(Note: This post is intended solely to suggest where the incorrigible cigarette smoker may be coming from.)

An Open Letter from the Inveterate Smoker to the Antismoking Crusaders

"Do you smell that? Someone must be smoking in here. IS SOMEONE SMOKING IN HERE?”

Yeah, someone IS smoking in here. It's ME. I'm smoking tenaciously and unapologetically. And the next fool who asks that question within earshot of me, I'm gonna spill his yogurt into his sneakers and scatter his lecithin granules.

I know I’m expected to be contrite about my cigarette habit and that the unrepentant attitude I’m displaying is a source of consternation to you. You wonder how I justify it. Could I somehow remain ignorant of the jeopardy my cigarette puts you in?

Well, I could remind you that studies from which you draw your ammunition--studies by the National Cancer Institute and the World Health Organization--have been shown to be less than reliable. I could point out that one of these studies was, in fact, deemed fraudulent by a federal court, and that the only certain instance of a smoker killing a nonsmoker was the stabbing of a California waiter who demanded that a restaurant customer extinguish his cigarette. I could get into this. But the possibility that the danger I represent to you has been exaggerated, or that it may even be bogus, has nothing to do with my position. Even if I were thoroughly persuaded that side-stream smoke is a genuine threat to you, your face in my cigarette would still provoke my ire.

So where am I coming from? Why am I holding on? Am I helplessly nicotine-dependent? The prisoner of a compulsive oral fixation? One of those combination suicidal/homicidal maniacs who wants to take you out along with himself? Worse, am I some kind of First Amendment freak?

No. It's none of the above. What it is, friends, is something we have in common, something we share. Like you I'm dealing with an outsized fear of dying.

Just like you (whether you conceptualize it in this manner or not). I live too intimately with the knowledge that I was born under a death sentence that can't be pardoned and that might be invoked at any time and in any of myriad ways. And just as it does with you, my hyperawareness of my ultimate dissolution--of the hideous fate that nature has in store for me--forces me to live not only with too much consciousness of my vulnerability but also with a crippling burden of guilt.

I must have done some serious poo-poo to be in so much trouble.

So, like you, and in order to fully partake of the world, I need to feel less vulnerable, less guilty and less afraid. Like you I need to believe that I have some control over my destiny and that I'm doing what I can to perpetuate myself for as long as possible. Where we part company is in how we're pursuing our internal equilibrium, in what we've discovered can work for us in this regard.

What you’ve been handed with the certification of tobacco as the “number one cause of preventable death” is a winnable battle to wage with mortality--a project which, by every measure, is a terrific way to address and alleviate dread and diminish guilt. Indeed, it can be an intoxicating thing. You can float around believing that you're securing an extension of your life by ridding the air of a lethal pollutant. At the same time, you can feel that by protecting other lives—by the absolute righteousness of this work--you’re acquitting yourself of any and all transgressions in past lives or in this one. If you become sufficiently obsessive about it you can even get to feel sometimes that EVERYTHING that's wrong has been reduced to a single locus and that you’re engaging--and wounding--evil itself. Not only can you move with less trepidation in the world, but you’re positioning yourself for an ultimate promotion to heaven, an infinite perpetuation of yourself.

That's a very good deal.

But if the "bad news" about cigarettes has been a boon for you it's also presented me with an opportunity to address my problem with mortality. I'm referring, specifically, to the denouement of cancer that cigarettes propose. Cancer, at once the most insidious and RETRIBUTIVE of diseases and a disease which ordinarily takes decades to develop.

My emotional circumstances inclining me to assume the worst as a given, it was automatic for me to interpret the authoritative conclusion that I risked the most hideous of consequences when I smoked as a certainty. I immediately took it for granted that I would die of cancer if I smoked. If, for you, a similar reaction was reason to demonize cigarettes, for me the opposite was true. My attraction to cigarettes, already strong but not yet compulsive, took the leap into addiction. I recognized that there was an inherent blessing in the certainty of a cigarette-induced death, and that it was a considerable one.

When, and not so long ago, smoking was perceived as a minor vice or a vaguely unhealthy practice, the best you could do with a cigarette was to use it as a surrogate tit to suck on in moments of tension or as an aid in the fabrication of a social posture designed to mask insecurity and self-doubt. Cigarettes were a wonderful anodyne and piece of business, but those functions constituted the limits of their utility. Now, however, I could derive that much and more from cigarettes.

By smoking cigarettes, by implicitly taking on the most terrible of deaths, I could affect an arrangement with nature that served to ease my anxieties at their very root. By embracing the ultimate punishment, I could, that is, own a sense of being insulated against all other causes of death. And armored in this way by my cigarette habit I could feel not only less susceptible to croaking by accident, violence or germs, but significantly free of the constraints guilt imposed on my ability to experience pleasure.

Moreover, with my sense of immunity to such eventualities, I could feel something like confident of thirty to forty years of survival on the planet--many more years, certainly, than I could otherwise feel confident of. Finally, I could feel that cigarettes might ultimately assure my salvation itself, that I could arrive at the moment of judgment having fully atoned for my felonies as well as my misdemeanors and with at least a balanced rap sheet.

You expect me to give this up?

I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that what I've come up with is insane, stupid, grotesque and awful and, in this case, you'll be right. But inasmuch as your cause is fueled by what, just perhaps, is less than solid fact, and since you’ve placed yourself on the side of angels who after all may not exist, I would think you’d appreciate that certain existential horrors are impervious to rational responses. Insanity and stupidity, I'd think you would agree, are often best understood, not as handicaps or pathological conditions, but as marvels of human resourcefulness.

So are we straight with this now? What we have here is a collision of self-perpetuation projects and given the urgency of our needs and the diametric opposition of our methods, a situation without an equitable resolution. I mean, I don't want to hurt anybody but, much as I'd prefer it otherwise, I can't demonstrate any more consideration for your need to stay afloat in a creation, than you can for mine.

Of course in this respect we're alike still again. We both mimic nature herself.

Mr Levin, you produced a long, staunch, thoughtful defense of your reasons for smoking. But I have one reason why I don't tolerate it in my house, car, or even outside talking to someone who is smoking. Much like urine, feces, drool on the pillow, cigarette smoking produces an odiferous, undeniable, unmistakeable byproduct: A huge, nose burning, tongue swelling, clothes infesting, house corroding STINK(I am always amazed that smokers, like people with bad breath, don't understand that they, their clothes, their things all stink hideously. Tell me, do you like to smell like an ashtray, is that the smell you want to be wafting around all day?

Smoking sure is addictive. People can come up with the most convoluted and abstract reasons why they smoke. If you do not want to admit you are addicted, there are a multitude of reasons you can come up with to avoid the simple one of addition.

I am glad society has changed its position on smoking. It is a big benefit to me to rarely have to endure the smoking of others. I hope we do not revert to allowing smokers to invade our air, no matter what justifiable reason they have to themselves.

Wow. What a long drawn out excuse for addiction.

I am a smoker, and it's a disgusting habit. I do it because I'm addicted, and I recognize that it's invasive to other people, therefore, I smoke only in places where smoking is expected...not at my place of business, not at a restaurant. If a smoker can't wait an hour to go outside and have a cigarette, than they just shouldn't go out at all.

I'm afraid I actually agree with the bulk of Mr. Levin's posting. Well, actually, I'm not afraid in the least: I agree unabashedly. And I don't take it as mere excuse for addiction.

Sure, smoking's addictive - but it's not that addictive. No worse, surely, than sugar or caffeine - and nowhere near as anti-social as an addiction to alcohol, crack cocaine, or gambling. On a bet, I once gave up cigarettes for three months. Having won the bet, I went right back to smoking. Why? Because I like smoking. I hated being a non-smoker. If nothing else, it is one of the best hand props going (as Levin mentions, they are a wonderful piece of business). And, unlike many, I'm quite willing to face the fact that I'm not going to live forever - even if I quit smoking, avoid traffic, become a practicing vegan, stop running with scissors, and think good thoughts all the time. Unless smoking begins to seriously impair my health (and after thirty-odd years of smoking it hasn't), give me real quality of life over speculative quantity any day.

Like Cyan, I try to be as considerate a smoker as possible, would the same could be said of non-smokers. I smoke cigarettes, for God's sake - I don't molest children or beat up grannies or indulge in projectile vomiting at priests - and I'm sick to death of being treated like the antichrist when I'm enjoying a cigarette in a designated smoking area. I also try to keep a sense of proportion, would the same could be said of non-smokers. Obesity kills way more people in the US every year than tobacco. Thanks to smoking, I weigh the same now as I did when I was sixteen. Maybe we should ban the eating of food in restaurants before we ban smoking: for the average American, it'd be a helluva lot healthier.

Those of you who smoke, might be interested in Richard Klein's Cigarettes Are Sublime - even, or perhaps especially, if you're trying to quit. It's a treatise on the history and culture of smoking and the allure of the "darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity" in the practice of smoking of cigarettes.

I must admit, I don't have a clue what your essay was about. I didn't even gather if you were for or against smoking, until I read some of the replys. Perhaps its late and I'm tired, or perhaps I think it's because your essay was just a collection of multi-sylabel words put together to form sentences

I did pull out one little fact that caught my eye. It doesn't take decades for cancer to develop. A good friend of mine has a 6 year old daughter in the hospital with cancer. She's been fighting it since she was 4 . Where I live, we have a whole hospital dedicated to children. The wing with the most patients in it, is the cancer wing . Decades?

No one really knows where cancer comes from, or what causes it. Sure, you can say cigs cause cancer, but then why does that little girl have cancer, and Wertz can smoke for 30+ years and not get it? What was that little girl's crime that gave her the cancer?

I saw a bumper sticker one time. It said something like: "Eat right, exercise, get lots of sleep, die anyway"

I could be killed in a car accident tomorrow on my way to work. What would smoking or not smoking done for me then?

Wertz Smoking is more addivtive than caffinee. But it really depends on the person. I have tried quitting several times, I only make it a week or so before I buy another pack. There is no WAY I could quit for 3 months cold turkey like you did. I would go nutz.

If someone wants to smoke at their own home or car or at a designated smoking area, that's their right and it's fine by me.

But, PLEASE do not litter by throwing your cigarette butts out your car and into the streets. Do smokers think it's cool to flick their cancer stick and litter the roads? Or it's cool to throw it down on the sideway to squish it with their feet? I think the fine for such offenders would be to pick up ALL the trash that they've just littered at.

I'm not saying anyone here does that, but it just gets me mad always seeing such trash everywhere.

That drives me bonkers, particularly when people throw lit cigarettes out their car windows with no regard to their surroundings. It's like they don't quite understand that there's fire involved...duh. Additionally, people don't generally throw their garbage out the window. I don't know why they think that a cigarette butt is any different.

Anyhow...I'm sure that all of us America's Debate smokers are more conscientious than that...

It must be physiological. Cigarettes I can take or leave - but more than two hours without a cup of coffee and -- stand back.

The problem with addicts is, unfortuately arrogance and/or ignorance. Humans, no matter what their opinion is, are subject to the same laws of physics as any other animal. Everybody suffers from the same reaction to the ignorance of whatever they put in their mouths, up ;their noses, or through their skins. Just because the person doesn't "feel" the danger does not mean the danger is not there. Just because the person does not die or suffer immediately does not mean that the damage is not on-going internally. All the modern maladies of mankind can be found in this country within it's 1.5 trillion dollar medical bill. Europe and the rest of the "modern" world is right behind.
Cyan--being a smoker is a very stupid thing for any female of any age. Breast cancer is not unrelated. You may even pay for your smoking with a deteriorated skin when you are older..... and not much older at that. For men to smoke and not take into consideration the possibility of prostate cancer at a later date is equally stupid. And this for Robert Levin--It's not the length of one's life that is important--It is how you live it that counts and if the last few years of your life are spent in misery, that is an indication of the arrogance and ignorance of which I spoke of earlier. You will pay for ignorance sooner or later.
Big tobacco like the big food corporations are not concerned one iota for your health. It's your money they want. Ever wonder why it is that diabetes is epidemic in America?