A Few Smoking Quotations and the Maverick on Nicotine

“I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”  --C.S. Lewis, On the Incarnation

“No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sort of mad modesty; a desire to melt the separate soul into the mass of unpretentious masculinity. It is a clamorous confession of the weakness of all flesh. No man must be superior to the things that are common to men. This sort of equality must be bodily and gross and comic. Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.” 
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

"I drink a great deal.  I sleep a little, and I smoke cigar after cigar.  That is why I am in two-hundred-percent form."  --Winston Churchill

"Adolf Hitler's life style is simple.  He never drinks alcohol and does not smoke."  --Heinrich Hoffman

"The church of liberalism must have its demons, and his name is 'tobacco.'  --The Maverick Philosopher

The Case for Nicotine

Nicotine is the main psychoactive ingredient in tobacco, and a most delightful and useful ingredient it is, especially for us Luftmenschen.  I am thinking of the chess players who make Luft, not war, and of the philosophers whose thoughts are characteristically lofty and luftig even if at times nebelig.  Nicotine is good for cognitive functioning, increasing both memory and attention.  Studies on humans and lab animals show this to be the case.  But we connoisseurs of the noble weed know this to be so without the help of studies. Experientia docet. 

The drawback, of course, is that nicotine may be the most highly addictive substance on earth–more addictive than crack cocaine or heroin, and a more difficult addiction to shake, Rezvani said.

Why is that? First, it binds with the receptors in the brain for acetylcholine, one of our most important neurotransmitters and the first ever discovered. Second, because nicotine is usually inhaled, via cigarettes and now e-cigarettes, it hits the brain almost immediately.

“One reason for it being so addictive is that as soon as you smoke, you see the reward,” Rezvani said. The same is true of crack cocaine, he said.

The quotation 'smacks' of wild liberal exaggeration.  It reeks of the Big Lie.  People have been parroting that Everett Koop line for years.  Remember that bow-tied sawbones who occupied the most useless office in the land, that of Surgeon General, from 1981 to 1989?  Surely it is nonsense to say that nicotine is more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine.  In fact, I will go one better:  It is not addictive in any serious sense at all. But of course it all depends on what exactly is meant by 'addiction,' a word I have yet to see any anti-tobacco ideologue explain.  It is a word that is used and overused and abused in all sorts of promiscuous connections.

You say you're addicted to nicotine?  Well, if I paid you a million dollars to go one month without smoking, would you be able to do it? Of course you would.  But if you had been shooting heroin daily for years and were addicted, and I made the same offer, would you be able to collect?  No way!  This is of course an empirical question, but some empirical questions can be answered from the armchair.  This assumes that you have experience of life and some common sense, a commodity in short supply among liberals.  It would be very interesting to set up an experiment, but you would need some moneybags to bankroll it.  Anybody out there want to pony up 200 million USD?  Do the experiment using 100 two-pack per day cigarette smokers and 100 heroin addicts who shoot up daily.  You get a million bucks if you go a month without indulging.  You will of course be under close surveillance.  I predict the following outcome.  90 - 100% of the smokers but only 0-10% of the 'smackers' would collect.

And now for some anecdotal evidence, which is, after all, evidence: 'anecdotal' is not here functioning as analienans adjective.

I have been smoking cigars and pipes for 45 years or so.  Time was when I smoked two loads of pipe tobacco per diem, all the way down, and it was strong stuff.  In Turkey where I lived for a year in the '90s I bought a Meerschaum pipe and I smoked an unconscionable quantity of the meanest shit there is, straight Turkish.  Stateside the stuff is used sparingly as a seasoning in blends.  I don't recommend it straight.  Might blow your head clean off.  Mine is still intact, thank you very much.

Now here's my point:  if nicotine is addictive, then surely I ought to be addicted.  But I'm not.  I smoke only when I decide to, nowadays, less than one cigar per week.  But I smoke the sucker down to the bitter end, reducing the whole of it to smoke and ashes.  "But doesn't it burn your fingertips?"  Not if I tamp it down into a smoking pipe.  The finale is mighty rasty and loaded with nicotine.  And I am still not addicted.

I am not an isolated exception.  There are all the two-pack-a day cigarette smokers who just up and quit of their free will without a federal program or a 'patch' or somebody holding their hand.  I'm thinking of my father, and aunts and uncles, and brother-in-law, and hundreds of others.  And they smoked unfiltered Camels and Lucky Strikes, not the pussy brands abroad in the land today. 

Now suppose I was smoking crack cocaine or mainlining heroin for the last 45 years.  I'd mostly like be dead, but if I weren't I would be addicted in a serious sense of that word. So there is just no comparison.  It's a bullshit comparison that only a willfully nescient liberal could love.

Can you call a substance 'addictive' if only some people become 'addicted' to it?  I say No.  In the case of nicotine, it is not the substance that is addictive but the user who allows himself of his own free will to become 'addicted.'  (Those are 'sneer' quotes by the way.)  You say you have an 'addictive personality'?  I'm going to question that too.  You are most likely just looking for an excuse.  Why not say you lack self-discipline and that you refuse to take yourself in hand; that instead of doing those things, you blame your problems on something outside of yourself, whether tobacco or tobacco companies, or 'society'?

The case for nicotine, then, is that it is a sovereign enhancer of cognitive functioning.  And you can get it without smoking cigarettes or using snuff.  I recommend that you stay away from cigarettes and snuff.

There is a lot to say on this topic and lot of liberal nonsense to dispose of.  But I'll end today with this aphorism:

The church of liberalism must have its demon and his name is 'tobacco.'