Cigarettes Into Me: A Theoretical Communique from the Invisible Nature of the Subjective Realm

(Notes: Ok, so this was a paper I wrote in the spring of 2008, in the last term of my very long — 5 different schools over the course of 12 years — undergraduate journey. At that point I was, unsurprisingly, kind of an expert at how to go to college. I needed nine more credits to graduate — three classes’ worth — but there were only two classes in the course schedule that looked interesting to me. At the same time, I’d been wanting, for a while, to explore and understand more about why I smoked cigarettes; something I hadn’t done at all, ever, in the first 28 years of my life, and now here I was at 30, a regular cigarette smoker. So I concocted the idea of writing an independent research paper — I called it a “mini-thesis” — and found a professor in the anthropology department who was willing to certify the project, and at the same time who would give me free rein.

It was a fun project, felt like an excellent capstone for my college career; multidisciplinary, long and involved, and bending the university bureaucracy to fit my will, as opposed to vice-versa. It was also me saying sayonara to academia, and the constraints of academic writing. And it was also the longest thing I’d written, up to that point. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 pages, when all was said and done.

I re-read it before posting it here, and it holds up better than I thought it would. Some of its conjectures aren’t as well-supported as you would like them to be; but the ideas are sound, and reasonably well-articulated, and in general I still find myself in agreement with most of its arguments. Most definitely, with its strong effort to de-value ideologies and its assertion of the primacy of subjective modeling. What I notice, mostly, is how I was battling with those words, staking my flags on territorial ground; in other words, the need to assert viewpoints back then, personally, that are now more or less integrated into my personal ecosystem.

At that point in time, I’d been smoking cigarettes for two years. Now I’m 37, so that means we’re at year nine. Which, is a lot more years. Yes, I still smoke. And I notice a greater negative effect, physiologically, than I was incurring back then, which is unsurprising. But it still helps, too, and I understand it much better now, in terms of how it functions for me. Basically, smoking cigarettes helps me manage and control my fountain of natural energy. It inserts punctuation into my life; commas, semi-colons, parenthetical pauses. I had on ongoing problem with time, for many years — continually, perpetually late to things, for example — that I don’t have anymore, and I attribute that, the solution to my time-problem, to cigarette-smoking, more than to anything else. It does all this through a combination of both physiological and behavioral mechanisms, that, y’know, I’m not going to try and explain here. As I said above, sayonara, to academia, and to that kind of explaining/defending.

Do I worry about it? Sure. I think about it a lot, especially lately. No, I can’t smoke forever, and I can feel that the time to quit — and the struggle that will entail — is not far off now. But overall, it’s still a functional part of a life that feels correct; a life that feels full, well-rounded, aimed at — and by and large, achieving — holistic well-being. There are a lot of things that I learned in the process of writing this paper, that it taught me, but that was probably the most important thing. Declaring, for myself, that I was going to hold to certain opinions that I thought were well-founded, even in the face of massive criticism and disapprobation. Sometimes the world thinks it knows what’s best for you; sometimes it does, yes, but other times you just have to tell the world to shut the fuck up.)

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You bring your thumb down quickly, in what becomes over time a learned and automatic motion; igniting the spark and depressing the lever which releases the gas, all at the same time. The gas and the spark meet and fall in love; they become a flame, a small fire, a tiny light in the night you hold in your hand. This is the first beautiful thing you encounter: the movement of flame, the magic of science to have placed it under your control. And then you bring it up, bring it to the cigarette’s tip, a few short inches from your face; head bent against the wind, you see the light reflected in the palm of the hand with which you cradle and protect the flame. Fire and cigarette meet, and you breathe in, breathe deeply: you breathe the fire into the cigarette, and as it begins to burn the cigarette breathes into you; whatever it’s been, alone in a field with its brothers and sisters underneath a North Carolina sky full of stars, the key player in a mission of greed; an object of hope, desire, scorn and rage. Whatever it’s been is now burning up in smoke, all of it, and you breathe that ghost into your body. Breathe in, deep; let it rise, gently as it will, and watch it drift away and dissipate into the air.

And the cigarette burns quietly, held between your fingers; the thin trail of smoke is some kind of simple, unconcerned reminder. You think about your mom, your body, your mind; the cigarette comes back to your lips and you pull, all the way in, deep into your darkness, and then you push it all the way back out. Yes, it’s a meditative moment, that much should be obvious. A communion with your various gods: of life, and yes, of death; that much should be obvious too. It’s not just this and it’s not just that, nothing so reducible and simple. When you take in a cigarette, as it’s dying right before your eyes, you are taking in that cigarette and the whole history of cigarettes: glamour, lung cancer, a verified global currency. Ancient civilizations, modern heresy, a whole culture and society unto and complete within itself. The way you smoke is the way everyone around you smokes, or doesn’t smoke. It’s a religion, and like all religions it has its ups and downs: its perfunctory rituals, its various sects and offshoots, its zealots and its just as zealous opponents. There are horrible actions performed in its name, there is its darkness; and there is also truth, wisdom, beauty and light. It’s not something to be taken up lightly and without care, but yet is something to be lightly done; part of a serious decision, for me, that life is something I want to enjoy.

And in the end that’s all I can speak to; why I smoke cigarettes, what cigarette-smoking is for me. It’s an individual choice and it’s an individual’s experience: the complete nature of what it does and what it’s doing is a secret inside the individual’s body, hidden within the complex of subjectivity that sits at the heart of existence. We can take notes, communicate, compare; we can create models. But a model is its own thing, not the thing of which it is a model; and beyond that, anyhow, if there’s a model that comprises the full range of the lived human subjective experience, then there is also a God in Heaven, and that God keeps the model in a Heavenly Drawer somewhere.

I’m bringing up this notion of subjectivity for two reasons. The first is that when I began smoking cigarettes, almost now two years ago, I had the intuitive sense that it was, and was going to be, a good and valuable experience for me, an experience essentially directed at full and comprehensive well-being. But wherever I presented this notion to my friends and family, to my community, it was by and large met with ridicule and general disbelief. This was notable because my community is generally pretty sensible; interested in being well-informed and in asking questions, a community that prides itself on keeping an open mind. But in the case of cigarettes, the case was closed: judgment had been rendered, and there was no need to give the matter any further consideration. What struck me was that I had apparently crossed some strange and invisible line, beyond which the trust and respect given to me and my opinions had somehow disappeared, beyond which my voice was suddenly no longer worth listening to. I had passed some threshold for the validity of my subjective experience. So when I decided to create and pursue this project, this was one of the things I wanted to explore: what this threshold was, exactly, what it consisted of and where it had come from.

The second reason for presenting and pursuing this notion of subjectivity appeared in the process of working on this project; a recurrent thread that I saw, at first, just out of the corner of my eye, but that I came to see was sitting pretty squarely in the middle of everything. This is, namely and nonetheless, that the opposition between the subjective and the objective is the key struggle of the contemporary age; of our present epochal moment. Is this a bold statement? Perhaps, and perhaps not. I will simply say two things.

The first is that I don’t see this as an argument that I’m presenting; rather that this is an argument that, in the course of my work, presented itself to me. As such, I don’t see this as an argumentative work, but as a work of translation and articulation. The simple truth is that choosing, at the outset, whether your pursuit is of objective or subjective knowledge; the truth is that in making that choice you will have in many ways predetermined the outcome.

The second thing I will say, having said the first, is to admit to what is probably already a perceivable bias: if battle lines were drawn up tomorrow, I would be wholly engaged with defending the authorizing validity of subjective experience. And this paper would be the perfect vehicle; the extent to which I have had to defend my decision to smoke cigarettes is categorically distinct in my life thus far. This paper is the consummation of that work of defense. It has taken me for a ride through history, into the various fiefdoms of the educated world; sociology, anthropology, psychology, and onwards to the outer reaches of neurophysiology and quantum mechanics; the lonely outpost of philosophical memoir. What amazes me is that in the end, I feel as though the work that follows from this point is a long and arduous journey that arrives at simple common sense: the farmer/poet/mystic at the end of the road simply nods his head and says, “Welcome.” At any rate, I leave it here with you; I am going outside to have a smoke.

Part 1: “Genesis: Genus Nicotiana”

“Tobacco is a recreational drug, a mood-altering, addictive substance, a deadly carcinogen, and a sacred, vision-producing force that links the user with the spirit world. It is a metaphor for life and death; it provides a balance between the worlds of humans and spirits; it is a supernatural agent during life-crisis ceremonies; it is the food of the gods.”

— Joseph C. Winter, “Tobacco Use By Native North Americans”

The genus Nicotiana belongs to the Solanaceae family, a family which also includes potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers, petunias, and many other edible, ornamental and medicinal plants. Within the Nicotiana genus there are 95 known species of tobacco. Seven of these are known in wide usage by Native North Americans. Of these seven, two are considered to be domesticated species. Nicotiana rustica grows to approximately 1–1.5 meters high; it has large, fleshy leaves and pale yellow flowers. Nicotiana tabacum grows to about 3 meters high; its leaves are thinner than those of N. rustica but much larger. N. tabacum is the species upon which rests the worldwide commercial tobacco industry.

Tobacco now grows in the wild throughout North America. Both N. rustica and N. tabacum were originally domesticated in South America thousands of years ago, and slowly made their way north with migrating native peoples and through trade. N. rustica first appears in the eastern woodlands of what is now the U.S. around A.D. 160; its introduction into the U.S. Southwest appears to have occurred around A.D. 720. The rest of the world became aware of the existence of tobacco with Columbus’ initial voyage to the Americas in 1492. In 1518, tobacco seeds were carried to Spain. By 1535 tobacco was being raised in the Philippines. In 1558 the first tobacco fields were sown in Portugal, and in 1560 trade had spread to Egypt, China, Japan and Turkey, amongst other countries; by and large it had begun to make its way around the rest of the world. In 1612 the Virginian colony shipped 20,000 pounds of tobacco to England. In 1992, 1.7 billion pounds were produced in the United States alone; ten times that amount was produced in the rest of the world.

In evolutionary terms, having attached itself to the destiny of people, tobacco is a runaway winner. Little by little, it has managed to spread and seed itself around the entire world. Except, that it has not actually seeded itself; it has been purposefully carried by the hands, the packhorses, the trailer trucks and ocean-crossing container ships of humankind. Perhaps no other non-food plant in history has managed to implicate itself so thoroughly into the society, civilization and life of Homo sapiens.

What I want to do in this chapter are two things. First, I want to examine tobacco’s use within its native environment by the people who are also native to that environment, namely the various groups which comprise the peoples who are native to North America. Unsurprisingly, these are also the people whose relationship to and with tobacco is of a depth and complexity which far surpasses the relationship with tobacco of any other peoples, or society of people, throughout the rest of the world.

The second thing I want to do is to offer a brief examination of the passage of tobacco out of its native context, and into its new role as a commercial property under the tenets and values of Western, commercial capitalism; to observe both the change in its signifying functions, as a part of that new world, as well as its effect when it returned, as a commercial property, to the people and contexts from which it originated. This will lead us into the next section, which will investigate tobacco and cigarettes in the modern era; to a certain extent that will be an inspection of the modern era through the lens or, if you will, through the filter of cigarettes.

But we are not quite there yet; in the story I am telling we are still in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Tobacco is spreading across the globe, engaging its own Manifest Destiny; but in the meanwhile, back in its native country, the peoples who have become intimately familiar with tobacco along the course of well over a thousand years are still living their daily lives; and tobacco is playing a very large role, indeed.

In Tobacco Use By Native North Americans, Joseph C. Winter (ed.) and others cite examples of the use of tobacco by 328 different tribal groups throughout the lands of North and Meso America. Tobacco was inextricably intertwined with nearly all aspects of Native American life:

“ . . . no other plant figured so prominently in religious and secular ceremonies, rites of passage, economic and political alliances, or social events and relaxation.” (Adair, 171)

The use of tobacco can be divided into two general categories. First, what we can call ingestion. Tobacco was smoked in a variety of pipes, cigars and cigarettes; it was chewed (often with lime); it was processed to produce resin and concentrates; and it was prepared and drunk as an infusion. The second general category can be called invocation. Tobacco smoke is blown on the body, or into the air; tobacco juice is painted on the body or used in a medicinal poultice; tobacco incense is burned; tobacco offerings are buried, placed in holes or crevices in rocks, or simply cast out onto the ground or water or into the air.

This distinction is instructive; it is indicative of a relationship with the tobacco plant that is complex and highly sophisticated, and importantly, a relationship that is taken seriously. What strikes me is that this approach to tobacco use is essentially universal amongst the many and varied groups that comprise the native peoples of North and Meso America, a vast and hugely varied physical territory. Amongst the Ojibway in northern Canada boys go on vision quests to obtain guardian spirits as a rite of passage; throughout the rest of a man’s life these spirits are summoned with tobacco offerings. The Huron of the Great Lakes region attempt to avoid or cure sickness by trying to satisfy their “soul desire,” often done with large amounts of tobacco. In the eastern U.S., hunters of the Delaware who dreamed of their game-animal during the night would sacrifice a pinch of tobacco in their campfire in the morning. The Kiowa of the southern Great Plains smoked tobacco mixed with the leaves of upland sumac, purifying the body so that peyote could then cure tuberculosis. In the World Renewal ceremony of the Yurok of northern California, priests offer and ingest tobacco as a

“symbol of the yearly transformation and rebirth of the whole of creation . . . tobacco is essential for this ceremony, which sets the world right again, year after year. Without tobacco, the ceremony could not be held, which means that existence would cease.” (Winter, 31)

What I am pointing to here is not just the variety of tobacco use amongst Native American groups, or even the extent to which it is intertwined with the rituals and motions of daily living. There is a vast difference in kind of use, obviously, between that of Native American societies and the society of modern commercial capitalism. But the important difference is not of kind of use, but rather of quality; for Native American peoples tobacco was far more than simply useful, it was sacred. Seen as a gift from the gods, a way of communicating with the gods, and sometimes even as a god itself. The extent to which tobacco is invested with this quality of the sacred ran so deeply in some Native groups that it generated the creation of “tobacco societies,” of which I offer here two examples.

For the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Five Nations) of upstate New York and lower Quebec and Ontario, these medicine societies were the basis of their religious and medical systems. As Joseph Winter describes it:

“The powers of the societies and the justification for their existence lies in the compact or covenant agreed upon between men and god, in which humans promised to offer prayers, tobacco, and songs to the supernatural beings in return for the power to cure.” (Winter, 283)

The Haudenosaunee believed that tobacco grew from the grave of the Earth Mother, along with corn, beans, and squash, after she died in giving birth to the twins Good-Minded and Evil-Minded. The tobacco

“grew from her head, so that it soothes the mind and sobers thought.” (Winter, 283)

Before being forced into reservation land by the military forces of westward colonial expansion, the Crow of the northern Great Plains were nomads and buffalo hunters; their only cultivated crops were their two varieties of tobacco. The tobacco societies of the Crow formed around this pattern of cultivation; the lives of the society’s members are devoted to caring for and growing tobacco. The two tobaccos that they raise are two variants of Nicotiana quadrivalvis; the variants are var. quadrivalvis and var. multivalvis. The latter of these two, N. multivalvis, is considered so sacred that the Crow do not actually even smoke it. It is only danced with in tobacco society ceremonies, and planted and raised in a seasonal cycle. Tobacco follows only the sun in the order of importance of supernatural beings; the tobacco plant is identified with the stars. Winter gives a version of this Crow story:

“First Creator (Transformer) walks about the newly-made earth with his companions until he notices a man who “is one of the stars above. He is down here now and standing on the ground. Come on, let us look at him.” When they approach him, he turns into Tobacco, the first growing plant. Transformer decrees that the Crow must plant it and dance with it, so that it will be their ‘means of living’.” (Winter, 288)

These accounts are, to say the least, remarkable. Remarkable in and of themselves, considering alone the quality of reverence given to this single plant. But we are seeing these accounts from within our modern context, and as such they are not simply remarkable, they are extraordinary. Because this is not just any single plant, this is tobacco; and in our modern context tobacco, more often than not, is simply evil, the Devil incarnate: symbol of greed, addiction, illness, and death. The arc is extraordinary, the travel from one pole to the other. There is probably no other substance which so quickly and consistently earns contempt and utter condemnation from the modern medical community; tobacco is anathema, bad through and through; unredeemable. And yet, to turn around and listen to the voice of another, different medical community is to hear an entirely different story altogether.

“First and foremost among the herbs and drugs used by shamans, medicine men and other healers is tobacco. Almost every native group in North America — with the exception of the far northern subarctic tribes, who do not find tobacco growing wild within their native region — uses or used tobacco as a tool to divine and treat illness.” (Winter, 266)

Whither this vast and extraordinarily oppositional gulf in perception of this single thing? Is one side simply right and the other is simply wrong? Obviously, no; subjectivity is heavily in play here; context is king. So the question then becomes what are those contextual differences; what is it that has changed? The modern medical establishment speaks first: it declares that information gained through advances in technology and the techniques of modern medical research has taught us that tobacco is bad. I am willing to dismiss this account, out of hand, for two reasons. One, despite its claims to the contrary, subjectivity plays a large role in determining the “facts” produced by the modern medical establishment, as we shall see in the following chapter. Two, and more importantly, I am wholly unwilling to dismiss the thousand or more years of experiential knowledge employed in the Native American community, especially when simple observation points to a wide number of substantial contextual differences surrounding tobacco and its use.

The modern medical establishment makes no bones about acknowledging the other risk factors which lead to serious health problems; chief among these are nutrition and exercise, or lack thereof. These were non-issues for native communities. They were hunters, gatherers and farmers; they had no commercially processed food to eat, no cars, office desk-chairs and couches in front of televisions in which to be sedentary during all their waking hours. They were active and in motion, and the food they ate was the fruit of the earth directly off the vine; the bodies into which they inhaled tobacco smoke were very different from the average American body into which tobacco smoke is inhaled today. And this tobacco, as well, was very much not the same either; often found in the wild, quite often an altogether different species, and always unequivocally free of modern industrial chemicals: neither pesticides nor the chemical additives which are laced into the typical modern cigarette during its manufacture.

But beyond all this, what catches my attention the most is something I have already mentioned, and it is this quality of the sacred. The important thing to see here is not that native peoples revered tobacco, but what that reverence points to; which is, namely, that they took it seriously; that they recognized it as a very powerful thing, to be related to with respect and care. It is this aspect that is distinctly absent from the modern tobacco conversation; the pro-smoking contingent wants to talk about civil rights, and the anti-smoking contingent seems to simply want to wipe tobacco off the face of the earth; it is, far more often than not, not a very thoughtful or productive conversation.

Before moving on and into that conversation, I want to touch briefly on one last point. In a paper titled “Health Effects of Tobacco Use by Native Americans,” Jonathan Samet examines the available data concerning the rate of incidence, among the Native American population, for the various illnesses and diseases considered to be linked to smoking. Incidences of these diseases are lower, across the board, in native populations when compared to the general population. The risk of cancer, specifically, is substantially lower. A survey from 1926 which gathered information from approximately 100,000 Native American deaths found only 276 cancer deaths, and not one death from lung cancer. Samet goes on to say that lung cancer

“remains relatively uncommon among Native Americans in the U.S. . . . although lung cancer mortality rates are now rising in Native Americans in some states.” (Samet, 336)

For speculation as to the possible source of such a rise, within a modernity in which the cultural context in which Native peoples once smoked tobacco has largely been destroyed, I defer to Joseph Winter’s account in “From Earth Mother to Snake Woman,” of a Navajo man named “LN”. Tobacco in varying amounts is used in all of the Navajo ceremonials, called chantways. One summer afternoon in 1994, LN took Joseph Winter to see a previously cultivated, now basically wild, patch of mountain tobacco.

“They were very rare in this region, he said, and he was afraid that if given the chance, some people would take them, for the plants were Holy People themselves — they were diyin, which are smoked only during ceremonials such as the Blessingway, when the smoke goes back to the spirits and the spirits give their blessings. He believed the reason people died from cancer and other diseases due to tobacco was that they smoked it for purposes other than those intended by the supernatural beings. Sickness and death resulted from using this powerful and sacred plant for everyday, recreational smoking. “ (Winter, 272)

And so, now we turn to the modern context, the “everyday, recreational smoking” of modern life and living; where tobacco is an evil, deadly abomination. But, even its harshest critics will admit, if pressed, that no, one cigarette won’t hurt you; nor will 5, 10, 20, or probably even a hundred. But you should never smoke that one, because it will change you, it will change your brain, you will become a subject to its dominion. It isn’t the cigarette that will kill you, they’ll say; it’s the fact that it’s addictive. Hmm. Well. And just what does that mean? Well, let’s wade into the morass now, and see what we can discover.

Part 2: “Language, Ideology and Addiction”

“Addiction, derived from the Latin root addicere, meaning to adore or to surrender oneself to a master . . .”

— William L. White, “The Lessons of Language: Historical Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Addiction”

The basic attack on cigarettes and tobacco (and I use the word “attack” very consciously here; a war is being waged) consists of two elements:

They are a major source of physical illness and disease.
They are addictive.
It is the second element that has drawn my attention, for a variety of reasons, and it is this second element that will be the focus of this chapter. But first, I want to spend some time with the claims expounded by the medical establishment regarding the negative effects of smoking on health; to look more closely at what they are saying, and how they are saying it; to look at the roles played by subjectivity and language in producing this specific discourse.

This is a difficult subject to tackle. Expressing even a modicum of doubt regarding these well-known “facts”, I have found, is generally rewarded with incredulity and indignation. The avalanche of newspaper headlines trumpeting the latest “studies” by scientific “experts” has buried nearly any and all opportunities for debate, has closed the field, by and large, to further questions. This closure of discussion is notable on two fronts. First, it takes the discourse out of science and into ideology; the heart of scientific discourse is theoretical, is to propose models which remain open to revision, to new lines of inquiry. Which, leads to my second point; namely, that examining the fine print reveals some interesting and, somehow, generally unnoticed details.

In March 1998, the World Health Organization (WHO) submitted a press release headlined: “Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You.” This headline, regarding the supposed dangers of secondhand smoke, was picked up and reprinted by major media outlets in the U.S. and around the world. The WHO’s full study was published in the U.S. in October of 1998 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, when it received a second round of widespread media attention. Secondhand smoke causes lung cancer, right? Case closed. Let’s look at what the study actually said. WHO researchers reported:

“…an estimated 16% increased risk of lung cancer among nonsmoking spouses of smokers. For workplace exposure the estimated increase in risk was 17%. Due to sample size, neither increased risk was statistically significant.” (Levy, 153)

Oh. Well. That sounds kind of funny; what exactly does that mean? Well, let’s look at the guidelines of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), whose journal published the WHO study.

“Relative risks of less than 2 (that is, a 100% increase) are considered small . . . Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident.” (Levy, 153)

In other words, the WHO study found relative risks of 1.16 and 1.17 in its two study categories; well, well below the risk factor of 2 that the NCI’s own published guidelines deem necessary for determining a real factor of risk. How is it, then, that a study which finds that “neither increased risk was statistically significant,” comes to bear a headline that reads: “Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You?” Who does “them” refer to, exactly; the scientists who described their own findings as insignificant?

This is not the only example I came across of manipulated data and problematically disseminated information, nor is it the most egregious example, either. But it’s the only one I want to cite, for two reasons. The first is that I don’t want to engage with an argument about whether or not smoking cigarettes can have negative consequences on physical health; this is a position I have no problem acknowledging whatsoever. No one who has ever been around a life-long smoker needs scientific expertise to tell them about the dangers of cigarettes; those dangers are unignorably real, and they are serious. But for some reason there is this need to hyperbolize, to exaggerate and obfuscate; to shoe-horn data into a priori hypotheses, whether the data actually support those hypotheses or not. It’s a disappointing betrayal of the public’s trust; you can tell me it’s for my own good, but in the first place that smacks of an authoritarianism that this particular republic is supposed to be free of, and in the second place I’m going to be inclined towards skepticism regarding any pronouncements you make in the future; the story of the boy who cried wolf has continued to cycle down through the ages for a reason. The real danger of which you are trying to warn people will be ignored, and the entire community suffers as a result.

But, actually, this is not the real source of the attack on cigarettes, anyhow. The real motivations for the anti-smoking movement do not actually arise out of genuine concern for the public health. In 1993 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its own report regarding secondhand smoke, calling it a “dangerous carcinogen that kills three thousand Americans yearly.” (Levy, 153) Five years later, after a lengthy review of the EPA’s findings, federal judge William L. Osteen came to the following conclusions.

“In conducting the Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) Risk Assessment, EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; did not disseminate significant epidemiological information; deviated from its Risk Assessment Guidelines; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. Both the record and EPA’s explanation make it clear that using standard methodology, EPA could not produce statistically significant results.” (Levy, 154)

This was EPA administrator Carol Browner’s reaction: “It’s so widely accepted that secondhand smoke causes very real problems for kids and adults. Protecting people from the hazards of secondhand smoke should be a national imperative.” (Levy, 154) What Browner does here is to reveal her ideological bias; a willful ignorance of the research’s actual findings in favor of a preconception.

Look at that headline again: “Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You.” This headline is bizarrely out of control; it carries none of the calm rationality with which science is supposed to dispense of itself. The first part of the headline is, simply, wrong. It could read something like: “Passive Smoking May Be Attributable To An Increased Risk For Lung Cancer.” But it doesn’t; it makes an unequivocal causal statement, a direct and secure link between cause and effect which is completely unsupported by the data it purports to represent. This is like saying, “Driving A Car Will Lead To Serious Injury From Accidents.” No one would ever consider believing that. Yes, everyone knows that driving can lead to serious injury and death; everyone who drives a car has passed by the twisted metal and broken glass at an intersection or on the freeway, everyone who drives knows they are engaging with a certain amount of serious risk. But to say that driving a car causes death would be scoffed at. So why is the same proposition in regard to cigarettes; and in this case we’re talking about secondhand smoke, remember, not even actually smoking; why is this proposition, given in regard to smoking, swallowed whole and without a second glance?

In Cigarettes: The Battle Over Smoking, sociologists Ronald J. Troyer and Gerald E. Markle examine the back-and-forth fluctuations in the American public’s attitude towards cigarettes over the last century. “Cigarette-smoking — the outrage of the 1890’s, the symbol of sophistication of the 1950’s, and debatedly, the scourge of the 1970’s — has a long and checkered history.” (Troyer, 3) Their intent is to use cigarette-smoking as a locus to ask these questions: “How does ‘knowledge’ come to be accepted as ‘true’? Why is the same knowledge claim accepted in one era but not in another? How does that knowledge get translated into public policy?” (Troyer, xii) Amongst their observations is a change in the nature of the anti-smoking movement that began to occur in the 1970’s.

“Furthermore, the official actions taken in the mid- and late 1970s are actions against individuals, whereas previous actions were against the product. It becomes the person, not the product, that is relegated to the rear of the public conveyance and told that he or she is committing ‘slow-motion suicide’ (former HEW secretary J.A. Califano).” (Troyer, 61)

Let’s look at that headline one more time. “Passive Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You.” This is the truly interesting element here, the strange, admonitory finger wagging in your face; who are the mysterious referents of this pronoun, this insidious “Them,” and why do we need to be warned of their devious intentions? Again, remember, this is in regards to secondhand smoke; so what this is, is a warning to all the non-smokers out there. It says: “That smoker next to you is a death-merchant, and he’s out to deceive you.”

This is not about the dangers of smoking, this is about the danger of smokers; this is not about cigarettes, this is about the people who smoke them. Secondhand smoke provides a good reason to call the smoker a deviant, to put him/her as far from public view as possible. But it’s not because of smoking; if it were, Carol Browner wouldn’t need to disregard her own agency’s actual findings. This is about what smoking represents. I mean, why would anyone ever smoke, right? An avalanche of data shows that it’s just pure poison, right? So why would anyone, anywhere, ever do it? The only answer is that they must not be able to stop, that they can’t control themselves, subject to something beyond the powers of their own will; namely, they must be addicted. Secondhand smoke doesn’t cause lung cancer; smoking cigarettes doesn’t cause lung cancer either. Continuing to smoke cigarettes well past the point at which your own body, with numerous and clear signals, tells you that it’s time to stop, is what causes lung cancer. Contemporary conventional, and often “scientific,” wisdom says that, again, these people can’t stop because they have an addiction; and no group symbolizes addiction, and modern America’s battle and obsession with addiction, more perfectly than cigarette smokers.

To say that smokers are addicted is true, and yet not true, depending on the smoker; they have an addiction because they believe in the addiction model. And it is a model, a theory; a theoretical answer to a set of questions. It is also just a shift in language; an old, old battle expressed in a modern idiom. The addiction model is powerful, seductive and complex; it is also frequently incoherent in application and rife with inconsistencies. It’s time now to turn to this model; what it is, where it comes from, and the role and function it serves in contemporary society.

Addiction has become a vast complex of meaning in our modern urbanized world. As the idea of addiction, and the language around it, has grown and become more sophisticated, it has spread throughout the culture, spawning new “addictions” in its wake. If you have a compulsion that’s difficult to control, don’t worry; addiction will soon be available somewhere near you, and it will relieve the guilty burden of responsibility from your shoulders. And now you will also be able to control, paradoxically, this genetic destiny, this faulty biological wiring; all you need to do is purchase these books, undergo the treatment programs provided by these professionals, and ingest these pharmaceutical drugs. Addiction, in other words, is very much in tune with modern America.

The word “addiction” first began to appear in the American language and conversation in the latter stages of the 19th century, coincidental with the industrialization and urbanization of society; and, more importantly, the advent of the slow but sure displacement of religion, by science, as the dominant American ideological paradigm. What we used to call the temptations of the devil and his demons, we now call addiction; original sin has been displaced by inherent genetic disposition. And we are no longer absolved of those sins, we are healed of our illnesses. Different words, same song; a song of advocacy and argument for an establishment’s belief system. The winning strategy employed by the scientific establishment has been in language: to “prove” and “discover” things, “facts,” to advance itself beneath this mantle of remove, of objectivity. But in truth, there is a lot more going on.

“Language helps create professions . . . the medicalization of addiction was about certifying treatment professionals as much as it was about anything else. (White, 51)

Psychology, biology, sociology; there are any number of disciplines that offer theories of addiction and extend offers of professional, expert, expensive help.

“Nuances of ideological argument mask the fact that the outcome of this debate determines the future of industries, communities, and individual careers.” (White, 55)

The young science of psychology, looking for a cultural toe-hold in the early twentieth century, was perhaps the first to really propel addiction into the rational conversation; describing it as

“representative of underlying pathology” in 1920 (Tracy, 8), and going on to create

“arguments based on models of psychotherapy, citing individual powerlessness over various drives.” (Stearns, 5).

In 1958 the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association joined in, issuing a joint report arguing for the treatment of addiction as a medical problem rather than a criminal one. And the last half of the twentieth century was dominated by the genetic revolution: it wasn’t me, Ma, my genes made me do it.

At this point, I want to step back and say a few things about what I’ve said so far. I am not saying that addiction was simply created as a source of revenue; I am not implying the existence of a shadowy “addiction cabal” somewhere, pulling on various strings. Nor am I denying the existence of “drives”, of “compulsions”, of “demons.” I am talking about the power of language as a shaping force. What I am trying to do is dismantle this notion of objective reality, to reveal the subjective forces and powers that underlie much of what society presumes to know, that build its “facts” and knowledge.

“Several medical historians have already noted that the concept of addiction originated because of cultural necessity, not scientific discovery.” (Stearns, 294)

And herein lies the key, in “cultural necessity”; once again, it’s context, in a rapidly changing world no longer presided over by an omnipotent and divine authority.

“In many cases, addiction also shows a need to soften an inability to live up to modern standards, with a designation as illness — beyond the individual’s control.” (Stearns, 291)

Addiction is a model. It is a model which assumes a division between mind and body; a reality in which the mind and the conscious will are powerless in the face of biological imperatives. A reality in which we do what we do because we are genetically programmed to do it from the get-go. But addiction is interesting, it waffles; it has one foot in the land of biological determinism, but it also clearly has one foot somewhere else. Because choice is also a fundamental thread of addiction theology; the idea that with work, effort, treatment, the force of biological imperatives can be overridden by consciousness, by willful action. The strange contradiction of the addiction model: people want a way out, want to be absolved of personal responsibility; but, at the same time, want to pursue treatment that will enable them to regain control. They want to release the burden, and pick it back up at the same time.

Addiction is an interesting place to visit, but in the end I choose not to live there, and that is the instructive point, that it is a choice: a model may be efficacious when applied within one individual’s subjective reality, and may just as well not be so within another’s. To begin with I would speculate, again, that belief in the addiction model is what generates an individual’s real addiction, a strange feedback loop of which I have no desire, or need, to be a part. But beyond that, and more importantly, addiction falls far short of successfully modeling the behavior under discussion here; namely, cigarette smoking.

Again, as with that on the risk factors for negative health effects, the literature regarding the addictive quality of cigarettes and nicotine is strewn with inconsistencies and weird science. I found at least one instance of two separate groups reviewing the same data set and yet producing opposing theories, based on the ranking of importance attributed to various corollary factors. The most coherent conclusion I found accords with my own experience, as well as what amounts, to me, to simple common sense:

“Jarvik concluded that nicotine may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for smoking behavior to occur and that more research is clearly needed to settle the issue of whether nicotine functions as the primary reinforcer or as a ‘re-enforcing co-factor.’” (Pomerleau, 53)

My own experience? I know that my physiology has changed, has shifted to accept the inhalation of tobacco smoke. It was a slow and easy-to-follow process that took place over almost a year, between the time I smoked my first cigarette and bought my first pack. I feel an urge sometimes to smoke, a little reminder, and I’m willing to attribute that to a chemical within tobacco that’s been isolated and studied as to particular effect.

Common sense? Science has isolated over 500 different chemical compounds in tobacco smoke, an astounding number and variety. To attribute causal effect to one, and only one, out of those 500 different chemicals, strikes me as a pretty illogical (and unscientific) proposition. Beyond that, I don’t want nicotine; I want to smoke. I want to pull the cigarette from its package and smell the tobacco; I want to pull the smoke into my body and watch it drift and dissipate before me in the air. To attempt to attribute smoking behavior to a single biochemical variable is reductive science at its tunnel-visioned, ideological extreme; assuming that smoking behavior can be understood and explained by feeding caged monkeys tobacco smoke through a plastic tube, as one study I came across attempted to do. A monkey is not a person. A monkey has no contact whatsoever with the vast array of supremely complicated behavioral maneuvers which comprise the modern life of human society; a society now far, far removed from its natural origins, and a society that is changing presently at a rate that is perhaps more rapid than any other in the whole course of civilized history. If addiction takes this at all into account, it is simply to throw up its hands and say, I give up. Read the etymology in this chapter’s epigraph: I give in, I surrender.

Addiction has a tenacious grip on the mainstream of thought; but, this being a free and diverse society, other people have seen the same contradictions and faults within addiction that I have seen, and they have proposed other models, models that seek to account for and integrate into themselves the sophisticated complex of the modern lived experience. I will introduce here one of those models, because it is the one that most closely corresponds with my own experience, and that is the work of the final chapter, which will directly follow: an attempt to model and explain my subjective experience with cigarettes.

The model referred to above is known as the “functional model”; part of its efficacy, for me, is that it was evolved specifically to account for smoking. In other words, the addiction model is an extant model which has been applied to the question of smoking, whereas the functional model began with the question of smoking and attempted to evolve a model which accounted for this single and very specific behavior. I offer a brief summary in the author’s own words, as I find it to be lucid and essentially self-explanatory.

“The functional approach regards smoking as a person’s use of nicotine to control their psychological state. The model is purposive; it views smoking as a strategy for maintaining everyday needs. The reasons for smoking pre-date its initiation, and smoking is maintained because it satisfies those needs, which are due to both exogenous and endogenous causes, situational as well as constitutional. Consequently, smokers smoke for different reasons. Smoking is a multi-dimensional behavior, which must be conceptualized by a multi-factorial model to explain all the reasons for smoking. Thus, smoking is a purposeful activity for smokers, it provides them with a resource for managing their lives.” (Warburton, 43)

If this paper were being offered simply as a defense of cigarette smoking I could probably stop here; but it isn’t. The functional model accurately describes a portion of my experience with cigarettes, as I’m sure it does for many others who smoke. However, as a tool for encompassing the range of the smoking experience, it falls well short. To begin with, it again reduces smoking to the intake of nicotine, reduces a highly complex behavioral and physiological event to the action of a single chemical element, a proposition I’ve already dismissed as illogical and broadly unscientific. But the functional model is also fundamentally flawed unless the generation of fatal illnesses within one’s own body is somehow viewed as a “need” that smoking cigarettes serves; which, is certainly not a position that I take. In other words, the functional model fails to take into account that for many smokers, smoking is clearly no longer functional; that it can in fact become dysfunctional, a behavior in which the costs have long overtaken the benefits. Again, advertising itself as one size fits all, the addiction model too is a failure; some smokers don’t quit, but more do, and it has no manner of accounting for this.

So, I’m done with these models. I’m emptying my pockets and leaving these worldly goods behind. This paper is, in many ways, an argument against objectively-focused models and generalized attempts to explain. Or, rather, against the ideological value which those models assume; which, I want to again point out, is antithetical to the core value of scientific inquiry. The beauty of true science is that it remains open, that its theories are theoretical, and thus open to revision at any time, to the receipt of any and all new information; true science, indeed, is open to the possibility of discovering the existence of God; it is open to anything, and always searching for more. To again refer to Murray E. Jarvik, M.D. whose study regarding nicotine I quoted the results of above: “A great deal is known about the harmful biological consequences of smoking, but very little about the beneficial effects. It is evident that some component or components in tobacco and tobacco smoke must be reinforcing.” (Jarvik, 18) So it is in this spirit of scientific inquiry that I offer my own account; an investigation into a body of information and experience that is available to no one else. In fact, it is true that when I began smoking, I told my friends and family that it was an experiment; well, it’s time to present my results.

Part 3: “Into the Subjective Breach”

“Multiple mechanisms are at play at both behavioral and physiological levels of analysis. This all leads to the animal maintaining bodily viability. There is no one path to survival, because the world is complex and changing.” (emphasis mine)

— Jay Schulkin, Rethinking Homeostasis

My advocacy for the authorizing validity of subjective experience arises, originally, from rational analysis. In the first place, the objective models are just full of too many holes and unexplained gaps. Some people smoke for a long time and get lung cancer, some don’t; some people are able to quit smoking without problems, some have great difficulty. Beyond this, though, and more importantly, subjective experience is just simply much more well-informed; the information gleaned from the subjective experience of phenomena is categorically removed from what can be known in observing that phenomena from the outside. I can try and tell you what a mango tastes like, and your mind can construct an abstracted, conceptual notion; but you aren’t going to know what it tastes like until you put it into your mouth and experience the sudden flood of olfactory, taste, and tactile information.

As I said, the original appeal, then, of the subjective model lay in its accord, for me, with common sense. But in my reading and research for this project, I found myself to be actually in step with two powerful and unexpected allies: on my left, new work being done in the frontiers of neurophysiology; and, keeping time on my right, the basic principles which comprise the theory and practice of quantum mechanics. I uncovered these two advocates for subjective authority in a book called The Mind and The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, by Jeffrey Schwartz, M. D., a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. Much of the book discusses the synchronicity that Schwartz discovers between his work and that of Henry Stapp, a quantum physicist at U.C -Berkeley; Schwartz and Stapp develop a working relationship, in fact, co-authoring a few papers. Their bond arises from the fact that each of them, in their respective fields, have been uncovering the role that subjectivity plays in shaping physical reality. Schwartz is very intentional in expressing that his work is consciously rebellious; that he is arguing a role for the conscious will against the tide of biological determinism that exists as the status quo in the scientific establishment. And, he finds very strong support within the work of Stapp and the laws of quantum mechanics.

What quantum mechanics does is somewhat bizarre; I can’t claim to fully comprehend how it works, but its equations do two things. First, they replicate the results of classical, deterministic Newtonian physics; in other words, quantum mechanics is perfectly capable of doing all the work of the model which preceded it. But after doing this, quantum equations go a categorical step further, turning the concept of an exterior, measurable, objective physical reality upside down and inside out. Quantum mechanics deals with the most fundamental elements of the material world perceived thus far, and its propositions are remarkable.

“Physical laws as embodied in the equations of quantum physics, then, ceased describing the physical world itself. They described, instead, our knowledge of that world . . . drew the experiences of human observers into the basic theory of the physical world — and, even more, made them the basic realities . . . with this shift, Heisenberg said, the ‘concept of objective reality has thus evaporated.’” (Schwartz, 274)

If all this is true (and the work of quantum mechanics says that it is), then why is there still a science attempting to describe an objective reality that has been shown to not actually exist? Schwartz’s explanation is that what this does, essentially, is subvert scientific ideology’s power; that it causes the scientific establishment’s base of authority to evaporate along with the objective reality it has been purporting to describe. And, as such, the powers-that-be in the scientific establishment willfully ignore Schwartz and Stapp and much of their work; would just like it to go away. Indeed, what the world of objective determinism has done is to attempt, at times, to simply re-draw the borders of what constitutes science. At one point Schwartz is discussing his work with patients suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD); how he has been introducing the practice of Buddhist mindfulness into his work with them in order to draw on the “mental force” that, he is discovering, can be generated by actions of conscious will. The response of his conversational partner, a former president of the Society for Neuroscience? “Well, then, you are not a scientist.” (Schwartz, 31)

Just the opposite is true, of course. Schwartz’s science is real science, bears the quality of openness that is true science’s great gift, backed by measurable and reproducible results. His pioneering work demonstrated a causal efficacy between acts of conscious will and the efforts of patients afflicted with OCD to overcome their compulsions, and beyond. His work earns the description of revolutionary: using brain-imaging technology, what Schwartz managed to prove was that, through the process of this 4-step, mindfulness-centered therapy that he developed with a group of patients; that what these patients actually managed to do was to change the chemistry and structure of their brains. In the age of biological and genetic determinism, this is remarkable.

But it’s also not, because this is also the age of quantum physics. As described in one version by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, quantum theory tells us that

“The world is built not out of bits of matter but out of bits of knowledge — subjective, conscious knowings.” (Schwartz, 31)

Examine this for a moment. This is not, actually, so revolutionary. To a large extent, it is again just science re-establishing, within the scientific idiom, what common sense already apprehends. Consider the quotation by Jarvik at the end of the last chapter. What that really points to is that much of the public perception regarding cigarettes as unhealthy arises from studies that set out to prove that cigarettes were unhealthy. In other words, in a world in which studies set out to examine the benefits of cigarettes, this is what would be talked about and known, is what would come to comprise “reality”. A little more than a hundred years ago, a vast and thriving society regarded cigarettes as a valuable healing tool, as strong medicine. Recall Troyer and Markle’s observation of the shift in public attitudes towards smoking, how it arises, in part, due to the subjectively-inflected dissemination of information; Carol Browner’s immovable ideology. So what quantum theory does, really, is less for “reality” than for science; it opens a door for the scientific establishment out of the pitfalls and limitations of theories based on an objective, concrete reality; a doorway into acknowledging the credibility of the subjective experience. And I can sympathize; can see science peering fearfully into this doorway, into the unbounded and very different world onto which it opens.

It is a very different world, and from the context of a world with an objectively describable physical reality, it is also a frightening one. Why? Because it requires faith; faith, and trust. Faith and trust in the individual’s capacity to be aware of his own existence; to know the tenets of his own existence and to make, within it, the correct corresponding choices. Faith and trust, for example, in the individual’s ability to choose to stop smoking cigarettes when the costs have begun to outweigh the benefits, as well as to know when that shift in balance has occurred. Objective determinism’s response to that proposition is to say: but look, see the individual doesn’t do that. And my response is to say: that is because he lives in reality as you have described it to him, a reality in which he is subject to objectively determinable forces beyond his control. My response is forthwith: to offer my own, subjective model for cigarette-smoking, for why I smoke cigarettes, to offer it up for scrutiny. I have made my advance arguments as to its validity; let us now turn to the model itself.

I did not begin this paper with this model in mind. It came to me in the course of my reading and research, beginning with a book called Rethinking Homeostasis by Jay Schulkin. The way the model works is to regard the physiological reality of a broken heart. When it first appeared to me it came as a surprise; this is why I smoke cigarettes? But it didn’t take much thought to see that it made sense. The broken heart I am speaking of, namely mine, and the relationship that broke it, have been the dominant effector in my life for the last seven years, since the relationship’s inception; it has been a deciding factor, if not simply the deciding factor, in every major decision in my life since then; and, the further reading I did just served to reinforce the model’s sensibility and efficacy. Let’s begin where the model first suggested itself to me, with Rethinking Homeostasis.

Homeostasis is a concept that originates in the biological sciences. It describes a centerpoint, an equilibrium, for the body’s various physiological systems, as well as the regulatory mechanisms through which the body regains and maintains physiologic balance, or homeostasis. Homeostatic mechanisms can be both physiological and behavioral; a simple example is body temperature. When the body is too hot, perspiration is the physiological response of homeostasis, a way of cooling the body and lowering its temperature. When a person feels cold, they will put on a jacket or sweater, or go indoors; this is a homeostatically-driven behavioral response.

In the typical course of life, homeostatic mechanisms are able to compensate for the various changes in circumstances which the course of ordinary, everyday life encounters. However, certain occurrences extend the homeostatic system beyond its functioning ability.

“When faced with unusually heavy demands, however, ordinary homeostasis is not enough, because the “homeostat” has been raised to a level beyond it’s capacity.” (Schulkin, 6)

To account for this, the author has evolved a concept he terms “allostasis.” Allostasis is the set of mechanisms through which the body responds to atypical, unexpected events and circumstances:

“At the heart of the concept is the depiction of change in order to maintain (or achieve) a state appropriate to the circumstances.” (Schulkin, 17)

In other words, it shifts the centerpoint. Specifically, it accounts for the role of the central nervous system in homeostasis; how it influences and can override the body’s other systems for regulating physiology. However, the body cannot maintain an allostatic state indefinitely. The

“re-setting of homeostatic systems is essential for long-term survival.” (Schulkin, 8).

The persistence of an allostatic state leads to “allostatic overload,” of which the author lists three types, the first of these being as follows:

“Overstimulation by frequent stress, resulting in excessive stress hormone exposure . . .” (Schulkin, 22).

The dangers of allostatic overload are real.

“Susceptibility to disease is a feature of allostatic overload . . . If these conditions persist over a long period of time (e.g. chronic stress) decay of bodily organs emerges.” (Schulkin, 25)

Finally, the author refers to the work of another researcher in the field:

“He speculated that chronic psychologic worry might be important for the etiology of physiological pathology.” (Schulkin, 6)

In other words, psychical events in the mind produce physical effects within the body.

This resonates with my own subjective experience. My relationship did not simply run its course, or dwindle away; it broke apart in a violent and somewhat cataclysmic fashion. And afterwards, I was certainly no longer in any way, shape or form who I had been beforehand; but beyond this, I also now felt wrong; there is no other or better way to put it: I felt a wrongness inside. The book A General Theory of Love describes the physiological correlatives of the emotional events that were occurring in my life, categorizing them as elements of the “protest phase” and the “despair phase”; these terms are not inaccurate descriptors of states that I found myself in, in a manner that was repeated over and over again and was well beyond my ability to control. The protest phase is marked by increases in heart rate and body temperature, as well as in the levels of catecholamines and cortisol in the body.

“Catecholamines elevate alertness and activity. Cortisol is the body’s major stress hormone, and its sharp elevation in separated mammals tells us that relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain.” (Lewis, 77)

The despair phase is in many ways a wild swing in the opposite direction. Heart rate not only lowers, but even becomes erratic. Patterns of sleep and circadian rhythms are disrupted.

“Even immune regulation undergoes major alterations; the physiologic signature of the despair phase is that of widespread disruption of bodily rhythms…prolonged separation affects more than feelings. A number of somatic parameters go haywire in despair. Because separation deranges the body, losing relationships can cause physical illness.” (Lewis, 79)

This is, again, a pretty accurate rendering of the experience I was going through, of how it felt, of what I felt occurring inside my body. But the instructive accuracy comes from the specific terms used: “haywire,” “deranged.” The point to register is that these were not isolated events occurring in me, they were me; this was my state of being. Which was painful, chaotic and confusing, yes; but more than this, what it did was make it very difficult to locate any ground of being; to find solid forms I could identify and return to, platforms of identity from which I could begin to rebuild. And then, at some point in the midst of that experience, I found cigarettes, a behavior and substance I had never even given a second thought to before; if I ever had, that second thought had probably been that they were addictive and bad for you, and then they were forgotten again.

In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge discusses the reality of neuroplasticity, of the way the brain’s structure and function changes throughout the course of life. Categorically distinct events of

“massive neuronal reorganization occur at two life stages: when we begin parenting, and when we fall in love.” (Doidge, 118)

“Falling in love for the first time demands a massive amount of unlearning . . . millions of neural networks have to be obliterated and replaced with new ones. Additionally, because plasticity is competitive, when a person develops a neural network, it becomes efficient and self-sustaining and, like a habit, hard to unlearn.” (Doidge, 116)

In other words, falling in love is a huge neural event, bringing about wholescale neural restructuring. From this perspective, it is easy to see how separation from the loved one whom your brain has restructured itself in relation to would cause physiological systems to go “haywire” and “derange” the body. And as Doidge notes, because plasticity is competitive, the next step is very difficult.

“In neuroplastic terms, if the person is to begin a new relationship, they must first rewire billions of connections in their brains . . . we learn to live without the one we love, but we must first unlearn the idea that the person exists and can still be relied on.” (Doidge, 118)

Once again, all this rings in accord with my own experience: the large and fundamental restructuring of me, of my self, in relation to another person; the deep sense of wrongness and basic confusion when that relationship broke apart the way it did and the person was suddenly no longer there; all that affirmative, check the boxes in the “Yes” column. But then, turning away from that part and back to the present topic: why cigarettes? Assuming that they have performed this function of being a fundamental part of this process of “unlearning,” the question becomes how smoking cigarettes has managed to do this.

Part of the answer is fairly straightforward. Smoking cigarettes was a new and fairly significant behavior for me to become involved with, part of creating an identity, of laying down new neural networks, that were free of and untouched by any of my previous experience. That quality of being new is the important one to note; smoking cigarettes was free of any previous associations, and finding an experience like that was both very important and more difficult than might be at first imagined. Everything that had been a part of my life before and during the relationship was now inflected by it, became a series of constant reminders; entire cities were now filled with ghosts for me. Books, music, personal touchstones, life-plans; everything had been touched and transformed, and everything was now tainted. But cigarettes, cigarettes were novel and pristine; an outward and clearly visible sign of a new me. And inwards, tangibly felt; a viscerally physical sense of real transformation happening.

But, in the terms of neuroplasticity, there is a different and even more significant fact to the way in which I engage with this particular behavior.

“It had his focused attention, the condition for plastic change.” (Doidge, 111)

In effecting neuroplasticity, it is attention that matters. Jeffrey Schwartz pioneers this discovery in the work, previously discussed, done with patients suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Again, as previously discussed, Schwartz implements the techniques of Buddhist mindfulness into his therapeutic work with these patients. It is a practice that enables them, over time, to discover a sense of consciousness removed from their compulsions; from this remove they become able to exert the conscious will to, in Doidge’s terms, “unlearn” the neuronal circuitry which encodes their compulsions, to rearrange those neural pathways by enacting new and different behaviors in response to those same compulsive feelings. Mindfulness, in the terminology of neuroscience, is attention.

“Although experience molds the brain, it molds only an attending brain. Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind — the state called attention. (Schwartz, 224)

This is the concluding point of this chapter and perhaps my most speculative point as well; as such, I am going to grant my subjective horse free rein here, down the homestretch.

And this point is that I pay attention to smoking cigarettes in a way and to an extent that I have paid to few, if any, experiences in the entire course of my life. To the course of the behavior as a whole, yes, amplified to a great degree by the perhaps unprecedented level of response it has generated in my friends and family; yes, I am keenly and constantly aware of the dynamical facets of my relationship with cigarettes and smoking. And I think I have sensed, on an intuitive level, the specific function that this relationship was serving, as just previously described; namely, the movement away from an “allostatic” state, from a “deranged” body, and the movement towards a stronger, healthier new way of life and living. I think I have intuitively sensed this, and been profoundly intrigued at my clear and growing sense that cigarettes, modern America’s “addictive public-health enemy #1”; that smoking cigarettes, for me, was clearly somehow a behavior directed at holistic and genuine well-being. Yes, I have certainly paid very close attention to my relationship with cigarettes.

But the heart of the singular nature of the attention I pay to smoking cigarettes is in the act, the each and every act of smoking itself. From the moment I pull the pack and lighter out of my pocket to the moment I stab the last remaining cinders out in the ashtray, smoking a cigarette is a performance; a moment-to-moment engagement I see from the outside and the inside at the same time. It is a test of my performative ability, of my ability to exert the conscious will to attend to the moment of my present engagement, to that moment and the information it is giving and to nothing else. Not to the reminders, the unbidden memories rising up and beckoning down old, dark roads; as I attend to the present moment, to the full sense of pulling the fire and the smoke into my body, those memories fall back again, fade like the unreal ghosts they are to me now. This is a practice, a work; and as I grow stronger and stronger within it, those dark and sad pathways are disappearing.

Epilogue

My effort here has never been to advocate for cigarettes or for smoking. It has been to restore a measure of rationality to the cigarette-smoking discourse, yes, in part; but more to restore rationality to American discourse in general. Too often in modern American life, common sense has left the room; “debate” is nothing more than one ideology waiting for its turn to try and increase its foothold in the establishments of power. Yes, cigarettes can kill you; so can fast-food and reckless driving; to pursue anything immoderately and in willful disregard is to pursue it dangerously. Addiction is exemplary of the American problem that creates individuals who act out of control; an American paradigm that claims much of life to be beyond the control that can be exerted by the conscious will, by the action of making choices. Strip the individual of his authority, and what he will now require is assistance, and to pay for it; either into the church coffers, or the insurance premiums, or from the self-help selection at Amazon.com. Economic growth is the primary concern of modern American life, and obliging the individual to pay for one service or another serves that primary concern.

But it is not the only concern, and that is what I have tried to speak to more than anything else; to cite examples of a science that is still committed to the great and beautiful function of the scientific method: not the pursuit of objective truths, but simply of new and different ways of knowing. And to cite, as well, one specific, critically-driven pursuit of knowledge, of self-knowledge; namely, mine. If you want to smoke cigarettes, then you need to look at the costs and benefits and make that decision for yourself. My situation was unique; I had a severe and difficult need, and responded with a measure in kind; the measure of its full efficacy is an experiment still unfolding over time.

I know that I enjoy smoking cigarettes; that it has brought me a variety and kind of experiences that I had never accessed before, that has been invaluable in my effort to better understand both the nature of being alive and the means and ways of pursuing holistic well-being; it has been an adventure, of the best kind, surprising and strange and provocative. And in the end, it is my life; I have been given the reins, and I am the one who is most able to effectively determine what serves it best. I hope this is what I have communicated in the end; a truth obscured by all those ideologically-derived modern American filters, but a truth that is just common sense, obvious: that there is only one person who has access to all the information about your life, and that person is you.

(I wrote a book called This is Love. You can buy it here. Find out more at: http://www.jeremyjaeger.com/)