--- description: "The habit of smoking is disgusting to sight, repulsive to smell, dangerous to the brain, noxious to the lung, spreading its fumes around the smoker... title: That Old Feeling: The Great American Smoke image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # That Old Feeling: The Great American Smoke by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) Nov 22, 2003 5:00 AM CUT by [Richard Corliss](/author/richard-corliss/) Nov 22, 2003 5:00 AM CUT “The habit of smoking is disgusting to sight, repulsive to smell, dangerous to the brain, noxious to the lung, spreading its fumes around the smoker as foul as those that come from Hell.” —King James I, 1604, a few years after Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England “This is sharp medicine, but it will cure all disease.” —Raleigh, 1618, just before he died (not from lung cancer; on the guillotine) The time: a decade or two from now. The scene: the First Church of Christ, Smoker, the only place where nicotine addicts can find sanctuary in a society that has declared their pastime illegal. Communicants file up to the altar rail for a long drag on a cigarette — a precious, stale relic from the last carton of Marlboros sold before the U.S. government banned smoking in 2007\. The priest blesses the faithful, they cough in response, and all exeunt to today’s hymn, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” It could come to this. Smokers may soon need to organize themselves into an underground religion, elevating cigarettes to sacramental status, as the Mexican Indians did to peyote. For what was once a seductive pleasure is now an endangered cult, subject to demonization by the fuming, nonsmoking majority. This week — as every year, the Thursday before Thanksgiving — we celebrate the Great American Smoke-out. It is the anticigarette lobby’s holy day of obligation, the Good Friday of bad habits, the Yul Brynner Yom Kippur, when the largest tobacco-producing nation on earth tries to get the 25% of adults who still smoke to quit for a day, but not so many to endanger the state and local revenue from cigarette taxes (something like $6 a pack in New York City). It happens that I am a smoker. It also happens that, each year at this time, I’m on vacation on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten / Saint Martin, which, being a joint satrapy of the Dutch and French governments, has no smoking restrictions — you can light up at work, on the beach, in the restaurants and casinos — and where a carton of cigarettes, from Europe or the U.S., costs $11\. So I am 1200 miles and one time zone removed from this noble experiment in summoning the will to tell other people to stop doing something they enjoy. To anyone who joined the Smoke-out this or any year, I offer my good wishes. Buck up, stub it out, and watch the minute hand of your cigaretteless day creep like an hour hand. My aim here is not to defend smoking; I freely acknowledge that, as a hobby (all right, a habit), it smells, and that Woody Allen was probably being satirical when, in “Sleeper,” one of his scientists from the future announces that smoking does not cause cancer but cures it. I might even say that the [Nick Tosches quote](/time/columnist/corliss/article/0,9565,546855,00.html "undefined") I cited last time about Las Vegas — that it is “a religion, a disease, a nightmare, a paradise for the misbegotten” — applies with equal acuity to smoking. The intent of this column is not missionary but analytical. Using two main texts — Richard Klein’s wonderfully suggestive book-length essay [“Cigarettes Are Sublime,”](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0822316412/qid=1069342374/sr=12-1/103-1604678-6664606?v=glance&s=books "undefined") and Ross McElwee’s documentary film [“Bright Leaves”](http://www.brightleaves.com "undefined") — I want to take a calm look at smoking, and its place in the culture, from the inside — from the smoker’s hot mouth, wheezing heart, sooty lung and vivid, endlessly rationalizing brain. WHY DO PEOPLE SMOKE? In his John Belushi biography “Wired,” Bob Woodward asked Dan Aykroyd why he joined Belushi in shooting heroin. Because, came the reply, it makes you feel wonderful — that is, before it kills you. Why would anyone take a drug simply because it kills you? The potential consequences have to be considered a side effect, however likely and looming, to whatever pleasure the drug offers. What pleasures does smoking provide? We turn to Klein, who may be trusted because, after writing his witty defense of smoking, he gave it up. Cigarettes, he says, “present benefits, universally acknowledged by society. These benefits are connected with the release and consolation that cigarettes provide, with the the mechanism they offer for regulating anxiety and for mediating social interaction. They serve as well to spur concentration” — all smoking writers know this — “and, consequently, to permit the efficient production of many different kinds of work.” A cigarette is also a pill that relieves stress. On a flight from St. Martin to New York a few years ago, the captain announced that smoking was permitted in the last four rows of the plane. Some of the smokers, who had psyched themselves into a few hours without a cigarette, now realized they might light up if only they were in the right seats. A frantic bidding war arose for those seats, stoking a commotion that the captain finally quelled by rescinding his order and declaring this a nonsmoking flight. If Klein had been captain, you could’ve smoked ’em if you had ’em. He calls the airlines’ no-smoking rule “a sign of the dangerous lengths to which antismoking impulses will go to deny others the freedom to enjoy the consolation and mastery cigarettes provide in moments of stress or fear. Many people who do not normally smoke take up smoking during times of personal or public crisis, at moments of great anxiety when self-control and concentration are required.” Smoking, Klein argues, nudges the user into a state that is not so much narcotic as contemplative. “The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and time of heightened attention that give rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hands, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.” As Klein suggests, the pleasure of smoking is both aesthetic and metaphorical. Aesthetic: the votary aspect of lighting a cigarette. The very phrase “cigarette lighter” can refer both to the machine that provides the flame and to the person who clicks his Bic — or, if he’s using matches, snicking his stick. Metaphorical: Smoking can represent passive surrender (one ingests the drug without a much greater expenditure of energy than an opium den denizen) or an active assertion of ego (exhaling smoke extends your “space,” creates a cloud, a gentle miasma, a box around you). A cigarette is an undomesticated pet: a tiny dragon (drag-on) between the fingers, allowing you to emphasize a verbal point with a plume of smoke or, when puffed, with the dragon’s flash of fire. I must mention, just in passing, another of cigarettes’ metaphorical potencies. “Smo-kin’!” exclaims Jim Carrey’s frenetic alter ego in “The Mask”; and we know he is referring to a different -king. Smoking is, at heart, oral gratification. There is, shall we say, a certain sexual implication in putting our lips around a long, thin object, ingesting its essence into the mouth, perhaps swallowing it, then expelling it. Put this way, the act of smoking is, literally, a blow job. And the ritual “smoke after sex” — is this not the reward for all the exertion of coupling? For some smokers, is getting down not the foreplay to lighting up? As Freud or someone said: a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. YES, BUT WHY DO YOU SMOKE? I could say I smoke for the same reason I do many things I write about in this column: out of nostalgia for times, and cultures, and pleasures, and bad habits of a more glamorous day. I could say I smoke because my father did, and his mother, though both were dead (cancer) before I started, at 23\. The immediate cause was unusual. A friend from California, a magical child named Albert Beach, was coming to New York to visit. He said he was bringing some marijuana, which I’d never tried, and that if I was to appreciate its full efficacy I’d better practice inhaling something. Like cigarettes. The grass never did much for me, but oh, those Benson & Hedges! I can recall sitting in my Brandon Films office after lunch, my brain a-buzz on a contact cigarette high. I say contact high because I never did inhale — never have, since trying it once as a kid and thinking, “People take this stuff into their lungs?” But I must have become habituated to the act of smoking. I took a year off in the 70s, then tried a pipe, some little cigars, and back to cigarettes. In the 80s, while at the Cannes Film Festival, I discovered a brand with a droll name: Time. Turned out they were the French version of the American brand, More. (More, in French, sounds like the word for death. “Donnez-moi un packet de Mort, s’il-vous plait.” In Italy, they’re pronounced Mor-ay: nearly the Italian word for love.) Since the mid-90s I’ve bought Capri Menthol 120s, a cigarette so svelte and mild that, I joke, smoking them makes you live longer. I do joke, because I do smoke. I know that smoking implies certain health risks, which I am alerted to, now and again, by friends, strangers and the media. TV stopped carrying cigarette commercials in 1969, but often runs antismoking commercials, like the one in the 80s starring Brynner, and broadcast after his death from lung cancer. This year there was a spot taped by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, proclaiming his regret that years of smoking led to larynx cancer. We’d never deny a man the right to clear his conscience and increase his celebrity quotient at the same time; may Eszterhas live for a hundred years. But, considering how noxious his scripts were (he is the auteur of “Jagged Edge,” “The Music Box,” “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls”), one has to wonder if his movies shouldn’t have carried health-warning labels — and if bad writing is not itself carcinogenic. Nor do I doubt the honorable intent of the “This is your lung on nicotine” brand of TV propaganda. I do wonder at some of the conclusions drawn from anecdotal evidence. That David McLean, the model for the Marlboro Man in 60s ads, died young of lung cancer should carry no heavier symbolic meaning than that James Fixx, the jogging guru, died young of a heart attack while jogging. I am also a tad skeptical (as Klein is) of the campaign to italicize the effects of second-hand smoke. Why have claims of deaths from second-hand smoke risen so dramatically in the past few years, when the number of smokers has dropped significantly, and the number of public spaces where they can light up has been so drastically limited? PUT THAT OUT! The battle over smoking is part of a bigger fight: the crusade some people want to wage over regulating what other people are allowed to consume. On one side is the healthy minority: the yoga-practicing, vegetarian, jogging, PBS-member activists — most of whom don’t smoke and don’t want anyone else to. On the other side is the complacent majority: the great glutinous mass of sedentary, morbidly obese, fries-with-that, “Man Show”-watching, internet-porn-downloading slobs — many of whom smoke and want to keep doing it. The war is fought on all these fronts, between those who would elevate the current culture (by force of law) and those who would wallow in it. The difference with smoking is that the forces of enlightenment-repression are winning. Have won. And they’re not good winners. “Like wars of religion,” Klein writes, “the campaign against smoking lends itself to cruel fanaticism and self-righteous indignation.” People who would never dare chastise a colleague for his body odor or four-letter vocabulary will demand of a smoker, “When you gonna give up that awful habit?” Children on the street shout “Don’t do that!” at a smoking stranger, as their parents beam in approval at the kids’ do-gooder rudeness. Olivier, my French barber down here in St. Martin, describes this attitude as being “politely correct,” but there’s nothing polite about it. The polite ones are the smokers. They know they are plague victims and suspect they may be carriers. So they try meeting a censorious society more than halfway. They grab a few furtive puffs outside of their office building. (In winter this make for a poignant tableau; in the future, more smokers may die of chilblains than emphysema.) At cocktail and dinner parties where having a cigarette is implicitly forbidden, smokers indulge their health-nut friends by abstaining, though they may excuse themselves every hour or so for a quick nicotine fix al fresco. I can recall only one Manhattan soiree in the past 15 years where someone lit up unbidden; that was Paul Schrader, the writer-director, who had built his movie reputation on being a bad boy. The only folks likely to say yes when asked if smoking is permitted are the elderly — perhaps because they are by disposition more tolerant or gracious, or because they grew up in a day when indoor smoking was the norm. Old friends Howard Koch, Dorothy Delaney, Ruth Dunn and Addie Richter have all granted me my nicotine indulgence. One even said, when I asked to light up, “Please do. I love the smell of cigarette smoke.” (This flummoxed me. I know of no one else who loves, likes or is indifferent to cigarette smoke. No air freshener comes in a Stale Ciggie scent. No one requests the dry cleaner to add a dab of Odeur de Butt to a dinner jacket. As someone who often changes clothes before smoking — my smoking jacket is an old T shirt — I’ve mused rancorously on why tobacco companies never came up with a stinkless cigarette.) Anyway, I bless the social largesse of my octogenarian friends. May it earn them places, but not too soon, in a smoke-free heaven. So we are agreed: polite it ain’t, this tobaccophobic vigilantism. And I’m not sure it’s correct. People find all sorts of pleasurable ways to shorten their lives. They drink or eat stupidly. They cheat on their spouses and get caught. They worry or rile themselves into an early grave. The act of breathing brings all of us one breath closer to death. (Some places more than others. On arriving in New York in 1965, I was told that simply inhaling the city’s air was equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes in a clean environment.) So why don’t the non-smokers take a laissez-fumer approach — live and let die? The first answer is the simplest: because they can. There’s no Smokers’ Lib to give a moment’s pause, a scintilla of scruple, to the anti-puff posse. The more complex answer is threefold: smoking is (1) an evil habit that (2) the public recognizes as such and (3) the perpetrator can correct, by quitting. Smoking is seen, and smelled, as an insult to civilization. It is also one of the few insults that civilization can forcefully address. The mannerly middle class may not be able to outlaw assault weapons or rap music or violent movies, but it can shove smokers (usually the working class, the minorities and the young) into pariah status right next to the serial killers. These days, of course, even multiple murderers are treated to the panoply of psychiatric intervention. So are compulsive gamblers, foot fetishists and people who like Josh Groban. Cigarette smokers are virtually the only addicts who can’t count on federal subsidy or public sympathy. We know when we’re licked, and there’s no use whining. So we stoically bear the vituperations of the six-year-old who sees us lighting up and shouts, “Put that out!” Out it goes and, with it, the notion of smoking as a soothing arbiter of middle-class behavior. Like the loosening of a necktie, it signaled a relaxation into informality at the end of a meal or the start of a baseball game, before drinks or after sex. Even for the solitary steam fitter or housewife, the act of sending a geyser from mouth to ceiling could envelop the user in a penumbra of calm thoughtfulness. It was an empyrean for daydreams — the cloud of smoke our thoughts went up in. CIGARETTE CULTURE American pop culture — in its movies, TV shows, music, fashion, comic books — has spread across the globe, an octopus strangling indigenous art forms. But before all this Pop Americana, centuries before, was the cigarette. (Sir Walter Raleigh took it from the Indians and brought it to his queen, Elizabeth, in the 1590s) Klein calls cigarettes “America’s gift to the world.” And Americans venerated smoke and smokers. In the last mid-century, Humphrey Bogart and Edward R. Murrow were twin saints of wartime and postwar liberal machismo. The actor and the newsman looked a bit alike, had similarly commanding baritones and were rarely seen without a cigarette — an emblem of their masculinity and integrity. That both men succumbed early to cancer did not diminish their aura; no, death testified to it, intensified it. Here was the pleasure a real man was willing to die for. The cigarette was a prime weapon in their arsenal of cool, and the one they allowed to be turned on them. Politicians can be as influential as movie stars in the shaping of public perceptions. F.D.R.’s cigarette, in a holder at a jaunty angle, proved him both a dapper patrician and a man of the people, while the can-do bosses of the public weal sucked on fat cigars. Smoke-filled rooms gave us Social Security and the Marshall Plan. In smoke-free rooms we get Iraqification and Enron. (Recall that Clinton — no liberal, but a man eager to try any sensation — enjoyed a good cigar, and that Monica Lewinsky, to prove she was a game gal, used one of them as an agent of vaginal adventure.) The cult of cigarettes was everywhere. France’s postwar intellectuals — Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus — were, as “Cigarettes Are Sublime” shows, inevitably photographed smoking. Nicotine was the Existentialist’s drug of choice. Jean Cocteau, Jean Gabin, Edith Piaf and Coco Chanel carried that same prop; the dicta of Left Bank swank demanded a cigarette to complete the couture. (Cocteau wrote that cigarettes “have, with potent charms, seduced and conquered the world.”) In the 60s, Jean-Luc Godard blew smoke rings as profligately as he exhaled movie ideas; that cloud of smoke was a thought-balloon in the comic strip of French aesthetic life. HERE’S SMOKING AT YOU, KID In old Hollywood movies, smoking was always sublime. Fred and Ginger, Bogie and Bacall, every gangster, gunslinger and G.I. used cigarettes to emblematize their suavity, maturity, grit. Kids loved the lordly caterpillar in Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland,” purring, “Whoooo are yooooo?” while blowing his Alpha-Bits smoke rings. America’s favorite movie, “Casablanca,” has an elaborate hierarchy of cigarethics, which Klein persuasively codifies, noting that all the men smoke and none of the women do. He makes one mistake, though: he credits the movie’s lack of femmes fumeurs to “the taboo in 1942 that prevented Hollywood films from showing women smoking.” If Klein, a professor of French literature at Cornell, had looked at other movies of the period, he would have found smoking women everywhere — before 1942, after it and during it. One of the stars of “Casablanca” was Paul Henreid, who played the Resistance hero Laszlo. In “Now, Voyager,” the film he made before “Casablanca,” Henreid famously ignited two cigarettes, gave one to Bette Davis and puffed away with her in sublimation of the love (outside marriage) that dared not speak its name but could display itself metaphorically in two glowing sticks in the night. This was nothing new to movies. Throughout the 30s, women’s equality with men was expressed by their smoking no less than by the snappy patter. Of course, lighting up had practical benefits — it kept an actor’s hands busy, it offered a little drama within the larger one, it gave the cameraman another point of illumination, of visual allure — but it also cued the audience to aspects of a star character. In general, only a strong, assertive woman would smoke. I’m as chic as any man, the gesture said, and as tough; I can take it in and blow it out. A cigarette was to Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Kay Francis and dozens of equal or lesser radiance what a gun was to Cagney, a horse to John Wayne: an icon of self-expression, a license to doing something cool and mildly dangerous. Something only men were supposed to do. Like enjoy sex. Often, the lighting of a cigarette provided the first intimate contact between a movie man and a movie women, the opening gambit to the game of romance. It also bespoke freedom. In the 1933 “Hold Your Man,” Jean Harlow, sentenced to a reformatory, gets the chance to take an ecstatic drag on a cigarette. Oh, that’s good, she coos. The cigarette is a token of all the pleasures awaiting her outside, denied her inside. To be deprived of cigarettes is to be imprisoned in propriety. (For GIs, the cigarette was a similar symbol of freedom, the America they were fighting for. Klein quotes Gen. Pershing as saying cigarettes were as important to his troops as food. Tobacco companies bragged about the free cartons they shipped to our fighting men in Europe and Korea, and further draped their patriotism in the mantle of the new medium of TV journalism. The first prime-time news show on NBC was “The Camel News Caravan,” a title that conjured up a vision of the brand’s iconic beasts of burden carrying the news from around the world to your living room.) Not to torture this subject into its own doctoral thesis, I’ll just say that the noir 40s offered a flourishing nightscape for cigarettes. To take an example from the last 40s film I watched, the B melodrama “Black Angel” features Peter Lorre as a nasty nightclub owner who smokes constantly; the only function of his muscle-bound assistant (Freddie Steele) is to rush to light Lorre’s cigarette. Fast-forwarding to the 50s, you will recall that, in the 1952 classic musical comedy “Singin’ in the Rain,” silent-movie star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) places a cigarette in its holder and six men lean in from nowhere, competing to light it for her. And is it James Dean or Corey Allen who tucks his cigarette pack inside his T shirt arm in “Rebel Without a Cause” (a mannerism quoted in George Lucas’ 1973 retro-rocker “American Graffiti”)? A recent TIME article on the fight to ban smoking from movies (not in the theaters: on the screen) included the remarkable assertion that “on average the 20 top-grossing films featured 50% more instances of smoking an hour in 2000 than in 1960.” I suppose the statistic could be accurate; it simply flies in the face of my experience of movies: growing up with the films of 1960, seeing the films of 2000 as a professional reviewer. Back then, smoking was pervasive, and was included without editorial comment. It’s less so now, and when it occurs it’s usually to indicate a character who is villainous or, at the very least, selfish and thoughtless. Two examples. One is a fake 1962 movie, released this year: “Down With Love,” which means to evoke the Rock Hudson—Doris Day sex comedies of 40 years ago. Author Renee Zellweger has just meet her book editor, who lights a cigarette; Zellweger’s response is to frown, cough and wave furiously to clear the air — an unmistakable imposition of 2003 attitudes on 1962 mores. Now, a real 1962 movie: “The Manchurian Candidate.” Korean War vet Frank Sinatra, traveling to New York on a train, is near a nervous breakdown, and so frazzled he can’t light a cigarette. A sympathetic stranger, Janet Leigh, sees his distress, takes the cigarette, puts it between her lips, lights it and passes it back to him — an act of sympathy (and romantic interest) that echoes the meeting-sweet cigaretiquette of the grandest old movies. BRIGHT LIES Cigarettes are still a rich subject for drama, and once in a while the movies are up to the task. Two entries at this year’s Toronto Film Festival showed different routes to the same enlightenment. The wild Mexican comedy-melodrama “Nicotina,” written by Martin Salinas and directed by Hugo Rodríguez, is set in a rough section of Mexico City, where a gang of cyber-crooks collides with pharmacists, hairdressers and their bickering spouses. The twist: everyone’s nerves are on edge because they either smoke or are trying to give up the habit or can’t stand smoking. Fear, greed and sexual obsession tangle in a plot that has more twists than a curl of smoke traveling through a double helix. “Nicotina” deserves to be the next big hit out of Latin America. “Bright Leaves” is a fascinating diary-documentary by McElwee, the director of “Sherman’s March,” whose family came to North Carolina in the early 1700s. His cousin John McElwee started saving films, and found the film “Bright Leaf,” a Gary Copper vehicle that told of the development of tobacco manufacturing in North Carolina. According to family legend, Ross’ great-grandfather John Harvey McElwee had worked on such a process, created the Bull Durham brand and made a bundle, then lost it when his rival John Buchanan (Buck) Duke stole the Bull Durham recipe. Duke’s fortune eventually rose into the billions; his daughter Doris was for a time the world’s richest woman. The McElwees became convinced that the story of their ancestor’s rise, and betrayal by Duke, was encapsulated in “Bright Leaf” — that the film was, as Ross put it, “a home movie reenacted by Hollywood stars.” Part of the film explores this mystery, as the envious Ross, carrying a fourth-generation grudge, visits the Duke mansion and mutters, “This would have ben all mine…. Duke University would have been McElwee University.” (Which means “Cigarettes Are Sublime” would have been published by McElwee University Press.) It’s small consolation that his great-grandfather “did leave behind a sort of agricultural-pathological trust fund.” To other family members, John Harvey’s only legacy is a nicotine craving. Recalling the days of his cigarette habit, Ross echoes Klein’s observation about the “parenthesis of time” tobacco engenders: “Smoking put me into kind of a trance state, as if time had stopped and time would go on forever.” Cousin Kerry has tried to quit, he says, but then “life steps in and I find a reason to go back.” His friend David Williamson confesses that “There are many times I would rather have had a cigarette than a woman. Not that that opportunity comes very often.” Two lovebirds had sworn to quit when they got married; a few months later, Ross finds them back at the habit. “I’m having my first post-matrimonial cigarette,” Brian says. His bride Emily will admit to no deep-seated reason for her refusal to quit: “I kept smoking because I love to smoke.” They’re in denial, or refusal, to think that smoking is not a habit but a hobby, not an addiction but the fiercest form of brand loyalty. They exist in a smokers’ Brigadoon, where time stopped in the 50s, when people could enjoy cigarettes that were “outstanding … and they are mild,” and when the culture convinced them that a cigarette were so sublime it would help them live, not longer, but more beautiful lives. SMOKE, DRINK AND BE BURIED All that was long ago. Then the 60s — from which all ominous changes can be dated — rewrote the rules of American gesture. Such previously banal signifiers as handshakes and haircuts, comic books and pop music, became freighted with contentiousness. Soon Steve Martin was introducing politically (not politely) correct comedy to the smoking debate. “Mind if I smoke?” he imagined someone asking him, then replied, “No. Mind if I fart?” In the 80s, even James Bond felt bad about smoking. Today the habit is excoriated — antitobacconists depict Joe Camel as a schoolyard drug pusher — and publicly survives only as a vestige of James Dean rebelliousness. As smokers are hounded off the streets, like pedophiles at a playground, so tobacco companies are chased away from sports sponsorship; the Virginia Slims Tournament and the Winston Cup are no more. Only the twentysomethings can exercise their privilege to smoke. For them it is a declaration of outlawry, an insurrection of style, and one more thing to piss off their parents and all others who would presume to understand or help them. The rest of us cannot erase the stigma: the bell of societal opprobrium around our necks, the scarlet letter on our lungs. We have a forlorn dream: if only we were hooked on booze. Then we could see our drug advertised on TV, in commercials brazenly aimed at kids and teens. (Joe Camel will seduce kids into smoking? Well, how many people under 21 have died of smoking? A good estimate would be zero. And how many have died because of drinking? Thousands: they’re roadkill every night.) If we were alcoholics, we could receive official succor for crimes somewhat more poignant than fouling the lungs of ourselves and our loved ones. I don’t know of one husband who battered his wife because he’d smoked too much that night. I haven’t heard of any fatal car crashes caused by a driver whose “one for the road” was a Carlton Light. Smoking shortens lives; alcohol ruins them too. But no one will share smokers’ illegal-alien status. Cigarette users must huddle in the ragtag solidarity of their serene, intense habit. Defiantly, they say, “We look so cool, don’t we, waving our wicked wands in the air. Our voices have the knowing, late-night duskiness of alto-sax jazz. We pack more fun into life because we know — know better than all those who stare darts our way — how short life is. We are nature’s bravados, medicine’s death-row aesthetes.” As the health magazines remind us, absolutely everything can kill you. So smokers figure they may as well go out with a smile on their lips, a stain on their teeth and a wheeze in their outcast hearts. Can we reach a compromise, O America of the New Prohibition? I’ll light up a little less; you lighten up a little more. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6912250/that-old-feeling-the-great-american-smoke/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6912250/that-old-feeling-the-great-american-smoke/"},"headline":"That Old Feeling: The Great American Smoke","datePublished":"2003-11-22T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T16:46:34.768Z","description":"\"The habit of smoking is disgusting to sight, repulsive to smell, dangerous to the brain, noxious to the lung, spreading its fumes around the smoker...","url":"https://time.com/archive/6912250/that-old-feeling-the-great-american-smoke/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6912250/that-old-feeling-the-great-american-smoke/","name":"That Old Feeling: The Great American Smoke"}}]}] ```