I live downtown. This could be any Canadian City, but this Canadian City happens to be Vancouver. (be in awe!). The third largest city in Canada. A city fabled for it's mountains, forest and sea, where you can play golf in January and even in December. A city congested with condominium towers that are now blocking the view of our glorious mountains. The city with Canada's poorest postal code, which includes our legendary Downtown Eastside. A city where it is believed that Vancouver will be catapulted to World Class status if we only build higher towers and relax our liquor laws, rather like waving a magic wand or uttering an incantation (I believe these are now called "affirmations"), or following Dorothy's example, closing our eyes and clicking our heels together three times and saying over and over "World Class City, World Class City, World Class City". A World-Class Wannabe.
These are themes that I would like to cover in future posts. Right now I would like to focus on public smoking. As we all know smoking indoors was banned in this city in the early 90's and soon they followed suit for restaurants, cafes, bars, café and restaurant patios, parks, doorways, and bus shelters. Now the remaining smokers have been driven onto the sidewalk (Gasp! Choke!). I think you've already figured out where I am going with this. They can be seen singly or in pairs or in small groups huddled in all kinds of inclement weather outside of doorways (hopefully outside of the legal three metre limit) or on street corners, or, worse, walking on the sidewalk right in front of you. They look sad, dejected, unwanted. Like the kids in gym class who didn't get picked for volley ball. Like social outcasts they adamantly wave their toxic stick in the air, as though it is a vile incense that they offer up as a diabolical form of prayer, their eyes glazed with that primal, reptilian-brain sourced gratification of a freshly staunched craving, less aware than passers-by of their intermittent fits of choking, coughing and hacking.
I wonder if smoking on sidewalks will ever be banned. I hope so, though I'm not sure how likely or practical this would be. No one is going to quit unless they really want to. Getting a smoker, or any addict to quit unwillingly is like trying to force Gollum to relinquish his "Precious!". Not all the free patches, gum and lozenges in the world seem to be enough to entice them. The very poor, who are smokers (and they make up the highest disproportionate ratio for smokers in Canada) are a particularly sorry sight. Far from actually quitting, since they cannot stretch their welfare cheque, realistically, to pay ten dollars a day ($300 a month) to fund their habit, many will pick up butts from the pavement, and harvest the tobacco or even smoke them as they are. Only from their cold dead fingers will you be able to pry their cigarettes from them. I still sometimes give money to pan-handlers, by the way, but I always draw the line at beggars who smoke. If they can afford to not quit their habit then surely they don't need help from me.
I am hoping that the e-cigarette will eventually catch on in this country, though Health Canada in their habitual idiocy is moving to have them banned, which would be a tragic mistake. Here is what I would propose: Make e-cigarettes widely available, even more available than the smokin' kind. Eventually replace the smokin' kind with e-cigarettes. Monitor the users and in small steps try to grandfather them towards quitting. Sure, smokers are going to remain addicted. Remember what I said? They are not going to quit until they want to. But in the meantime the only way to go is towards harm reduction, and this means harm being reduced just as much for the passive recipients as for the smokers themselves. Smoker gets her nicotine fix and passer by doesn't have to stop breathing while trying to enjoy a sidewalk stroll. "Oh, but the unknown health effects of nicotine!" bleat the naysayers of Health Canada. Oh, but the falling rates of lung cancer and emphysema and heart disease which is never going to occur as long as the addicts have easy access to cigarettes.
There is a subtheme I would also like to explore here: Smoking as metaphor. Tobacco smoke is toxic as well as unpleasant. The addict must have his fix, public health be damned. Even momentary exposure to second-smoke has been shown to be potentially dangerous. I have had to make the practice of dodging smokers in public into almost a science. Every day when I am out, I am trying to avoid inhaling it, sometimes feeling (and even appearing) as though I am practicing the steps for some bizarre folk-dance. It is worse when they are walking ahead of me. If they are going a bit faster than I am I try to stop or slow down for a while until the smoke is out of my reach. If that isn't possible I will run ahead of them. I used to try to make a righteous statement about it, but publicly shaming people only reinforces their bad behaviour and it also makes an ass of me, so I am almost cured of doing this. Sometimes I will cross over to the other side of the street. I know, this all sounds very neurotic and practically obsessive-compulsive, but honestly, I know that this is a health hazard and I have come to highly resent feeling held hostage to other people's mindless and selfish bad habit. I also lost my mother to lung cancer (guess how she got it?) and I have worked in palliative care looking after other casualties of the tobacco habit. So, please don't bore me about smokers' rights. There are no such things as smokers' rights. Nobody has the right to threaten and jeopardize other people's health through their own addiction and their stubborn selfish refusal to come to terms with it.
And yet, there was a time when smoking everywhere was perfectly normal and publicly accepted. Recently I was watching on Youtube vintage episodes of the Twilight Zone. Everyone smoked. Everywhere. Even doctors in front of their patients. That was in the late fifties and early sixties. Both my parents smoked. I grew up in a house where the air was constantly saturated with tar, nicotine and other air-borne carcinogens. Smoking was cool. The younger you started the better your street cred (and sadly, this moronic self-destructive behaviour is still very common among young teenagers.) The culture of smoking as a socially and publicly approved activity goes back centuries, four hundred years at least. It is going to take more than one generation to change this. Of course it might also be argued that we have swung too far to the other extreme concerning our current obsession with health and wellness. The smokers' rights brigade often makes this charge, that anti-smokers are simply obsessed and intolerant and that we have a neurotic terror of death. Fair enough.
What really makes me marvel is the absolute selfishness of smokers. This is an addiction. Being an addiction makes it an illness. Smokers are sick people. To me the practice of smoking in public is disturbingly metaphoric of human toxicity. That through even the most passive, innocuous action, or lack of action that we can actually harm others. This is a very unfortunate and frightening feature of our humanity, the shadow side of our humanity. It also shows that we are all interconnected. Yes, it is your life, but your life and your choices are going to impact on my life and vice-versa. In Latin America there is a saying: Your individual rights end where those of your neighbour begin. We are all entangled together in the same sparkling and lurid web of life. To me smoking has become symbolic of human sinfulness, but not in the glamorous, rebel-chic form manifested in Hollywood icons such as James Dean or Marlene Dietrich. I am thinking here of the black and white poster of the haggard old woman with dishevelled hair and lit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. The caption? "Smoking is very glamorous." It is also a metaphor of the way we behave and affect one another through our bad attitudes and selfish indifference. Why, even my bad attitude towards smokers can be every bit as toxic as the second hand smoke I am trying not to ingest. They are after all human beings, like me, made in the same image of the same God that I was, and some of them are actually even nicer and kinder people than I am.
Smoking represents a universal death wish. An urge towards self-destruction that is often hidden in our deepest unconscious but nevertheless often rears subtly like a subterranean serpent hungry and ready to swallow us alive. It isn't done simply because it is pleasurable, and really, what is so pleasurable about chronic hacking? Or filling your mouth, throat, and lungs with toxic, foul tasting smoke? Or never being able to taste and appreciate food or enjoy the sweet fresh air after the rain? Neither do people refrain from quitting because it is an addiction, though it is and one so powerful that it simply staggers the imagination that it was never outlawed along with heroin and cocaine. The urge to smoke, just like the desire to get drunk, inject heroin, smoke crack, snort cocaine, or go on eating binges is nothing less than a manifestation of Thanatos, the death instinct. I think that the real key to smoking cessation, just as it is with giving up other addictions, lies in regaining and rediscovering a fresh love of life, to embrace the life force, to recover our innocence and our spirituality, to become, not in the words of the fundamentalist Christians, but of Jesus Christ himself, spiritually born again. I am not about to suggest how this could happen because the scope of this essay is really too small to contain this theme, plus, I really don't have a clue. I have my own walk with God, my spiritual path, but I cannot tell others how to conduct their own. But if there is anything in this article I have just written that could perhaps provoke someone, inspire them, challenge them or even make them good and angry enough to do something constructive with their lives then I can gladly say that this blog is already beginning to serve a good purpose.
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