Pursuit of Crappiness

In Great Britain, banning things is a national pastime.

The Monet family in their garden at Argenteuil by Édouard Manet (1874)

In what some call the ‘Noughties,’ my teenaged self plastered satirical stickers over the grim health warnings newly foisted upon cigarette packets. ‘Smoking keeps you thin,’ was one. My favourite: ‘Smoking causes happiness.’

In twenty-odd years, save bouts of profitless, nerve-fraying repentance, I’ve smoked with sinful, Talmudic commitment. I’ve happily and heavily chuffed a quarter of a million cigarettes, from the lustrous gold-filtered Sobranie Black Russians to the soigné Gitanes of Jean-Luc Godard fame.

I’m fully aware that human mortality remains an immovable one hundred percent, and that my smouldering little love affair will quite possibly end like the best love affairs—in peril.

Covering those dire, nannying health warnings with a little British irreverence invited a wry smile or a giggle. Back then, ‘mind your own business’ was a fearsome command.

Not anymore. At this week’s Conservative Party Conference, our prime minister announced plans to raise the legal smoking age each year. Anyone aged 14 or under will never legally buy a packet of cigarettes.

Prime Minister Sunak, a Goldman Sachs-addled supply teacher for whom nobody voted, has banned smoking. No referendum. No pledge in the manifesto. Just a tech-bro Babbitt governing by whimsy.

This silly manna from LinkedIn’s representative on Earth means that 34-year-olds will one day have to loiter outside the shops, as I did at age 12, and convince a sympathetic 35-year-old to shuffle into the off-license and nab them twenty Marlboro.

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This norm-shattering ban is pointless. Amongst the TikTok throng, smoking is all but over. They prefer sucking on cheesecake-flavoured USB sticks.

But that’s not the point. Opinion polls, those thermometers of human ingenuity, show wild support for such an illiberal measure. Nearly two-thirds of Brits think they have a right to police what other adults put into their bodies. (They also oppose those bodies riding on high-speed trains, obvs.)

In our culture, age restrictions symbolise a rite of passage. Reaching a certain age used to be an endorsement of adulthood. We used to earn the right to do with our minds and bodies pleasurable and foolish things. Anyone fourteen and under will never quite earn that right.

Reader, despite growing empirical evidence to the contrary, I’m not completely mental. Smoking is a bad habit which kills people, often slowly. There’s nothing glamorous, sophisticated, or rebellious about lung cancer. But for an ever-shrinking few, the right to choose what one does with one’s body is an inalienable one.

Some things are bad for you. That’s life. Incidentally, eating ultra-processed nonsense every day is very, very bad for you. I’m no scientist, but the industrial garbage we consume on an industrial scale will be the radioactive health concern of the near future. The mutant rubbish we scarf down our gullets three times per day is not food. Check the labels. The ingredients read like Wi-Fi passwords.

And yet, you’re an adult and so am I. What you put into your body is none of my business nor should it be the business of anyone else, let alone the business of a scientific committee enchanted by a spreadsheet. Live and let live works both ways or not at all.

There’s something comforting about the fidelity of human folly.

I wonder I wonder what the anti-smoking schoolmarms will do once they realise their smoke-free utopia. Of course, they will not find alternative dragons to slay. Of course not. They definitely will not protest against and correct other disagreeable behaviours. After winning their final victory, they'll just leave people alone. Layman observers of two thousand years of civilisation would suggest otherwise.

As smoking rates decline, obesity rates balloon. One in four deaths is linked to one’s weight. New analysis suggests that by 2030, weight-related cancers will outstrip smoking-related cancers in young women. Krispy Kremes kill more than cancer sticks.

Prediction: After hunting down the last smoker—a title I covet—the fanatics at Action on Smoking and Health will turn their sniffers on those who enjoy a cheeseburger and fries.

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Twenty or so times a day, I’m reminded that smokers die younger. I’m also mindful that nursing home care is £50,000 a year, and the average stay is five years.

Smokers pay three times in taxes what we take out. After enduring annual criminal price rises, our people are due reparations. By shuffling off this mortal coil early, we can save a quarter of a million pounds en route to that happy hour in the sky. That beats the alternative—slumped on a nursing home sofa, helpless before daytime TV’s audiovisual lobotomy.

Reader, my mother is a qualified nurse. For decades, she’s worked tirelessly and often thanklessly with the elderly. No, thank you. That's not for me. I have seen enough. That might seem glib to you—the recklessness of ebbing youth. And so, what? For the time being, my thoughts are still my own.

Perhaps my smoking is not a pathetic memorial of a free-spirited time but a noble endeavour. Consider that one in three girls and one in four boys born today will live to one hundred. By 2050, and for the first time in human history, the old will outnumber the young. Sentimentalists might think that a marvellous progression, another first to trumpet. Realists see civilisational collapse. By shuffling off early, we are doing the world a favour.

Better to leave utopia to the utopians. The realisation of which will always be just around the corner.

By 2030, the experts say Great Britain will be smoke-free. And beauty will never fade; mothers will look ten years younger than their daughters. Strife, unfairness, torment, and woe are banished for good. All ambiguity is ironed out of human nature. The blind will see, the lame will walk, and Banksy’s adolescent graffiti will finally reveal its cosmic profundity.

Even that Walden of wellness would not please Puritans like Action on Smoking and Health. To paraphrase Mencken, they’re frozen by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. Perhaps they should change their name to Against Smoking and Happiness and leave us adults to kill ourselves slowly, in peace.

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