Support the campaign against smoking since I realized that most people have become addicted to cigarettes, especially young people who spend their last money for a pack of cigarettes.
Before smoking can be beaten, people need to understand why so many find it attractive, writes author Richard Klein in this personal - and controversial - opinion.
Teenage smoking in the United States, as in Europe, has hardly declined at all. How can that be?
But are the kids listening?No generation in history knows more about the dangers of smoking. Teenagers have been bombarded, from their earliest years, with anti-smoking propaganda directed at them by parents, doctors, teachers, and public health officials.
The propaganda always claims to tell teenagers the "truth" about smoking: that tobacco is bad for their health and harmful to developing bodies. But young people, always alert to adult hypocrisy, are apparently not impressed.
Smoking's advantages
They recognise a half-truth when they hear it. The propaganda never acknowledges the many advantages of smoking, its dark pleasure and irresistible beauty.
Some years ago I wrote a book entitled Cigarettes are Sublime, in order to stop smoking. I had been lighting up since I was twelve.
Cigarettes, after all, are a source of consolation, particularly in times of loss. They provide a powerful antidote to anxiety. That's why they are beloved by soldiers, journalists and actors in the wings.
A break from tedium
They are a means of release and relief after exertions. They are a tool of social intercourse, an aid to dieting (particularly for young women obsessed with being thin), a spur to concentration.
Smoking a cigarette interrupts and punctuates the tedium of work and waiting. It opens up in our daily lives a brief parenthesis in which our thoughts, like smoke, rise above quotidian concerns. Smoking has often been considered a form of prayer.
'A dark pleasure'But most of all, cigarettes introduce into our lives a form of beauty, the negative beauty that has been called sublime. It is the beauty, not of childish pleasures that taste sweet, but of adult pleasures, which rarely taste good, and inevitably entail risk.
That's why 43% of US teenagers smoke. Cigarettes have traditionally been the most widely available means of initiating adolescents into the reality of adult pleasure.
Teenagers understand implicitly that they are expected to discover for themselves how to deal with the temptations of compulsive habits.
A life of struggle
They recognise what adults rarely acknowledge, that they need to experiment with risky pleasures, because they are probably going to spend the rest of their life struggling with and against them.
What parent would want to raise a child who was never ever solicited by deliciously dangerous practices?
Maybe on No Smoking Day adolescents should rather be encouraged to try it. On this day, they would be allowed to experience what it might mean to enjoy a substance that's likely, if abused over a long period of time, to kill them.
An act of rebellion?They should be fully informed of the risks they face if they continue to smoke, but they should be publicly permitted to take a thoughtful first step in a life-long encounter with the lures and dangers of adult pleasure.
They should be encouraged to recognise that how they meet that test will have the most far-reaching impact on their daily lives and their chances for happiness.
Lighting up on No Smoking Day should be a moment of confirmation for adolescents, a rite of passage, acknowledging the whole truth that they are embarked on the perilous adventure of learning to make fateful decisions, like grown-ups.
But are the kids listening?No generation in history knows more about the dangers of smoking. Teenagers have been bombarded, from their earliest years, with anti-smoking propaganda directed at them by parents, doctors, teachers, and public health officials.
The propaganda always claims to tell teenagers the "truth" about smoking: that tobacco is bad for their health and harmful to developing bodies. But young people, always alert to adult hypocrisy, are apparently not impressed.
Smoking's advantages
They recognise a half-truth when they hear it. The propaganda never acknowledges the many advantages of smoking, its dark pleasure and irresistible beauty.
Some years ago I wrote a book entitled Cigarettes are Sublime, in order to stop smoking. I had been lighting up since I was twelve.
Cigarettes, after all, are a source of consolation, particularly in times of loss. They provide a powerful antidote to anxiety. That's why they are beloved by soldiers, journalists and actors in the wings.
A break from tedium
They are a means of release and relief after exertions. They are a tool of social intercourse, an aid to dieting (particularly for young women obsessed with being thin), a spur to concentration.
Smoking a cigarette interrupts and punctuates the tedium of work and waiting. It opens up in our daily lives a brief parenthesis in which our thoughts, like smoke, rise above quotidian concerns. Smoking has often been considered a form of prayer.
'A dark pleasure'But most of all, cigarettes introduce into our lives a form of beauty, the negative beauty that has been called sublime. It is the beauty, not of childish pleasures that taste sweet, but of adult pleasures, which rarely taste good, and inevitably entail risk.
That's why 43% of US teenagers smoke. Cigarettes have traditionally been the most widely available means of initiating adolescents into the reality of adult pleasure.
Teenagers understand implicitly that they are expected to discover for themselves how to deal with the temptations of compulsive habits.
A life of struggle
They recognise what adults rarely acknowledge, that they need to experiment with risky pleasures, because they are probably going to spend the rest of their life struggling with and against them.
What parent would want to raise a child who was never ever solicited by deliciously dangerous practices?
Maybe on No Smoking Day adolescents should rather be encouraged to try it. On this day, they would be allowed to experience what it might mean to enjoy a substance that's likely, if abused over a long period of time, to kill them.
An act of rebellion?They should be fully informed of the risks they face if they continue to smoke, but they should be publicly permitted to take a thoughtful first step in a life-long encounter with the lures and dangers of adult pleasure.
They should be encouraged to recognise that how they meet that test will have the most far-reaching impact on their daily lives and their chances for happiness.
Lighting up on No Smoking Day should be a moment of confirmation for adolescents, a rite of passage, acknowledging the whole truth that they are embarked on the perilous adventure of learning to make fateful decisions, like grown-ups.
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