Dear Tobacco,

I learned a new term for you today. Or, rather, I learned a new word for Cigarette. It was a brief comment in the middle of a well written rant/blog that identified 'cigarette' as a capitalistic term, and that really all they are are tobacco rolls... tobacco rolls that sometimes have filters.

It makes sense that the term 'cigarette' is a marketing term in addition to the description of a mini cigar. So who thought up the term 'cigarello' then?

I doubt I'll make the verbal transition to using the term tobacco roll instead of cigarette, but I will try to incorporate that term into my letters to you.

Since Eric's death and my starting letters to you I've noticed you a lot more. The litter you help generate, the way you convince people that they need you, they way that your Addicted Truth is a lot like the same Addicted Truth that alcoholics and other drug addicts use, and that you often bring out the worst in people.

Remembering the ways that I've been impacted by you has been an enlightening and depressing journey. Everyone I know has had to consciously decide how they want to be involved with you. Everyone I know has a stance on you. Everyone I know hates you, or loves to hate you even though they smoke. I can't remember meeting someone who says they love to smoke, though I would probably silently pity anyone who did say that knowing their belief that they love you is an Addicted belief. You have this disgusting amount of power over people and this world - it's a toxic power that pulls the wool over so many eyes.

It's not just tobacco rolls that people turn to.. there are lots of ways to imbibe in your seductiveness, be it snuff or smokeless or whatever. Now I've got to think about what to call snuff and smokeless - perhaps powdered tobacco and shredded lip tobacco?

I get tired thinking about you, but it's worth it. It's worth it to keep talking to you so that I don't get tempted to go near you. So that I can help others see how you hypnotize us with your smoky haze. I'm not really giving you 'the time of day' when I write these letters, rather I'm acknowledging you and coming to a conscious stance against you. I am conscious of you, and look forward to seeing less and less of you.

Someday I might get to say 'bon riddance' to you, but in the mean time you'll be hearing from me in these letters.

Stay tuned; not that you're going anywhere....

Dear Tobacco,

One thing you've got going for you is that you seem to treat everyone equally.

Going to a private High School on Vancouver Island gave me a wealth of opportunity to observe how you impact everyone with the same non-bias we all wish we had for the world. Be it the wise old instructor, the young 8th Grader, to the girl on the Greyhound bus in Vancouver - they all had relationships with you and all taught me things about you I hadn't thought about before. We'll talk about each of them in time.

The girl on the Greyhound wasn't anyone I knew, but she embodied everything I wanted to be at 16. I couldn't even tell you now what she was wearing then, but the sense I get when I remember her is one of patchoulie and hemp, cotton, leather, and earth. I think she had a hat, like a berrett, and had at least a sling bag (the big droopy kind that sways against your hip when you walk) if not a back-pack too. She was probably 18, and she was alone.

I've always admired solitary travellers. They know what they want, they are solely responsible for attending to their own needs, and they must be the ones to ask to make anything happen. It's an empowering thing to be able to walk confidently when travelling - even if you're totally lost :-)

The Greyhound had a 15 minute stop at the ferry terminal in which people could get out to stretch their legs before the ferry boarded. The hippie girl got out for a smoke. It was from her that I learned how to 'save a smoke' for next time, how to conserve you so that she could get another moment with you and that cigarette.

I observed her cherishing those moments with you, and then as we were called onto the bus she took one final romantic drag and then carefully pinched the tip (also known as the Cherry, as I learned later) so that the burning ember at the end fell to the pavement leaving only ready-to-burn tobacco left in her hand. She then popped the smoke back into the pack and brought herself and the scent of her satisfaction (you) back onto the bus.

This, to me and my 16 year old eyes - the ones that had only began to flirt with you - this was brilliant. Ingenious. It meant that there were no ashes, less stink in the pack, no squishing the end of the smoke, and no risk of the ember keeping burning. What a great trick!

I couldn't tell you if I ever employed this trick, but I did learn something about conservation and human nature that day. Humans savour their vices, and like to prolong them. If this means learning a new trick or developing a new tool we will! That girl was actually thinking ahead as to how to conserve her smokes either for reasons of money, addiction, availability, or whatnot... that mentality is impossible to ingrain in most kids most of the time, yet once you get them hooked on something they will find ways of keeping it around.

Pokemon might be addictive, but at least it doesn't coat everything it comes near in a haze of toxicity.

Dear Tobacco,

Heather didn't think twice about you when she was working at the smoke filled restaurant that led to her cancer, but now that she's gone all I can hope is that her last thoughts didn't even give you the time of day.

She had a voice. At least her voice will live on despite you doing all you did to choke her.

globeandmail.com : Waitress who got cancer from second-hand smoke dies: "Heather Crowe, known as the face of Canada's anti-smoking movement, has succumbed to lung cancer in Ottawa at the age of 61.
The long-time waitress, who never smoked, is widely known for television ads in which she describes how she contracted cancer from second-hand smoke at the restaurant where she worked for 40 years"

Dear Tobacco,

I see you around a lot.

Enough already.

  

Dear Tobacco,

I've received my first letter to you from one of the folks that I found online.

He's going through a lot to try to get you out of his life, and it's a hard journey. The awareness alone of how addiction is different for each person is so apparent in his letter, I only hope you're listening. Either way, I think he's rid of you a little differently now than he was the first few tries.

Here's hoping.

Dear Tobacco,

Since the age of 12 you have ravaged my lungs with your carbon sandpaper.

With the carrot of nicotine and the comfort of sucking, you turned me into your willing slave.

I escaped for seven years; under stress at medical school, of all places, I relapsed into that concentration only nicotine provides. They didn't have patches or gum back then.

There was another three years in my thirties when I escaped your ashen clutches, but after my back surgery failed and I was in constant pain, I said, "What the hell, who wants to live? Give me a cigarette."

Afterwards six months off here, six months there, but I could never completely escape the spurs you had dug so deep in my brain.

Now I've got two months and I'm not going back. You are a great whore but a lousy master. I want to stay far from your bordello and your plantation.

I am not stronger than you, but pain is, and the pain of coughing and shortness of breath finally did me in. For me to smoke is to be sick. At the end I threw up when I sampled you on an empty stomach in the morning.

I will always envy those who can have a cigarette only when they go out to a bar, those who can keep a pack in a plastic bag in the freezer for weeks like my brother. It boggles my mind that any human could have such power over your black magic. Then there are exceptions to every addiction.

The best I can ever hope is to be a non-smoker, because, as you well know, I will always be a smoker at heart. They still smell good (Damn you!).

Should this ever change, I will have the brand removed from my forehead and proclaim myself "free." Until then I wave a wooden cross at you.

Thanks for the good time, but the price of your burning was always too high.

Go with God,

C. E. Chaffin M.D FAAFP
Editor, The Melic Review
www.melicreview.com/

Dear Tobacco,

I've found a blog from a local that has been documenting some of his experiences with you. I really like the raw honesty, anger, pleasure, and reality of how you and he get along.

Perhaps you want to read it too?

Smoking - RaVeN's Nest - A Pagan's Rite - by Raven

I'll tell you there really is nothing like that first cup of coffee with a cigarette in the morning. It's the breakfast of champions. Caffine and nicotine - perfect together. Like a family reunion. There really is nothing to open your eyes like the "ine" sisters.

Dear Tobacco,

People get really good at finding ways to make their relationship with you more ritualistic & personal.

Derick was my Mom's brother who passed away earlier this year of a heart attack, likely a shriveled liver, tired lungs, and loneliness. His wife, Nicola, preceded his death a few years ago as a result of a swift encounter with pancreatic cancer. They are, as a result of Derick's death, the first 'couple' to both have died in our family other than his parents having died many years earlier - as well as the first couple that both took their addiction to you with them to the grave.

Derick was successful well before many of his siblings. He took an opportunity to sell his business to retire early and travel the land with Nicola. They became nomadic - investing in fancy 5th Wheel campers, staying in small towns RV parks for months, and generally just seeing everything they could together and enjoying life.

Even before I could judge right from wrong I remember my sister and I being completely fascinated by the process those two had for rolling their own cigarettes. Nicola had crafted a little assembly line for portioning, dividing, stuffing, packing, and packaging their smokes. She even hand-made the little board & gizmo that handled all the tobacco so that she could prep and roll about 20 at a time... a work of genius, really.

You helped open up her imagination so that she could maximize her time spent on/with you. If only she had as much confidence in herself as you did. Even Derick was as meticulous with you as she was - it was like the first thing they had in common. Maybe you were the first thing they had in common.

Maybe you're like the third angel sitting on our shoulders. The one that says "Hey, forget those Goog & Evil pussies, I'm where it's at!". You're sort of in your own little third dimension, hovering above the ability to reason, to rationalize right and wrong, pulling on the reigns that control either usual angel.

My sister and I were somehow given permission to assist with the rolling ritual. So we learned how much to pinch and where to sprinkle you, and then where to place the tubes so that nothing went awry. So that the brand name was facing just right. Lastly we got to finalize the process of the gizmo by sliding it together like an old credit card machine with a usually-smooth cha-lunk.

I didn't get to go to their funerals. I wouldn't have asked about that contraption either, but I wonder where it ended up. Burned, hopefully.

How did it feel to get them, too?

Dear Tobacco,

You don't ask anything of your subjects other than utter devotion.

Sure, they can carry on their lives 'as normal' and all they have to do is devote anywhere from 10 minutes to even two hours of each day to time with you. You don't care if someone double-tasks, as long as you're part of the action. Like the businessman sitting at home, with the kids in the other room, shuffling through paperwork on the kitchen table. A dark Hollywood-like spotlight might seem to form around him from the potlight above as you dance around the table in gentle wafts, careful to spread out as you creep around the home looking for unsuspecting items to cling to... like cloth, walls, windows, furniture, lungs. You have to leave an impression on anything that might give him reason to not need you, or anything that might make him realize he is stronger than you when he has the right support.

He's allowed to keep you around and get work done; with you convincing him the whole time that he's not putting you in the wrong hands. He is, however, putting you into the wrong lungs. Any lungs. And he's letting you bathe his whole existence in you... to help keep the haze in this head as well as his body.

The irony? Is that much of the smoke he leaves around him literally leaves from him.

Talk about a breath of poison air...

Dear Tobacco,

I just can't seem to escape you.

I went for a walk at lunch yesterday with a colleague of mine. It's Spring, and so we decided to risk the breeze in exchange for the sunshine and headed out the large main doors of the building to get to our favourite perimeter sidewalk. Not three steps out and I was reminded that you're always there...


It was like walking through a ghost. I felt you, smelled you, saw you, tasted you, and instantly - again - I loathed you. Swarms of hypnotized teens and adults were laughing and talking their way through the fact that a cloud of your waste was hovering over, in, and around them. They were nursing each other through a few minutes of semi-ignorant bliss.

I couldn't help think of the rush the Bison must have felt running in thunderous herds, lungs flexing & blood pumping, nostrils flaring & comradery abound only to find their deaths (sometimes slow) on top of the corpses of those that ran before them. The haze you held over the people I passed yesterday shadowed, to me, the dust and fellowship that blinded the Bison to their own demise, and reeked of the souls you've taken before.

I guess you don't have any qualms about making sure they don't see ahead of each dose. No light at the end of the tunnel with you - at least not the kind of light people would like to see.

Dear Tobacco,

Statistics are fun. They whitewash evils, expose trends, identify key points, distract, clarify, and they support - and that's just getting started. I'd say they have agendas, purpose, and want to give merit to whatever they attach themselves to.

One might even say that 100% of them are a result of articulating characteristics inherent to the subject, often with the intent of awareness and/or definition. I'm talking out my multi-syllabic ass here, but you like to do that too so I bet you're following along fine right now. Try to keep up.

We both know you're no stranger to statistics. It's one of those games that you talk people into playing - even if those folks are racking up the Karma points and can't quite figure out why they might not feel happy about their role in life in doing so. The anti-tobacco side of course likes statistics as much as the next guy, and certainly does a good job of making you look bad. But, as you seem always capable of doing, you can't just be bad... you have to be 'good ok by means of a massaged statistic' and by 'right' as in 'Consumers have the right to ignore everything else because I, Tobacco, am just that alluring'. As such, countless groups, websites and studies battle for the best statistic yet.

It's as though you use statistics to justify the logic of addicts. The only thing though, as many a person near an addict might attest, is that Tobacco robs humans of the ability to justify what is best for themselves as a whole. The whole might be relating to body, soul, environment, expectancy around lifespan, overall health, or impact on others - the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts, too. The whole might be the impact that you continue to have on Eric's family, even after his death.

Addicted Logic is then Impaired Logic. Addicted Logic lets people feel ok about their choices on the surface. Addicted Logic is thus inherently biased, and must be understood as coming from a place where that logic can't necessarily be trusted to be capable of impartiality. It's like that woman I met recently that still struggles to stay quit. How else can she, a mother, swear to her kids & partner that she has quit smoking and then still find herself hiding by the garage to get in a drag? I know she meant it when she said it, but it's as though her ability to tell the truth and keep a promise such as that is equally marred by you to become an Addicted Truth. Addicted Truth often leads to broken promises, and broken hearts.

Well dear Tobacco, your logic is impaired, and your truths are loaded. you are what you are, and as such I believe you are addicted to yourself.

So go on and get your minions to tell me that there aren't studies that show direct health damage due to 30 minutes of second hand smoke - yet. Tell me again how you weren't the key player in Eric's cancer. Go on and tell me that I am not listening to your logic, and that I should just suck it up. I know better though.

I know now that you operate under what I've now come to understand as Tobacco Logic. And what a skewed, self-perpetuating, and tainted Logic that is - inherently ;-)