What is that which starts innocently, fashionably, seductively… gives you an instant high and makes you feel more of a man? Which has an unmistakable air of style when you do it? Where, after you have done it, you notice you have changed subtly, notice a certain superior attitude? Something so pervasive, so very mature?
You guessed wrong. It’s not sex. It’s lighting up your first cigarette. To millions of youngsters who shove a cancer stick in their mouth and light up for the first time in their lives, the initial experience is always heady and fashionable. Don’t filmstars, rock stars, celebrities do it? For a kid who is 15 or 16, it’s a sure sign of having arrived. Statutory warnings be damned. The stuff is cheap, smart, accesible.
But that’s how it was designed to be in the beginning. Romantic and smooth. Very few smokers remember that they coughed like crazy the first time they pulled smoke into their lungs. That cough was a sure indication that their body rejected the tar, nicotine and a hundred other chemicals; rejected it with all its power, as emphatically as it could. But they overruled the natural response of their intelligence and forced their lungs to suck in the smoke again and again. Until the carefully designed poisons worked their way into the blood stream and brain. There the chemicals would hook on to receptors and created addictive memories that would remain for a lifetime.
A teenager writes wanting to know how many cigarettes a day does it take to get hooked for life. In most cases, just one is enough. It leaves a distinct scar, and triggers a craving, where you start feeling uneasy, irritable, angry and confused until you light up again. How long will the addiction last, he wants to know. Till you are diagnosed with throat cancer, I guess. But even that is not enough of a deterrent. I know people who smoked even after getting cancer, bravely coughing and choking all the way till the end.
His last question, how do I quit, has no ready answer. Dear friend, getting hooked is easy. Quitting is near impossible. Maybe your girlfriend can kick your butt till you quit. After all your mouth is bound to taste and smell like a stale ashtray. Your clothes are bound to stink like mad. Your teeth will be streaked black, your fingertips stained yellow. I can’t imagine her kissing you and feeling nice or holding you behind a moving bike and not getting the odour. Yes, that’s the answer.
Find a girl who hates smokers. Go on your knees to be accepted. Plead that you want to quit but haven’t got the nerve. Ask to be whacked each time you light up. It’s bound to help because parental counselling is of no use. Teachers are of no consequence. You know far better than the fuzzy old generation dudes, of course. But the buck stops with a girlfriend. Smokers don’t need counselling. They need whacking until they quit. Yes. That’s your answer.
And remember, you need to quit for at least a year before you consider yourself out of the danger zone. During that year, stay clear of other smokers, avoid stag parties, and fill your mind with the notion that smokers suck.
Smokers are losers. It doesn’t matter if they succeed in other things. They will pay a heavy price for their addiction one day. The last years of their life will be spent in painful agony. You don’t want to be one of them.
The writer is a film director