True grit amid smokers’ clouds

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 20

True grit amid smokers’ clouds

By

Russell Baker

Although pathetically addicted to cigarettes, I once gave them up for five years. It was a question of character. Anybody who couldn’t whip the cigarette habit, I thought, ought to be ashamed of himself; to prove I had true grit, I decided to fight. . It took a year to become a fullyfledged non-smoker, by which I mean somebody who in the space of five minutes can hear that a favourite aunt has died, that he is about to be fired, and that he has to have all his teeth removed, without feeling an urge for a cigarette. After one year of struggle, I reached that stage and lived at it for the next four. Aeroplane engines failed at 5000 metres, blackmailers threatened to destroy me, governments pirated my pitiful savings in lightning raids, yet not once in all those four years of life’s daily catastrophes did I feel the faintest urge for a cigarette. The agony of breaking tobacco addiction is highly overstated. For the first couple of weeks, to be sure, life was almost unendurable, but thereafter the problem was mostly a matter of concentration, for quitting cigarettes is a fulltime job. If you think about not smoking to the exclusion of almost everything else for at least six months, you are almost certain to succeed. Breaking the habit is, obviously, no job for people who have other work to do. The best way to accomplish it is to stop all other activity for six months and do nothing else but quit smoking. In the second six months, if my experience is any guide, you can do a modest amount of your usual

wage-earning labour, attend three or four mild social occasions, and resume a few low-pressure relationships with your family. I am mentioning all this out of pride — not pride in defeating the addiction, but pride in the way I conducted myself afterward. In my four years as a non-smoker, I never once abused an unregenerate smoker for not following my splendid example. Not once did I try to make sofne poor smoky wretch despair by gloating that my purified lungs and detoxified innards would assure me of the opportunity to say, “I told you so,” when he went prematurely to the grave. In saloons and restaurants helpless addicts blew gales of smoke around my head, yet I felt no urge to scowl at them, or make a scene, or complain to the headwaiter or bartender that their stupid selfabuse was dulling my palate or ruining my capacity to distinguish between the fine Pilsener and the coarse, gassy American beer. Nor did I press politicians for apartheid laws to isolate such people from the rest of society. When they came to the house, I provided ashtrays instead of telling them to smoke in the backyard. I didn’t even object when one of my children proposed to marry a pack-a-day smoker. My tolerance in retrospect seems saintlike now that we are in the age of the militant non-smoker, whose aims seems to be to make life more hellish than it already is for the addict. I was not motivated by ambition for sainthood, though. It was a simple case of sympathy for people less fortunate than I. Even by that time, of course,

of ‘New York Times’ through NZPA

almost everybody acknowledged that smoking was'a health evil as well as a social nuisance. Many smokers, I assumed, seriously wished to be free of their curse but couldn’t afford to spend six months to a year undergoing the cure. Abusing these miserable people would have been like taunting paupers for not being rich enough to devote a year to tending to their own bodies. This is basically what today’s militant non-smokers are up to. Of all life’s unfortunates, the smoker is the last whose abuser can enjoy a sense of superiority refined by self-righteousness. It is curious that a society sympathetic to addictions of every other kind can spare none for the tobacco junkie. The cruelty of the medical people is even stranger. Are they are at work on a miracle cure that will help the smoker overcome his habit over a week-end? If so, they are mum about it, but not about much else that concerns smoking. With their incessant statistics, their main goal appears to be to drive the addict into severe depression because he can’t afford the time and money to cure himself. Better they should shut up and do nothing than darken the spirits of the afflicted. I speak with some prejudice here, having rejoined the ranks of the smokers after my five-year experiment. It was a failure of character. One evening, to show how completely I had triumphed over tobacco bondage, I smoked a cigarette to instruct a friend on the ease with which I could now take ’em or leave ’em alone. Such is the evil of pride. Before the night was out, I had

smoked six more. The next day, a whole pack. That was several years ago. I keep meaning to quit again, and certainly will, as soon as I get a year free to do it.

In the meantime I try to stay out of circulation, avoiding public places almost entirely now. I’d hate for the militant non-smokers to get me before cigarettes do.