Smoking: UK We Love Cigarettes

Tobacco killjoys are less healthy than the smokers they ban
October 17, 2014
David Hockney
Spiteful restrictions mean any place meant for pleasure is now off-limits, writes David Hockney
LONDON, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 07: Artist David Hockney poses for photographs with a cigarette at The Royal Academy of Arts on September 7, 2011 in London, England. Hockney is promoting an exhibition of his landscape paintings ‘David Hockney: A Bigger Picture’ which runs from January 21 to April 9, 2012. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
So the mean-spirited are at it again. I’ll repeat: the mean spirited and the utterly humourless are at it again, this time with a proposal to extend the ban on lighting up in public places to include parks. No more sitting down to contemplate and have a cigarette; no more enjoying a walk and a smoke in some of our finest public spaces. I suppose now instead you’ve got to jog and show just how healthy you are. It’s all madness.
I remember the time I used to walk up through Holland Park to Lucian Freud’s studio. Seeing the black rabbits playing on the grass I sat down to watch them, and lit a cigarette. Then some magpies joined them and I was enjoying it. Then along came three girls jogging, who on seeing me smoking gave me a no-no salute. I pondered them and noticed they had not seen the magpies or the rabbits. They thought they were very healthy, but I thought I was healthier.
They were obsessed with their own bodies. When people are jogging they are thinking of body management; when you walk the mind can range over far and wide. Walking is better than running, which wears out your knees and leaves you with excruciating shin pain.
Who is behind this madness? Maybe it is the long arm of Michael Bloomberg, the rabidly antismoking former mayor of New York whose desire to clean up the Big Apple drained one of the world’s greatest cities of its edge and variety, making it a safe place for safe people. Or maybe it is the work of prim do-gooders hell-bent on “saving lives”.
Really? Whose life is “saved” by stopping a few people from smoking in big, open air public spaces? Who are the ones who get this extra time? Do they know who they are? Do they say thanks?
The number of smokers in the UK has remained the same for a few years. Sir Walter Raleigh’s fellow travellers have been revealed for what they are, but now they have reached the hard core, of which I am one. This fact must be acknowledged. It means there are 20 per cent of people who do not care what the doctors say, who know time is elastic – a finding unknown to medical science, it would seem – and enjoy themselves.
If only we could. Any place meant for pleasure is off-limits to smoking. I know there aren’t many people who will stick their necks out for this – I’m one of the few – but it has gone much too far. First it was the airlines, then it was the Tube, then stations and trains, restaurants and pubs. I’ve been told there are hotels where they won’t let you smoke. A lorry driver was prosecuted a while back for smoking in the cab of his truck. Soon they’ll be hauling us before the courts every time we take a long, sweet drag in the privacy of our dreams.
But for now it’s the parks. The parks, the great unroofed outdoors, places where people are not crowded together like on the street. It is only for spite that they are doing this, wanting to punish people. I have a dark idea of what must go through their heads when they watch a fellow citizen cup their hands around a lit match, cradling the flame and sucking in that sublime first draw. Maybe deep inside, behind that stern, superior glower, there is a little part of them that’s dying. Funny, when you think about it.
File photo dated 12/03/12 of a man smoking a cigarette as six lifestyle changes could prevent almost 40 million premature deaths, say researchers. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Saturday May 3, 2014. The key risk factors are tobacco use, alcohol consumption, salt intake, blood pressure, blood sugar levels and obesity.
By reducing each of these to globally-agreed targets, more than 37 million early deaths around the world could be avoided over 15 years, according to the study published in The Lancet medical journal. Scientists estimated the number of deaths that could be prevented between 2010 and 2025 by reducing tobacco use by at least 30%, alcohol use by 10%, salt intake by 30%, high blood pressure by 25% and halting the rise rates of obesity and diabetes. Meeting the targets would reduce the risk of dying prematurely from heart disease, chronic lung disease, cancer and diabetes, by 22% for men and 19% for women. Over the 15 year period, this was equivalent to delaying or preventing at least 16 million deaths of people aged 30 to 70 and 21 million among those aged 70 or older. See PA story HEALTH Risk. Photo credit should read: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire
They think they can get rid of smoking, these reformists, but I doubt it very much. They are relentless in their attacks but this is going too far, especially in a country that is reasonable and free, or at least that prides itself as such.
It’s a long time since you could smoke at work. Officeswere the first to go. They didn’t quite force smokers underground – just threw them on the street – and it made us stronger; now we’re the only ones who get any fresh air.
The press are all for it, of course. No one in the papers now supports smoking – that’s why I will be glad when they are gone, and going they are because of the internet. We are going to be in a new era soon, and no one knows really what it’s going to be like. But I expect it’ll be harder to tell people what to think about a thing like smoking.
I know all about how fanatical anti-smokers can be: my father was one, and I have already outlived him. And I know how utterly irrational they are. What is worrying is that there are lots of people in Britain who seem to think that they are well within their rights. It’s hardly a symbol of the fair-mindedness and tolerance that British like to present to the rest of the world. Mean-spirited and cruel, more likely.
It is high time an accommodation was made for smokers to be social again. I might point out that now in California more non-smokers are dying than smokers. The truth is that we have all got to go at some point – so why worry about it. We all get a lifetime.
The writer is the recipient of the 2003 Lorenzo de’ Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale, Italy

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ichannel Presents WE LOVE CIGARETTES
February, 2011

Today, the world will spend $1.2 billion on tobacco products. More than a billion people will light a cigarette, and more than 10,000 will die of smoking-related illnesses. Our relationship with the cigarette a seductive yet utterly lethal product? is as strange and passionate a romance as any this planet has ever seen.? This irreverent and unsettling BBC documentary tells the story of a single day in the life of humanity’s obsessive but ultimately fatal attraction to the cigarette. A whirlwind journey around the globe, from the heartland of American tobacco industry in North Carolina to the streets of mainland China, We Love Cigarettes offers up unforgettable portraits of men and women whose own lives are bound up with the worldwide addiction to nicotine.

Among them: British author, smoking aficionado and smoker’s rights champion James Leavey; Duke University researcher Jed Rose, inventor of the nicotine patch, who is studying how this drug nicotine works upon the human body; Dr. Chris Proctor, head of science for a British tobacco manufacturer? and an ex-smoker who quit because of “health risks; British cardiac specialist Dr. Stephen Westaby, who has operated on the hearts of more than 4,000 smokers; corporate whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (memorably portrayed by Russell Crowe in The Insider), who has spent years waging a quixotic one-man crusade against the tobacco industry; and famed British painter David Hockney, who dismisses the campaign against smoking as a totalitarian war on pleasure.

In much of the Western world, our love affair with the tobacco has soured since the 1960s. In developing nations, however, the romance is still in its first flush. As many as 70 percent of the world’s smokers now reside in poorer countries, and nearly a third of all cigarettes today are smoked in China. Love it or hate it – and many of us, frankly, do both – the cigarette isn’t going to be out of our lives any time soon.

Bill Nighy (Notes on a Scandal, Love Actually) narrates.
http://www.channelcanada.com/Article5444.html

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We Love Cigarettes (Cigarettes Addiction) 5 part series

A?love of nicotine unites all peoples across the globe, regardless of colour, wealth or creed. Where religion and politics have failed tobacco has succeeded, but at what cost? For over 50 years people have been knowingly paying for the pleasure of tobacco with their lives, making man’s fatal tryst with the cigarette one of the strangest love affairs ever.

But as smoking bans in the US and Europe abound, what is happening in poorer nations? Their love affair is still in its first flush – one third of the world’s cigarettes are smoked in China alone. And globally the tobacco industry is still worth $430 billion and going strong.

Intrigued by our planet’s obsession with the cigarette, we decided to capture our love affair with nicotine across the world on one single day.
Part One:? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQOXpQYQr84

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I smoke for my mental health

Following our G2 special on the smoking ban, artist David Hockney offers a personal view on why he will always be devoted to cigarettes

May 15, 2007

On July 1 2007, the most grotesque piece of social engineering will begin in England: the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, imposed easily by a political and media elite. They think it will lead to healthier people and a cleaner atmosphere. They believe they can change people easily. The science of marketing has been absorbed by them and they think they can control everybody. I don’t think they can. People will stay at home and do drugs instead – legal and illegal.

I have lived in California for a number of years. They started smoking bans, but they didn’t affect smokers that much. In California you move around in your own private space. If one goes to a public space, say the opera or Disney Hall, then because the climate is ideal the smoker can just step outside, at all times of the year. Many restaurants have gardens and the bans have never really bothered me. But something else has happened in California since the bans came in, unreported by the media, and it took me a while to notice because I have spent the past seven years working in England.

The amount of drugs advertised on television tells me what has replaced tobacco (although 20% still smoke): painkillers, Prozac and antidepressants, mostly prescription drugs – you just tell the doctor what you need. When prescription drugs are advertised in the press there is always a lot of small print listing side effects, and on television you get a speedy talking voice listing the side effects. You perhaps hear one word in four – paralysis, diarrhoea, death, headaches. I expect it all to come here. Drugs (legal and illegal) are the world’s largest business, and one can understand why, since they make us feel better.

I know about fanatical anti-smokers – my father was one of the first (although his eldest son has outlived him and smoked until he was 70, and I’m still smoking at almost 70 – indeed, my birthday is nine days after the ban). I smoke for my mental health. I think it’s good for it, and I certainly prefer its calming effects to the pharmaceutical ones (side effects unknown).

Well, you say, smoking has dreadful side effects. Certainly on some people, but not on all. So we should ask the British Medical Association to explain Denis Thatcher smoking Senior Service (unfiltered) and dying at 88, or Kurt Vonnegut living till 84 after smoking Pall Mall cigarettes for 70 years. What is the explanation? Nobody seems to ask and no one gives any explanation.

In the late 90s the ex-mighty New York Times was very anti-tobacco. I kept writing letters to them. None was published. When Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, died at the age of 92, there was an obituary in the New York Times. Three days later there was the most foolish letter which said that Mr Deng was a very bad example to the young because he always had a Panda cigarette in his hand or mouth.

I was appalled that they had printed this, and wrote to them suggesting Mr Deng had lived a very long life – how long do you expect people to live? – and the logic of his argument would be that Adolf Hitler was a very good example for the young as he didn’t smoke. It wasn’t published, and I began to realise the New York Times was no longer a serious newspaper. After that I was sceptical about everything I read in newspapers.

Meanwhile in England, the press, without tobacco advertising, sided with the anti-smokers. The BBC made itself “smoke-free” and I realised how sinister this was. The BBC’s problem, which won’t go away, is that there is no neutral viewpoint. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is part of the basis of the mathematics that led to the computer, but it also stated that the observer affects the observed – no one is neutral. The BBC used to claim that it was neutral, but now it is part of a massive social engineering project paid for by its listeners and viewers. It is against a group of 12 million people who choose to smoke – not very fair.

The British press might be quite lively, but it is also pathetically childish. I take little in it seriously, and when I am in Bridlington I only glance at newspapers. They are not sceptical enough, which is why I see them now as part of the social engineering. No one asks what the consequences will be – all will be good, they childishly think.

The Guardian says that the ban has been a “success” in Scotland. What do they mean by “success”? Pub takings have gone down, some pubs have closed. But surely the ban would only have been a “success” if the non-smokers had been flocking to the pubs. They have not.

What do I think? You’re living in a madhouse, David … Actually, I’ve always thought that, but I have a love for the surface of the Earth that is an escape from the mean-spirited and dreary people who seem to have taken over England.

The ban won’t affect me much. I live very privately. I’m not very social – I’m too deaf, and in the world I have created I will smoke. I’ve no wish to meet politicians – most of them have the most odious ideas about people. England is full of big pushers of the coming pill society, and we’ve lost a sense of messiness – no longer any Delight in Disorder here (a careless shoestring in whose tie/ I see a wild civility/Do more bewitch me than when art/is too precise in every part, Robert Herrick).

Two months ago I started the largest painting I’ve ever done: 15ft x 40ft. The moment I began I found myself running up the stairs (with a fag) and realised some people are more in tune with a life force than others.

I can’t be the only voice like this. In England people should speak up more, defend themselves, but it’s hard against all the forces at work. Two million anti-smoking signs are going up on July 1, including inside Westminster Abbey. The uglification of England is under way by people with no vision. I detest it.

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We Love Cigarettes
A day in the life of the cigarette.

June 29, 2006

A love of nicotine unites all peoples across the globe, regardless of colour, wealth or creed. Where religion and politics have failed, tobacco has succeeded, but at what cost? For over 50 years people have been knowingly paying for the pleasure of tobacco with their lives, making man’s fatal tryst with the cigarette one of the weirdest love affairs ever.

A wide range of people are tangled in this web and by filming them for one day, simultaneously all over the world, Horizon has captured our extraordinary relationship with the cigarette.

Scientist and inventor of the nicotine patch Jed Rose has spent his working life trying to unravel the mysteries of nicotine addiction and searching for ever more ingenious ways to help people quit. Today, he’s investigating the path of nicotine through the body by having his subject light up in a PET scanner.

Meanwhile in Texas, Dr Jeffrey Wigand, tobacco scientist turned whistleblower and subject of the Hollywood film The Insider, is preparing for his next appearance as expert witness in another anti-tobacco court case.

But as the West finally seems to be reaching the end of its affair with the cigarette, not everyone is pleased. Writer and smoking aficionado James Leavy laments the passing of a bygone age as he attempts to light up in a smoke-free Dublin. And in an attic in Yorkshire, artist David Hockney regrets the increasingly puritan, anti-pleasure sentiments that have made his “delicious vice” socially unacceptable.

Despite the woes of smokers in the West, globally the tobacco industry is worth $430 billion. Business is booming and in Southampton, British American Tobacco’s blenders spend their day developing yet another irresistible smoke.

For while smoking bans in Europe and US abound, in poorer nations the love affair is still in its first flush. One third of the world’s cigarettes are smoked in China. In Beijing, one man has made it his life’s work to persuade 360 million Chinese smokers to give up. Zhang Yue spends this day snatching cigarettes from the lips of the unsuspecting and haranguing them in an attempt to get them to quit.

Meanwhile Allen Carr, retired accountant and discoverer of his own Easy Way to quit, faces his ultimate challenge. He will attempt to persuade every smoker watching to quit, by debunking four myths held close to every smoker’s heart.
Read

Horizon: BBC Two’s flagship 50-minute science documentary series. Thursdays, 9pm BBC Two

Horizon’s mixed smoke signals

June 30, 2006
Last Night’s by TV by Ian Johns

Before we start, I’d just like to point out that this column has a no-smoking policy. Readers are advised that smoking is permitted in the nearby television listings, though I’d hurry as it probably won’t be for long.

As Horizon (BBC Two) suggested, we may be nearing a time when smoking is legislated or taxed out of existence. By 2030 Australia is expected to be smoke free. In the future we may watch Casablanca and end up wondering why Rick’s Bar wasn’t closed down by Health and Safety. At least in the West. In the developing world, the tobacco companies are still busy targeting countries with a less health-conscious attitude.

Helen Britton and Jackie Higgins’s film pondered why, despite the well-established health hazards, 1.3 billion of us around the world still smoke each day. “Cigarettes are delicious but you’re not allowed to say it,” said David Hockney, railing at smoking bans as if he were auditioning for Grumpy Old Men.

Jed Rose, the inventor of the nicotine patch, explained how nicotine releases feelgood chemicals. Professor Richard Peto shared his chilling statistics that the average smoker lessens his life by ten years and that the next 100 years could see a billion deaths from smoking-related diseases. The programme was called We Love Cigarettes; it should have been The Lung Goodbye.

Yet it clearly wanted to avoid being as stark as a “Smoking Kills” government health warning. It was peppered with smokers’ vox pops from around the world. Bill Nighy brought an Eeyore-like incredulity to the narration. Allen Carr, seen in presumably comfortable retirement in the Costa del Sol after a lucrative career stopping people smoking, kept popping up with advice to kick the habit. A surgeon extracted the fatty deposits from a smoker’s arteries to the strains of Take a Little Piece of My Heart. Even the head of research at British American Tobacco (“Smoking with respect” proclaimed the sign in the canteen) was a cheery soul — and an ex-smoker.

This catch-all approach made lively viewing but left any analysis and argument as wispy as smoke rings. The writer James Leavey, struggling to light up in a windswept Dublin, asserted that Beckett, Wilde and Yeats show how smoking has been a catalyst for great literature. It was left as an unchallenged soundbite. The programme ended up like a skittish smoker, swiftly stubbing out one interview to light up the next.

Still, it was intriguing to discover that, until it was established in the 1950s that smoking caused cancer, the prime suspects had been tarmac and the motor car. That’s the kind of detail that sticks in my mind, like the late Ronnie Kray apparently smoking 140 cigarettes a day. Now if a cigarette takes five minutes to smoke, and the average person is awake for 16 hours a day, how long did he spend on his daily smoke? Answers on a postcard, please. And then try to work out how many prostitutes were plying their trade per square foot in 1750s London, “a seething mass of humanity” and a “city of vice”, according to The Harlot’s Handbook (BBC Four).

This told the story of Harris’s List, a sexed-up version of the Yellow Pages that detailed the names, addresses, personal attributes and “specialities” of London’s prostitutes. Compiled by Jack Harris, the self-styled “Pimp-General of All England” and a reprobate hack called Samuel Derrick, it went on to sell 250,000 copies over 38 years. In it you’d find descriptions ranging from “vile bitch” to the observation that “if you can forget she’s hunchbacked, she’s a little Venus”.

The programme and its presenter, Hallie Rubenhold, were alert to the implicit brutalities (abandonment, rape, poverty and bereavement) contained within the list’s pages, its subjects including prepubescent orphans, aspiring actresses and the wives, widows and daughters of clergymen, lawyers and schoolmasters. But the programme’s makers couldn’t resist its surface titillations either. There was much eyebrow-raising and knowing looks from Rubenhold (her surname sounding like a “speciality” from the book), who was sent walking down red-lit London streets. Silhouetted mimes looked like clips from some lewd Georgian farce. You half-expected a Sid James type to shout “Phwoar!” as Rubenhold walked past.

Still, I now have a prurient titbit about how Georgian prostitutes faked their virginity. It’s not the kind of detail I feel I can share with you before the 9pm watershed. So here’s another smoking statistic from Horizon instead: by the end of today 90,000 children around the world will have tried their first cigarette. Somehow I can’t stop imagining the world’s largest bike shed.