The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Every seventh cigarette, I think about how I am an idiot.
Do I even need to mention the mass death? Smokers’ life expectancy is 10 years lower than that of nonsmokers; 1 in 5 deaths in the United States is related to smoking. Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the US. Have you recently read a list of diseases that kill you? I did—because I looked up what cigarettes do to me. The usual sources of expiration listed unhappily in paragraph two of an obit—lung cancer (of course), but also coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, diabetes, the flu, and COPD—are all caused by smoking.
I pride myself on not being too health-conscious. But I am also not a fool. It is obvious that my lungs are becoming mottled with black soot like some 19th-century chimney sweep when I ask, “Any chance I could bum one?” outside every bar. You can feel your heart clog, and your body weaken, when you smoke. Let’s not be naive. All smokers know this. Some don’t care. Many do. Over 50 percent of smokers want to quit. But only around 8 percent of us successfully and permanently do.
Still, during that Seventh Cigarette of Shame, I’ll be honest: I don’t think of my health. It is the small humiliations of smoking that drag me down. I ponder my leftist credibility as I partake in a useless “pleasure” that is connected with labor practices—and political money—that are often evil. (I judge a DoorDash user’s choice to join the worst of capitalism, yet I don’t ever judge a smoker. How lazy is that?) I shamefully think about the fact that I am being duped—my consent manufactured!—by advertising campaigns. And I run through the rolodex of childish explanations people give about smoking, each as pathetic as loving Catcher in the Rye too much past the age of 19.
This last point stings. I despise the faux intellectualism of smoking. People speak of touching death, or some half-assed nihilistic thrust against the mainstream, paraded as a reason to smoke. The glamor of cigarettes irks me, almost as much as the phlegmy cough I hurl some mornings after too many Marlboro Reds. “Beautiful people do it, really talented people do it,” actor Fernanda Amis (yes, daughter of the late British author Martin) told the New York Times, live from the Lower East Side, in one of the seemingly endless articles about how smoking is cool now. “It goes with things that I admire.” She continued by noting the “contemporarily atypical” nature of smoking.
Worse than the long-term diseases might be this particular affliction: saying silly shit to explain to yourself all the reasons you have for liking cigarettes. Please go ahead and strike me down dead early, either way, if I am telling you that I am smoking because of a Nietzsche quote.
Worse than the long-term diseases might be this particular affliction: saying silly shit to explain to yourself all the reasons you have for liking cigarettes.
And yet, as bad as smoking feels, it also feels quite good. On a cold day, if you, like me, enjoy smoking—which I do, frankly; I love it—then you will know that for every Seventh Cigarette of Stupidity, there are three of casual nothingness and three of pure, unadulterated joy. There are many cigs of felicity.
There is the cigarette after a run, when my lungs are fresh. I take in smoke, and I inhale deeply. The head rush mimics the sublime experience of my first-ever nicotine. (I recently bonded over this pleasure with my girlfriend’s father. See! Smoking helps in so many ways; smoking is pro-social—we smokers love to say this.) There is the cigarette outside a show, away from the cramped and the sweaty. At a party, there is the cigarette to avoid a conversation; at a party, there is the cigarette to start a conversation. There is the cigarette after a long, useless fight—with partner, colleague, friend, or relative—in which I breathe out, like a zen ritual of pure release.
And there is my favorite cigarette. It is when I smoke while listening to a perfect song. This is when I lean into music that I want to fully immerse myself in: country (George Jones, Don Williams, Jerry Jeff Walker), strange jazz (Loren Connors, Ben LaMar Gay), slow rap (Ka). At these moments, I feel quite good alone, a difficult stability for me to find.
So then, I contain multitudes. I love cigarettes. I hate cigarettes. I have been smoking cigarettes on and off since I was a teenager. I have been quitting for five years—which is to say: I have smoked regularly for five years, but with more guilt.
Here is where, in theory, I should say: The problem with smoking is that it is obviously addictive. The issue is nothing more complicated than my brain is broken. But recently, I read a forthcoming book from Princeton University Press by Hanna Pickard, What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? A Philosophy of Addiction. It has changed my understanding of my habits—and maybe it will change yours, too.
First, let me point out something Pickard makes clear in her work: Addiction is heterogeneous. Your relationship with drugs—from the crippling ones to the caffeine in coffee—might not be what I am describing here. In this piece, I’m saying nothing to anyone but myself. So let us relinquish, as Pickard writes, “the idea of a universal explanation of addiction or underlying ‘essence’ that makes it what it is.”
Great. Unburdened, we can explore new ways to think about desire to the point of self-harm.
Pickard’s book disputes what she calls the brain model of addiction. In a famous study in 1985, researchers put rats in a container with a lever that gave them cocaine. “You will not be surprised,” Pickard writes, “the rats in this experiment took a lot of cocaine.”
A month later, the rats looked like our current view of addiction: They had stopped eating and drinking and had basically killed themselves. Thus, our stereotype of the addict is formed. “The rat relentlessly pressing the lever, the human whom drugs have made into a walking zombie,” Pickard writes, “these are the poster children of the currently dominant scientific paradigm of addiction, which sees it as a brain disease causing compulsive drug use.”
But, convenient as the model may be, is it true? Pickard doubts it. Think about the situation the rats found themselves in. Imagine you were alone in a cage with nothing but cocaine. What would you do? You’re basically being tortured. There’s nothing to do but coke; it is the only relief as you “live for weeks on end without any respite from the boredom, the loneliness, the misery, and the suffering.”
It took years for scientists to run the same experiment, but with other options. The results were stunning. What about when rats were given the option of a social reward? “They found that, when given a choice between pressing a lever for methamphetamine or heroin or pressing a lever to get one minute of playtime with another rat, almost 100 percent of the rats—including those who showed every indication of addiction-like behavior…chose to press for playtime with the other rat.”
Pickard concludes something that felt revolutionary, for me at least, to read: Many times, drug use is “the misery of a life where addiction is the best thing on offer.”
Feeling bowled over by this, I emailed her to make sure I understood her argument. “The brain disease model claims that addiction IS a brain disease. I think this is not what addiction is,” she explains. “I think it is a pattern of drug use that has gone wrong.” The question then becomes, she says, “Why is a person using drugs when doing so is so destructive to them?”
There are many answers to that question, Pickard notes. But they aren’t always as easy, or clear, or one size fits all. They have to do with self-identity, joy, habits, and the many, many strange complications of the self.
This paradigm shift really has helped me understand why I smoke. How much is my smoking about self-identity? How much is it about struggling toward concrete actions that make sense of myself to myself?
This insight has implications for broader research, too. “Keeping clearly in mind the idea that what we are trying to do is explain behavior—drug use gone wrong—is part of how we make sure we don’t sideline all possible explanations and end up focusing on only one,” Pickard told me over email. That means we can and should be thinking far beyond just the brain disease model for helping people who find themselves addicted. This allows research to continue to move beyond just sending money toward solving the brain model of addiction.
This year, what I found particularly monstrous about cigarettes was not all the stuff I already knew about them—how much they suck and hurt me and kill and profit big business—but also, how much I loved them anyway. I’ve come to see that it will be impossible for me to quit until I’ve accepted that the pain of cigarettes outweighs the good.
Reading Pickard, I felt empathy for those rodents. I have used cigarettes most when my life resembles that of a coked-up rat—feeling as though there is nothing else to do but smoke. When I am stuck in a situation in which being addicted feels like my best option for bringing a little novelty to my life, smoking is the easy way to get “happy.” I suppose it goes without saying that when I’m feeling good, not just about but in my life—when I am truly happy—I smoke less. The worst thing about being addicted to something, in the end, is that it has revealed how indifferent I have been to looking past a cloud of smoke to find a little fun.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.