Smoking — The ‘Cool’ Thing To Do
When this life becomes confusing
There was a time when we lived close to the largest church in Nairobi — Divine Word Parish, aka, DIWOPA.
If you board a 19c public means of transport, and alight at Kanisani, the monumental structure is visible. The stage is named after the church, as Kanisani is Swahili for ‘around the church’ or ‘inside the church’.
There were moments when we lived a few steps from this historical architectural marvel. Most of my weekends would be spent dancing and singing with the Rwandese community that often met behind the Sunday School hall.
And when not inside the church compound, we would monkey-bar from one spoilt vehicle to another as the garage was just outside the face of the church’s entrance. Far left from it was a posho mill and when you move further uphill, there was a small open ground where people would burn their trash.
The best time to do this was around dusk when darkness was settling in. The burning fire would announce to every kid around the block that there was a fire in need of feeding. It was a chance to watch plastics melt, bottles pop, and dry grass rattle.
It was also the moment when we would roll a piece of paper into a makeshift cigarette, tease its butt end on the crackling fire and pretend we were smoking.
It was the cool thing to do.
We’d then go back home and hope our elder siblings would never know. Our naïve minds never considered that the smoke would stain our clothes with an evident smell.
No matter how many times we were told never to play around the fire, the gravity of our friends’ allure to such open fires was irresistible.
So were our improvised cigarettes.
We were caught in the allure.
It seems I’m caught in the allure
— Omen
The (cool) psychological cues
That story speaks of an irresistible attraction that comes with and from one’s peers.
Your parents could censure you from engaging in certain behaviours but it could not match the social proof your peers gave you. The social proof tendency is something I learned from Charlie Munger, in which we’re all pulled to act according to the group we’re affiliated with.
If they smoke the cheap versions we rolled using papers from books, everybody would do it. A cough would not deter anyone from making a second puff. Although I don’t think we puffed anything. We just loved how the butt turned red when we inhaled.
You would get rewarded with acceptance by the rest for engaging rather than rebuking the act.
We would also see some of the famous actors in movies light a cigarette or a cigar. It was the cool thing to do.
It hasn’t changed since I was a small kid. Not that I still make these wannabe cigarettes, but the psychological allure driven by our peers, whether you’re 80 or 8. And those who would later try the actual stuff would have set themselves up for moments of trials.
Cigarettes have nicotine, the addictive substance that takes our brains into overdrive. You get happy and slogged at the same time. You become productive and relaxed. The effects take around 72 hours, on the lower end, to get out of your system. Such an attractive mental state becomes irresistible.
This is the chemical side of it.
This allure is not just the result of the products that make up the stick that embraces and later darkens lips. It is also psychological.
Smoking is a merger-inducer. It induces individuals to meet other smokers. It’s cool to direct your puffed clouds or shape them as you prefer. Even cooler to find those who like doing it without retribution. Thus, the allure becomes difficult to deviate from at a chemical and psychological level.
I’m back to normal in a couple days
But I repeat the same mistakes and so the trouble stays— Omen
What’s happening, however, doesn’t have immediate feedback. By the time you’ve made it a regular practice, coughing is stifled. Coughing was the feedback you would have relied on but the movable levers of social groups and nicotine makes one insensitive to the lever of a coughing and a burning chest.
What’s worse, it sets the path for the development of cancer.
The cancerous and evolutionary angle
It is well known that smoking is the single factor known to cause a myriad of cancers. Lung cancer is just the easiest to remember because it is the immediate associate of the very act of smoking. Smoke goes into the lungs and comes out. Lung cancer should follow suit.
That coughing lever is stifled by another component in cigarettes — tar. Tar covers the cells that would have escalated the mucus plugs and dirt in the airways. It then accumulates. The elastic property of the lungs then reduces.
It also stimulates immune cells to help repair the damage done to the lining. However, since the effects are prolonged, it confuses the immune system. As the lungs try to heal, they become lined with fibre tissue.
The tough fibre outnumbers the elastic ones. They even displace it.
Your lungs then become tough. Tough to expand.
You don’t want lungs that don’t expand.
Since your exposure to small forms of insults is affected by cigarette contents, the blood vessels don’t heal as they normally should. Blood supply to vital organs worsens.
Here’s where I want to stretch a concept — the need to survive.
Organ systems have an inbuilt need to survive.
The origin of the name organism and organ strikes at the heart of the word organization. The heart is organized differently from the brain. The brain is from the intestines. The intestines from the skeletal muscles. The muscles from the bones.
I like to think of these different organs as organisms. They have a physical structure and form that distinguishes one from another. You cannot mistake a pancreas for the liver.
The theory of Organismal Selection states that the easiest way to identify an organism is to subject it to some form of imminent threat. Looking at the effects of smoking at a systemic level, we see the kind of threat it subjects the different organs of the body.
Organisms, according to the same theory, tend to avoid annihilation. As for these organs — which I have to remind you, can be viewed as organisms — they tend to avoid annihilation by resorting to an efficient way of making energy and surviving.
Cancer cells begin to form.
In the human body, there are two ways of making energy. The oxygen-dependent and independent ways. The oxygen-dependent way produces the most energy. Oxygen-deficient ways produce what we feel when we run — lactic acid. It doesn’t yield that much energy.
Cancer cells, however, use this oxygen-deficient way and produce more energy using a unique process known as the Warburg Effect.
This is how these cells retaliate. It’s how they tend to avoid annihilation.
Cancer, according to the theory of Organismal Selection theory, shows how cancers form as a means of survival. Since their organization is different from the organ that birthed them, they are a different type of organism from their mother. The rogue child.
An efficient one.
However, as it grows, it destabilizes the metabolic relationship it has with the surrounding organisms — in this case, organs. The result of instability is collapse.
Not so cool anymore, more, huh?
Now…
What I’m trying to say is…
Smoking might not be cool, but I think the theory of Organismal Selection has a cooler way of looking at the effects of smoking.
I doubt I will be able to change anyone’s perspective about smoking. Many have tried. I don’t even have the budget for it.
What I can add is how the theory I continue to advocate for, Organismal Selection, affects individuals.
It leaves organisms in paranoia.
And when paranoid, an organism will do anything to survive.
The result is not that cool.
But the process — now that’s cool.
