigarettes, are causing a whole new generation to get hooked on nicotine.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it…