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The Rise and Fall of the Cigarette
— Charles Lamb, Letter to Thomas Manning
It was a tough week for the cigarette and all but the most heartless would fail to feel the pain that has now been inflicted upon it. And in feeling their pain they’d be joined by Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and three of his colleagues who have received huge campaign contributions from the cigarettes’ makers.
Mr. McConnell has received more than $400,000. North Carolina’s Richard Burr, who bravely led opponents of the recently passed tobacco legislation into battle, has received $359,100 and two other members of the opposition were recipients of over $100,000 from the tobacco industry and friends. None of them was, of course, influenced to protect the cigarette because of the gifts. But I digress. This column is about the poor cigarette and briefly traces its fall from glory. Although not yet the recipient of the death sentence it has handed out to so many of its followers, the cigarette has been dealt a mighty blow.
Under legislation just passed by Congress and sent to the president, the care and feeding of the cigarette has been turned over to the probably unfriendly Food and Drug Administration. How far the poor cigarette has fallen in only 24 years! 1985 seems like yesterday. Here’s what led up to that year.
On November 11, 1981, Walter Jacobson, a commentator for WBBM-TV in Chicago broadcast a report about Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation. In his extensive report he said that B&W had developed an advertising campaign to lure the young into smoking by depicting smoking as “A declaration of independence and striving for Self-identity” Mr. Jacobson said B&W’s aim was to “present the cigarette as an illicit pleasure. . . A basic symbol of the growing-up, maturing process.” B&W sued for slander and a jury, outraged at the suggestion an esteemed corporation would do anything as despicable as Mr. Jacobson had reported, awarded B&W a cool $5.05 million.
In 1988 Philip Morris decided it had taken enough from the anti-cigarette crowd. It ran an ad campaign to show that friends of the cigarette were a group to be contended with. In an ad using big black letters of the sort used to herald the end of world War II, it said: “$1 trillion is too much financial power to ignore.” (In 1985 a trillion dollars was a lot of money.) Smokers are, said the ad, one of the most economically powerful groups in the U.S. and help fuel the engine of the largest economy on the globe. Commenting on the ad campaign, Guy L. Smith 4th, then the vice-president for corporate affairs, said “Let the politicians take note. You’re not just talking special-interest group. You’re talking swing vote.”Other P-M ads were more playful. An ad that followed the banning of smoking inside airplanes, shows a smoker sitting on the wing of an airplane contentedly smoking. Another portrayed a smoker sitting on a desk outside the 8th floor of an office building that had banned smoking happily puffing away. According to James Morgan, senior vice president of marketing for Philip Morris, “the ads establish a connection with the consumers that is warm, humorous and whimsical.” That plus “deadly” is the perfect description of the relationship many of us had with the cigarette. Today that has changed.
As soon as the president signs the Bill, the cigarette will be placed under the FDA’s jurisdiction. The FDA will have the power to regulate the cigarette’s content. Colorful ads and store displays will be replaced by sober black and white only text. The cigarette will not be permitted to brag within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds. In recent years the cigarette has improved itself by adding variety of flavors such as Mandarin Mint, Mocha Taboo, Margarita Mixer and the like in order to appeal to the younger set that while seeking sophistication through smoking nonetheless continue to enjoy flavors of that remind them of the halcyon days of their youth.
The cigarette may be discouraged but does not yet have to concede defeat. Already groups are lining up to attack the new law on the ground that it impinges on the cigarette’s free speech rights. Daniel Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers and a friend of the First Amendment as well as the cigarette said: “Anybody looking at this in a fair way would say the effort here is not just to protect kids, which is a substantial interest of the country, but to make it virtually impossible to communicate with anybody. We think this creates very serious problems for the First Amendment.” I’ve good news for Mr. Jaffe. The First Amendment will overcome its problems. The cigarette and its friends will almost certainly figure out ways to continue to communicate with young smokers. They always have.
58 Comments so far
Show AllLet me begin by saying, I support people's freedom to smoke, shoot, snort, 'put a pinch between cheek and gum', rub on their skin, or stuff up their ass anything they like - including tobacco.
Outside of guns, and bombs, and synthetic plague, the drug called tobacco is one of the best killers of human beings we've come up with so far. Deaths from tobacco far outstrip deaths from any or all other 'illicit' drugs combined. Again - if people want to risk the consequences, more power to them.
But my question is why don't countries who grow poppies, hemp, or coca who the US has bombed with pesticides or sent in armies to destroy the crops and cripple their local economies attack the tobacco fields in the US for growing such a dangerous drug that kills so many at home or around the world?
Oh yeah, I forgot. It's good for business and only the US makes the rules and can get away with such crimes.
Was your post a joke? Tobacco is legal both here and around the world. Narcotics are not. Millions of Americans are strung out and destroyed by foreign produced drugs and the foreign smugglers who bring that poison to our shores. We obviously have not done enough to destroy foreign drug production operations.
The tobacco itself, while an issue due to the nature of the plant, isn't nearly as much of a problem as the 600 to 1,000 additional chemicals that the industry puts into a cigarette. Things like formaldehyde which increase the rush one gets from smoking and increases the addictive quality by about 80%. Things like the flame retardant which keeps the things burning evenly. Things like arsenic, which increases the buzz as well.
When you add enough of these chemicals and burn them, you increase the deadliness of them. Cigarettes are the ONLY product put out which, when used as directed, results in the death of the consumer. If you were to start selling them today as a brand new product, they would NEVER be allowed into production.
Funny, cannabis has never killed a single person from it's use, but THAT is illegal, while the cig makers are all just losing their shorts of merely being regulated. Anyone care to tell me how that all makes ANY sense at all? And don't waste your time telling me about the money, I know ALL about it.
We learned nothing from Prohibition. It criminalized otherwise non-criminal private behavior, ruined numerous lives, profited criminal organizations, increased alcoholism, corrupted courts and police forces, curtailed personal freedom, filled jails with non-violent and otherwise law-abiding citizens, precipitated governmental intervention and violence against otherwise harmless individuals, created a general disregard for all laws, and provided another tool for the government to intimidate and control its citizens - not unlike what we're seeing in Columbia and Mexico among other nations. The government incessantly lies about the 'drug war' and the $250 Billion already thrown away on it. But it won't end. Too many people, important people, profit from it for that to happen. Like poverty, prisons, homelessness, and unemployment, the drug war is just another very successful profit center.
How "private" is tobacco smoking?
The smell of the smoke in public places is offensive, and the health costs to society in the form of higher insurance premiums, or higher cost for a national health plan - if we ever get one - are enormous.
The same argument applies to those who think not wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle is a "personal choice". It is not. When Pittsburgh hero Ben Rothlesburger ran up a multi-6-digit figure restoring his completely-preventable face-smashing after hitting a car without a helmet, auto insurance premium payers everywhere paid for it.
Where does one draw the line, though? The health costs caused by fat people are enormous, but nobody is seriously proposing that we institute mandatory weight loss regimens with severe consequences for noncompliance. This is true even though there are more fat people than smokers. Everybody is going to die of something. If smokers weren't dying of cancer or COPD or whatever, they wouldn't live forever and cause no cost to the health care system, they'd get sick and die of something else.
The smell of cigarette smoke is bothersome, and secondhand smoke may be unhealthy, but how does secondhand smoke compare to the ozone and particulates from cars, ports, and planes?
The government should be protecting us from each other, not from ourselves.
"The government should be protecting us from each other, not from ourselves..."
You completely missed my point. All personal choices have an impact on greater society. There is a balance to consider, someone may participate in a high-risk sport, but also get a physical and mental health benefit. But cigarette smoking has no conceivable benefits.
There is a big difference between outlawing a substance and mandating a behavioral regime.
Regulating the intake of poison seems like a pretty reasonable government function. They can also start regulating the food additives. But that's a far cry from Big Brother leading the nation in mandatory fitness sessions.
Yeah whoopie, the FDA gets dominion over tobacco. The same FDA that allows and encourages multiple poisons in our food supply. The same understaffed agency that can't seem to regulate the slaughterhouses. The same FDA that is allowing some very nasty food imports that if properly inspected would fail to meet even the minimal standards of pathogen presence.
I realized a long time ago that the shitty frankenfood, cigarettes, rot gut alcohol and white powder drugs were different faces of the necrotic culture of industrialism. They are the flip side of the Pentagon's death machine.
"The smell of the smoke in public places is offensive, and the health costs to society in the form of higher insurance premiums, or higher cost for a national health plan - if we ever get one - are enormous."
As inverse_agonist pointed out, there are health costs to society from other "risky" behaviour to. Not just smoking. Are you going to regulate and ban ALL "risky" behaviour? And why would you think bans would work, better than people deciding for themselves? How well has the war on drugs worked?
Two, there are arguments that smoking doesn't result in higher health costs to society, since the smoking causes smokers to die off faster than they would otherwise. That is, the increased health costs burden from smokers on society, is balanced out by the smokers dieing earlier, and not having other health costs that society has to pay for.
Nobody promised that life would be without 'offense'. Personally I'm offended by people who are willfully ignorant or driven by superstition but there's not a lot that neither I nor society can do about it.
I'm sure there are plenty of carcinigens in Marijuana smoke. But I guess far fewer joints get smoked than cigarettes.
And you can eat pot for the same, but longer lasting effect (fiber value too?), but eating tobacco will kill you.
It's not only the additives. Virtually all forms of tobacco increase the risk of cancer.
Let's talk about the money just for the record since that is always what it is about:
"The illegality of marijuana is a reflection of where the power is in our society. Marijuana is outlawed for economic reasons, not for health reasons.
While it is no more addictive and no more of a health risk than tobacco and alcohol (both of which are protected by law), if it were grown it would put half the cotton growers, nylon and rayon manufacturers, and timber products people in the world out of business.
Hemp is one of the most useful, strongest, toughest, longest-lasting materials on the planet. One cannot produce a better fiber for clothes, a stronger substance for ropes, an easier to grow and harvest source for pulp. We cut down hundreds of thousands of trees each year to produce our newspapers so that we can read about the decimation of the world's forests. Hemp could provide millions of newspapers without cutting down one tree. It could easily substitute for so many resource materials at a tenth of the cost."
This is the catch. Somebody loses money if this plant, which also has extraordinary medicinal properties (e.g. hemp oil has the optimum balance of Omega 3 & Omega 6 oils for our diet), is allowed to be grown.
This is why marijuana is illegal in the U.S.. It is the same reason we have taken so long to mass produce electric cars, provide affordable, sensible health care, or use alternate sources of energy in every home. We have had the wherewithal and technology to produce all of these things for years. Why don't we have them? Look to see who would lose money if we did. Our "great society" has to be dragged kicking and screaming to consider the common good. Whenever these are mentioned people yell "communism". So if providing for the good of many does not provide a huge profit for someone, the good of the many is more often than not ignored.
As always "Cui bono?" As always, not the working class.
Are you talking about the legislation, or the tobacco companies reaction?
The cigarette takes a terrible financial and health toll on the working class.
Why do you think alot of poorer people smoke and or drink or any of the other things that people do?It is mostly to forget or put aside the things they have to put up with while trying to make a living.Insurance companies dont care if you smoke or drink since they will charge you more if you do and the gov. does not care for your health either it is eye wash to keep us off of real change like single payer,the so call war,the enviornment;real stuff and so we got this and the apology,what a farce!.Tony
What this country really needs is a good 25-cent cigar.
Cuba awaits!
I would like to see the statistics on tobacco use and subsequent cancer...in my own experience I can link EVERY cancer death of friends and family to a history of such, and second hand smoke plays a big part as well. Calculate the costs of health care for those affected, and wonder why we allow this product in our society...oh yeah, the 'new world' was founded (by English and Europeans) on the tobacco plant and addiction to it...again, the influence of profit for the corporation undoes the good intentions for a healthy society...and then, lets talk hard liquor...what would the insurance industries, police, courts, prisons, lawyers, hospitals, do without that influence? I agree with lvrich, we could all be alot happier, healthier, and sustainable with a different paradigm.
"It was found that 172/1,000 of male current smokers will eventually develop lung cancer; the similar probability among female current smokers was 116/1,000. For those who never smoked on a regular basis the lifetime risk was substantially reduced. Only 13/1,000 males and 14/1,000 females in this category will develop lung cancer."
Can J Public Health. 1994 Nov-Dec;85(6):385-8.
Yeah, most people with lung cancer smoked. Most people who smoke do NOT get lung cancer. Smoking is bad for you for lots of reasons, but the majority of smokers simply do not die of lung cancer. Most of the time, what you hear about are relative risks from smoking, and not absolute risks.
All drugs should be legal, tobacco included. No good comes from prohibition.
THIS NEW ANTI-CIGARETTE LAW IS FASCIST, IT IS ANTI-POOR PEOPLE !!
Because poor people depend on smoking as anti-depressant. The USA is such a depressive society, that people need to smoke in order to feel motivated. This anti-cigarette law is against the US workers.
I assume you are being facetious.
The class-dimension of cigarette smoking does need some serious analysis.
Where I live, smoking is nearly non-existent among the upper classes but widespread among the working classes. And an expensive habit it is!
Having been a blue collar worker all my life, I can testify to the fact that smoking breaks are necessary. So is a nice smoke after work and after dinner and after sex. Most blue collar workers are living lives of quiet desperation, in boring, repetitive jobs. They need all the 'enjoyment' they can get.
Do like they do in the Andes, chew cocoa leaves, or maybe cocoa gum? :D
This is actually more true than people might think. The relationship between stress and drug addiction is well-documented, and who might one expect to be experiencing increased stress? Also, high taxes on cigarettes are arguably pretty regressive.
Tobacco without all the chemicals isn't such a big killer. Besides, if you think tobacco is bad, wait till the problems that arise (and are being noticed) after years of anti-depressant use, particularly people that have been taking them since they where kids. OR better yet, take a look at what people eat, this country is becoming so incredibly fat, I say an 8-10 year old scarf down a pound of fried chicken the other day. Forget second hand smoke, a lot of these young kids are going to be lucky if they live to see twenty.
"Tobacco without all the chemicals isn't such a big killer."
This simply is not true. Lung cancer deaths were high even early on, especially with non-filter cigarettes. Nicotine itself is not the killing chemical as much as the 'tars' that come from inhaling tobacco, and let's not forget carbon monoxide. Granted, some of the additives are likely to increase the danger, but eliminating them would not make inhaling tobacco smoke safe. Even snuff causes cancer, when chewing tobacco comes into contact with the mouth.
Perhaps a smokeless cigarette can be produced whose primary purpose is to deliver nicotine and provide the 'oral satisfaction' that goes along with cigarette addiction. But then the truth about cigarettes would pretty much be out as to what they are and what they do: deliver an addictive drug to an addict who craves it.
Maybe I'm unique, but most of my family smokes, and no'one has had lung cancer, nor died from lung cancer that I know of. Then again my family is full of very active farmers, maybe the high activity level helps counter smoking, idk. And that whole "o its addictive", people need to learn self control, I smoked for years and went cold turkey one day and haven't smoked since (waste of money).
Its amazing how much other people know about other peoples failings.
Writing as someone who grew up in a house with a smoker and was forced to inhale second hand, I welcome any measure that negatively effects the companies who made billions (and continue to do so) poisoning whole swaths of people. These measures, and prior ones, have "encouraged" cigarette companies to relocate to Switzerland, as the Swiss do not have anti-trust laws, enforce financial or civil judgments from foreign courts (a whole separate action must be undertaken in Swiss courts under Swiss law), or extradite for financial crimes (Marc Rich took advantage of this). It is from the the corporate fortress that Switzerland provides that the cigarette companies plan their continued operations that Christopher Brauchli writes of.
Tobacco is a very addictive, dangerous drug. That's been scientifically proven, despite all the millions thrown at corporate scientists to prove otherwise. What goes around comes around. Take heart, all ye pot purveyors and hemp heads.
AH, but you have it all wrong. It was the lawyers and spokesmen that they threw the money at to lie before congress and say that it's not addictive. They threw money at the scientists and chemists to make it MORE addictive. That is what the formaldehyde is for. It changes the alkaline level and makes it like a direct shot into the brain, thus increasing the addictive factor from a normal amount, about 10% of those who try it, to about a 90% level.
As to the addictive level of cannabis, there are no physical withdrawals from quitting cannabis at all. I can attest to that from personal experience. You don't climb the walls, you don't lose your senses, you don't have any of the same things that you go through with tobacco. It's not the same thing any more than it's the same as drinking, which you can die from quitting. And in over 4700 years of medicinal use, no one has EVER been found to have died from the use of cannabis. In fact, in the early 70's, when the US Senate did studies on the Jamaicans and Costa Ricans who smoke far more than any us citizen could dream of, they found that those who use it tended to live an average of a year and a half LONGER than their next door neighbors who didn't use it.
The two plants are not even close physiologically. Tobacco leeches the soil of heavy metals, things like chromium and cadmium. That is why the Indians used it in their crop rotation systems. Cannabis doesn't do that. It doesn't retain any heavy metals nor does it use them in it's growing process. Broccoli has more cancer causing agents in it than cannabis does, and you don't hear of anyone getting cancer from that, do you? Also, tobacco restricts any membrane it comes in contact with, whereas cannabis dilates them. That is why your eyes get red. It also acts as an expectorant, and allows you to cough out the stuff you just inhaled. Cigs don't do that.
We just in this country have decades of users that smoke cannabis every day. They aren't lined up at their doctor's offices with lung cancer, are they? Cannabis needs no insecticides, and if grown in decent soil, requires no chemical fertilizers either. It doesn't have any of the chemicals found in cigs, and as a result, it doesn't contribute to deaths of anyone. If the gov't, with all their money and connections, can't find anyone who has died from it (and they have been looking for anyone for over 40 years, now), then there just isn't anyone.
Not to mention, we in the cannabis world have been paying FAR worse of a price than is deserved for our plant and it's use.
BTW, it was originally made illegal so that CA could kick the Mexicans out. That was 1913, and it was then that the word "marijuana" was first used. If they had called it cannabis, everyone would have laughed at them and it would never had been made illegal.
Sioux Rose
WJM: Marijuana was also used as a treatment (to suppress the cough) of TB patients before it was rendered illegal. Since many natural herbs (of which I associate marijuana) dispense with the need for more costly, orthodox medical treatments, it would seem AMA and big pharma had a stake in making sure this peace pipe was made illegal; and from there, an entire anti-drug culture has grown up to finance thousands of careers and a whole network of prisons. That's a lot of dominos to dismantle.
The hysteria engendered by cannabis says so much about our culture! It is a gift given by the gods, and we should thank them for it instead of making it a cornerstone for our drug wars and prison system. But that would be a different reality. As you say, the world is now dominated by Mars.
WJM you are right about the Cigarette CEOs and their pet 'scientists.
Smoking anything that burns is harmful to the respiratory system. I don't have any proof of that except for experience. I'm a 68 year old, and developed COPD several years ago. It's probably mostly due to being a house painter and not using a mask, but I did smoke for 20 years and smoked pot even longer. Wish I hadn't. I found that using pot in food was much more enjoyable, and much easier on the lungs.
You are also right about the racist aspect of making drugs illegal. But this IS the United States, after all. And we do pay for our sins! Or at least Mexicans, Chinese, and pot smokers pay or have paid. But so does the whole country. The war on drugs that has been fought for the past 95 years has done more to damage us than any other 'war'. It's been hugely expensive both in money and lives, has created and supported horrendous bureaus (not to mention organized crime), and is still being used as a racist tool. Marijuana is so deliciously Mexican. Too bad they didn't stick to the Latin name.
Having vaporized both, I can tell you that there was, surprisingly, far more tar residue from cannabis vapor than from tobacco! The problem with tobacco is when we over do it by smoking "packs" a day (or more) everyday, and the chemical additives. Combustion of any plant material yields potential carcinogens. You've got to vaporize, ok! On a completely different note: a contradiction of Western Civilization is the tendency of the narrow minded, easily brainwashed (by the powers that be) to overdo every thing that is unhealthy. Everything in moderation facilitates long lasting health and happiness. Even....garlic!
Smoking is so Twentieth-century!
Thanks for your triple comment, GeniusMonkey. I gave up smoking pot soon after I gave up cigarettes. But I didn't give up pot. It became one of my most special condiments. My brownies and spaghetti sauces were legendary in some parts of San Francisco.
Smoking is so Twentieth-century!
Smoking is so Twentieth-century!
In North Carolina, more people are considering the idea of getting hemp on the markets and allowing it to compete with tobacco. Too bad the DEA is blocking real competition. Abolish the DEA and the cigarettes will go the way of the dodobirds.
I am no fan of the "war on drugs" and agree with you that we cannot afford to continue to fund organized crime by keeping drugs illegal. But because these drugs ARE illegal we have very little knowledge of their true effects on the human body.
As much as I hate drug laws I also hate the people who pretend that other substitutes to the legal alcohol and tobacco addictions are going to be healthy and wonderful. They might be better than Tobacco and alcohol, they might be worse. There is currently way too much propaganda on both sides of this coin for me to form an opinion based on evidence.
But other evidence is a good guide. Pouring something into your body that alters your state of mind is probably not a good idea when you do not know what that thing is actually doing to you.
This has been born out often enough that it's a good guide from which to start.
I haven't smoked marijuana until I realized that we don't get held accountable for smoking it because of weak enforcement but that was after I got into employment. From there, I stayed careful not to arouse suspicion lest they pick me for another random drug testing. I haven't smoked much though to begin with so who knows?
Just chiming in on the whole anti-cigarette war is anti-class war bit... It's really very true. Any smoker will tell you that in general, just about any measure obstensibly put forward to "help" them is really just an assault on their pocketbooks.
The problem? You think that just by making smoking more expensive, you will be able to get people to quit.
While that may work in some circumstances, and it certainly may help to keep some children from smoking (an admirable goal, I admit), in reality, all you're really legislating is how much disposable income poor people have. You aren't really impacting rich people at all (if they want to, they can still afford it - and so can their kids). And the problem poor people have, more than anything I believe, is that they have neither the appropriate time, resources, or help to really quit. They can't quit, so they have to keep buying the cigarettes, and all you're really doing is taking bread out of their children's mouths.
The state-sanctioned smoking cessation programs are a joke. None of these techniques work well for people who need to work 3 jobs to stay afloat. Have you tried quitting smoking while working 14 hours a day? You can't. You just can't. You can't live a life of such stress and simultaneously give up the thing that's helping you cope with your stress. It just doesn't work.
What these people need is paid time off in a sort of clinical setting where they could not possibly access a cigarette if they wanted to. If you could take a poor person addicted to cigarettes, assuage their fears *if only for a week* that they will go broke, take care of their family financially just long enough for that person to go somewhere where they can really kick the habit... Then you will actually achieve the goal of getting people off cigarettes.
You can sit there and say all you want "they got themselves addicted to cigarettes, the state and the employers shouldn't have to foot the bill to get them off". Well, too bad. The state and employers too had a hand in creating the factors that led to the addiction in the first place. And on top of that, the state and employers will be the ones footing the bill when people *don't* get off cigarettes, and people develop all the nasty diseases and other problems people can get when they continue to smoke. Which is worse?
Quitting smoking doesn't take long. Nicotine can completely leave the system within 3 days. After that, with proper reinforcement the cravings become entirely psychological, and with proper training people can find other coping mechanisms (perhaps, some lemon drops?). But those first 3 days of physical nicotine withdrawal, you can't expect someone to work, and you can't expect someone to be worrying the whole time about how they're going to afford not working for 3 days.
Stop just taking money away from poor people, and start really addressing the real problem - not people buying cigarettes, but people needing cigarettes. Then you'll really be doing everyone a service. But don't just take more and more money from people who don't have it while claiming to help them. It is in fact a regressive policy.
Rush Limbaugh certainly agrees with you there.
Aww come on buddy. I'm not that bad. Really, I'm about as left wing as you get on most issues...
There are two phases to nicotine withdrawal - physical, and psychological. The nicotine physically leaves your system after 3 days, after which the physical cravings subside (unless you do something dumb like take the patch or the gum, in which case, the nicotine sticks with you for a while while you torture yourself). However, yes, the mental cravings last for years. I know, I've been there (still am there). Years and years of a habit can take a long time to overcome.
But I'm saying, just bleeding people dry until their lives collapse isn't a great way to get them to quit. You make it easier on people, you'll have more success, and feel just a little bit less like a life-sucking leech.
every former smoker I have ever known who has successfully quit and stay off cigarettes for over 2 years STILL reports the desire to take up the habit again. Every smoker I have ever known who has quit for over 3 months and then restarted again has reported to me that it was the horrible craving that drove them to "just have one, I can contol it" and within a week was back to a pack-a-day or more.
If nicotine is truly out of your system after only 3 days I am then astonished at the stranglehold that this "high" gives you such that you can still crave after years, that the mere smell of second hand smoke is sufficient to trigger a powerful urge to take up the habit again. C. Everett Coup likened this addiction to being as bad or worse than being addicted to cocaine. With cancer and heart disease as fringe benefits.
I am all for letting people smoke, in private and away from me...because I chose not to and I have a right to keeping that cancerous effluent out of my body and a right to stand at a corner or bus stop that isn't fouled by the detritous smokers so impolitely leave where ever they go.
Jove is suggesting enlightening the people instead of punishing them. But it's difficult to recognize the value in this suggestion because the Enlightenment was smashed and all that are allowed now are carrots and sticks in the "greatest empire in world history".
It took me several months before my body stopped craving nicotine. It took over ten years before I stopped having an occasional itch for cigarettes. After about 20 years I tried a cigarette and it was absolutely disgusting. I'm 68 and still have cravings, but thank God a craving for cigarettes is not one of them.