Back when I was in secondary school, the cool kids used to smoke in the leisure centre car park every lunchtime, puffing diligently away outside the auspices of the college. Rebellious and rugged, they were an impressive crowd; they could really spit on the floor with authority and poise. For a while, I really wanted to be one of them.
But my parents (aided by my early adoption of atheism and a concomitant terror of human mortality) had done a good job. With sonorous tones and sad eyes my mother and father had skilfully implied that if I ever started smoking they would be disappointed. They would be very, very disappointed.
And so I never did. I never even tried it once, and I still haven’t. Yes, I am that much of a square.
A lot of my friends, however, did try it. Devoid of my shield of godlessness and grimacing guardians they escaped from the claustrophobia of peer pressure. And inevitably, while still teenagers, they became addicted. Slowly and insidiously they became physically, mentally and habitually addicted.
Most remain so. Countless attempts to quit have proved fruitless. A few days, a week, even a month may occasionally be battled through without the nicotine hits their body demands, but, eventually, a drunken lapse will draw them back into the comfort of the familiar: beer in one hand, fag in the other, a pleasant feeling in the stomach that this is how it is all supposed to be.
In all my twenty-two years I have never witnessed a long-term smoker successfully give up the fags first hand. It’s a perniciously addictive drug. People become hooked and they cannot give up. It’s as simple as that.
So why don’t we cut them a little slack? Because it seems to me that nicotine addicts have become the latest in a long line of demographics that it’s now acceptable to be malicious towards. Recent additions to the pantheon include skinny famous women, castigated almost universally for being bad role models for young girls. But some people are just skinny – their metabolism will not allow them to put on weight. It shouldn’t be any more acceptable to harangue them about it than it is to shout “Hey, fatty, lay off the lard” to someone overweight.
Incredibly stupid people, famously, have become the most fashionable hate group. But people so unintelligent that they cannot express their feelings of inferiority and anger in any other way than through bullying deserve our sympathy, not our scorn. Jade might be a hideous bully, but she’s a stupid hideous bully, not a racist hideous bully, and the media shrieks slandering her should be of far more concern to us than anything that went on in the Big Brother House.
At the Cardiff AGM this year, smoking was the hot topic. A motion to spend £50,000 on shelters to accommodate smokers when the ban on April 2 comes into effect was debated vociferously before, finally, the decision was put off until November. What caught my attention, however, was an accompanying motion that proposed smoking should not be allowed on Union premises, including all steps and balconies. Smokers, like in my college days of old, would be consigned to huddle away from their educational establishment, never to sully its walls with tar-tinged breath again.
Thankfully, these plans were defeated through the democratic vote, but the fact that they were even mooted epitomises this worrying trend of oppression. Smokers are not pariahs; they are normal people who just happen to be addicted to a drug. I would suggest that forcing them onto the streets to satisfy their habit would likely cause more stress and resentment (and a correspondingly augmented intake of nicotine), as opposed to weaning them off the drug, as the ban will hopefully do for some.
It is right that people should not be able to smoke in enclosed spaces. It is right, also, that we do not spend £50,000 on shelters to accommodate smokers. But to propose such draconian measures as shunning cigarettes from the Union steps and balconies is as ridiculous as the rhetoric heard at the AGM: “Students who smoke obviously have money to burn so they can build their own shelters.”
They don’t have money to burn. I repeat: they are addicted. We should all give them a break. It can’t be easy satisfying a craving that eats away at both wallet and lungs. So, while we’re all rejoicing that the stench of ash will soon no longer permeate our wardrobes, let’s take time to hug a smoker, because very soon things for them are going to get pretty tough.
