LIGHT A CIGARETTE. Enfold your lips around the filter. Draw deeply, impregnating your lungs with smoke, and exhale. What has passed into the most intimate spaces of your body passes back out into the common world, a chemical fug exiting through nose and mouth. The smoke writhes and dissipates. In your hand, the cigarette inches towards the void, ash forming and falling like snowdrift. Sooty tang in your mouth. A sensation of pleasantly swirling. The world – or you – seems to jump a groove. You tap out an ash-dislodging rhythm, a cocktail of chemicals settling on your skin and seeping, in time, through it.

To smoke is to make yourself porous. It is also to expand yourself. Your lungs open to receive the incoming vapour. In turn, as the nicotine it contains hastens towards every organ, crossing the blood-brain barrier in a matter of seconds, your mind seems to reach out in an unencumbered embrace. Anguish and angst, all the accumulated regret and foreboding of the day, fall away for one exalted moment. You are present as you are not normally present, mindful of your fleshy existence – and, like that of the cigarette itself, its heroic finitude – with rare trenchancy. In his 1993 cult classic Cigarettes Are Sublime, the literary scholar Richard Klein writes that

the moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and a time of heightened attention that give rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.

What have you done to achieve this fleeting bliss, this sublime displacement of self? You have smoked a cigarette, perhaps ten puffs over the course of five or six minutes. If you are in Australia, where cigarettes are heavily taxed and frequently the object of other forms of government intervention, it has cost you something like two dollars for the privilege (as with any commodity tax, it is the end user who pays the price; in the case of cigarettes, this means predominantly poor and working-class people). It may also, according to one recent study published in the journal Addiction, have reduced your life expectancy by twenty minutes. Smoking may have begot a new interpersonal connection or caused your ostracisation, turned you into a social pariah or marked you as a gatekeeper of a coveted experience (more on these polarities later).

Findings like those in Addiction are indicative of a time and place convinced – and yet, judging by the numbing regularity with which they are published, not quite convinced enough – by the irredeemableness of cigarettes. This cottage industry, one assumes, is the precursor to the complete and final outlawing of cigarettes. (Already, the menthols I prefer to smoke have been banned, the predictable effect of which has been to drive the trade in black market cigarettes purchasable for as little as twenty dollars a packet.) I imagine there are, unlike in the case of, say, red wine or chocolate, few researchers attempting to quantify the pleasure and relief cigarettes give smokers, or the social rewards that flow from their use. Nobody any more seriously doubts that cigarettes are injurious. But it is not often that cigarettes are characterised as anything other than murderous, addictive ‘cancer sticks’, an exploitative product of a bygone era without benefits of any kind except to the multinationals churning them out and the governments taxing them to ever more outlandish degrees.

What is not well understood by those opposed to smoking is that the danger of cigarettes is not antithetical or even peripheral to their appeal – it is central to it. As Klein argues: ‘Healthism in America has sought to make longevity the principal measure of a good life. To be a survivor is to acquire moral distinction. But another view, a dandy’s perhaps, would say that living, as distinct from surviving, acquires its value from risks and sacrifices that tend to shorten life and hasten dying.’ No wonder that the cigarette dangled insouciantly from the corner of the mouth – an image still sufficiently chic to adorn the cover of the newest Bryan Ferry compilation – has defined the transgressive and coolly death-adjacent for several generations now. It cannot be a coincidence, either, that cigarettes code for the feminine and the sensual in a way that, for example, alcohol – that notorious thwarter of sexual performance – does not. That the phallic, post-coital cigarette should be the object of the new puritanism is hardly surprising in a culture that still, to paraphrase HL Mencken, remains haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, may be enjoying themselves.

I WAS REMINDED of the enlarging power of cigarettes while watching Sean Baker’s latest film, Anora. In one scene, the Russian henchman Igor (Yura Borisov), who has just effectively held the titular character (Mikey Madison) hostage in her own home, lights two cigarettes at once and offers one as a kind of olive branch to Anora. As in the Hays Code-era classic Now, Voyager, in which Paul Henreid’s Jerry habitually lights one cigarette for himself and one for Bette Davis’ Charlotte, this chivalric act betokens something more than chemical dependence: a dawning intimacy conjured through fire, smoke and the lip-grazed baton of the passed cigarette.

Although it too is a kind of social lubricant, you cannot say quite the same thing for alcohol, if only because you can smoke like a chimney and remain relatively dignified – a feat beyond most heavy drinkers, whose use of alcohol foments at best boorishness and at worst brutality. There is no question that cigarettes are overall deadlier than booze, but mortality rates alone do not tell the full story. According to a 2019 study published in the European Journal of Public Health, in England the costs to the National Health Service and wider society are significantly less for tobacco (£2.5 and £11 billion respectively) than alcohol (£3.5 and £21 billion). It isn’t hard to fathom why: when was the last time you heard of the police being called out to a tobacco-fuelled incident of intimate partner violence? As British gastroenterologist Chris Hawkey has observed, ‘compared to cigarettes, the effects of alcohol are worse because it destroys self-esteem and dignity before killing. This personal degradation and the accompanying family destruction does not generally occur with tobacco.’ 

If you want to make a friend, take a packet of cigarettes to a wedding. Find a quiet spot, removed enough from the wedding party to not attract the venue staff’s ire but not so much as to render yourself invisible, and note the inevitability with which your smoke signals draw a crowd of guests to you, descending like seagulls around a morsel of food. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve burned through packets this way, chronic non-smokers fiending for a hit like the most dedicated tabagist. Neither a wholly private nor public act, smoking once brought together people in the workplace too under the auspices of the ‘smoko’, the short, parenthetical downing of tools once symbolic of working culture – and, for a time, protected by industrial relations laws – and now vilified as unhealthy and unproductive. Yet I’ve heard more than a few actors wistfully recall the days when rehearsals would regularly spill out onto the fire escape amid a haze of cigarette smoke, the ensuing tobacco-loosened conversations every bit as generative as the rehearsal-room work itself. And can it be a coincidence that smoking rates peaked in the early to mid-twentieth century, a time of extraordinary cultural achievement and artistic vanguardism?

NONE OF THIS, of course, will be lamented when the last cigarette is figuratively crushed underfoot by a future health minister. What we have lost will be framed as insignificant next to what we have gained: more life and yet, somehow, less of it. Klein argued that the popularity of cigarettes waxes and wanes in proportion to our fears and anxieties about world events. If so, we can expect smoking rates to surge as multiple crises – climate change, global authoritarianism, various intractable wars and their resultant fissures and displacements – converge and deepen. I wonder too if the surfeit of technology in our lives, the increasing collapse between the virtual and the real and the flourishing of all kinds of simulacra – vegan ‘meat’, alcohol-free wine and beer, decaffeinated coffee and, yes, the electronic cigarette – is kindling a longing for pre-digital experience, for the unmediated and visceral. What could be more real, in an era that has produced a whole class of ultra-rich creeps obsessed with extending the human lifespan, than chipping off a few minutes of our increasingly artificially extended lives by drawing a fiery cocktail of poisons into our brutely phenomenal bodies? By heightening rather than merely prolonging life, the cigarette both mirrors and intertwines with the ephemerality that, in terms Silicon Valley’s tech-utopian optimiser bros should understand, is not a bug but a feature of the human condition. A cigarette smoked infinitely, like a life without end, does not bear thinking about.

Photograph by Lex Williams, courtesy of Flickr Commons