You know where the Smoker’s Lounge was back then in O’Hare Airport? It was called the parking lot. As far as possible from where long-distance fliers change planes: two full concourses away. There is no provision for smokers anywhere in that vast complex. (This, of course, was before they banned smoking even outside the airport.) The last time I had passed through O’Hare, smoking was permitted in the bars. But the bars were apparently getting packed full of smokers who ordered nothing…so they made the whole airport nonsmoking. All the smokers (who happen to have sufficient time) got the healthy exercise of a trek the entire length of the airport, twice, with a wasted security check on the way back in.
My luck was good: I was just able to sprint all the way to the free world, suck down a lungful of solace and race all the way back before my flight lifted. And indeed the run seemed to have done me good; I noticed how pale and wan my spouse looked by comparison. I steeled myself for the long flight to come, anticipating the classic symptoms of nicotine withdrawal plus jet-lag: excitability, hyperirritability, racing thoughts, etc.
To my surprise, I deplaned in the same condition as my nonsmoking beloved: apathetic, thick-witted and headachey. A quick smoke in the parking lot was no help; neither was a good sleep. It was at least two days before I felt “right” again. Ah, well, I thought, getting old. You’re in Florida in March; quit complaining.
We had a lovely time in Key West. And then we headed home.
I knew the first leg would be the longest, going back, but didn’t mind. I was utterly content after a blissful vacation. Besides, the layover in O’Hare this time—five hours!—would be more than adequate for as many smoking hikes as I wanted.
Our vacation bliss was gone when we reached O’Hare. Headache, fatigue, mental torpor. My wife and I sat by what would eventually be our gate and read. Newspapers. Only twice could I work up the energy to make the half-mile trek for a smoke—on arrival, and just before re-boarding. By that point I was so groggy I was having trouble spotting the logical fallacies in USA Today editorials. And it was on that final smoke-break that I met the two flight attendants.
They emerged from the terminal to find themselves—like everyone who left a terminal those days—in a dense cloud of smoke from the dozen or so of us clustered around the ashtray just outside the door, mixed with the exhaust of a hundred taxis and buses. They both smiled, and they both took in deep breaths of blue-grey air, and they chorused, “Thank God—fresh air again!”
Of course I took this for sarcasm. But one of them saw my face and said, “No, really. Compared to what we’ve been breathing for the last eight hours, this is fresh air.” I lifted an eyebrow, and she and her friend explained. And things began to click into place.
Remember back when the anti-smokers first demanded every flight be smoke-free? Ever wonder, as I did, why every single airline caved in without a whimper, risked offending up to forty-five percent of their customers and degrading pilot performance? They did so because it allowed them to cut back inboard air circulation by over fifty percent, saving them a medium-sized fortune in jet fuel. Why circulate the air if the customer can’t see it, and smell it?
Result: every passenger—and crew member—of every flight now spends the entire journey in a poorly-ventilated Petri dish of shared viruses and bacteria. And deplanes, quite often, with symptoms resembling those of CO2 poisoning. The flight attendants have noticed this, and many of them are mad as hell and have formally complained to their union, which is agitating to have the airflow turned back up again, and have you heard a lot about that on your eleven o’ clock news? I haven’t. “And it’s even worse in the terminals, now,” my informant said, “but of course there’s probably nothing we can do about that…”
Several years ago I was invited aboard the nuclear submarine USS John C. Calhoun, and was shown everything except the reactor room and the upper third of the Trident missiles. A fascinating day. Finally my host pointed to a massive device that looked like God’s boiler. “That’s my station,” he said, “the carbon monoxide scrubber.” Like an idiot, I said, “You mean carbon di-oxide scrubber.” He smiled forgivingly. “There are two of those, much bigger than this little thing.” I suddenly recalled that I had seen sailors smoking all over the boat. “You mean they installed a monster unit like this just so the men can smoke?” I asked. “God, no,” he said. “Cigarettes are no problem at all—if your air circulation isn’t good enough to deal with cigarette smoke without help, it just isn’t good enough, period. Most of the CO we scrub is transistor-exhaust: over a year or so, it builds up.”
We civilian passengers, and the professionals who fly us around, receive much less concern for our welfare. A large fraction of us are in drug withdrawal, and the rest are poisoning themselves—and us—to keep us there, all in the name of public health.
Where There’s No Smoke…
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 1996
A LOT OF ESSAYS COULD BE WRITTEN dissecting the current plague of antismoking hysteria, but this is not one of them. This one is an attempt to make the whole problem go away.
Purely for purposes of (postponing) argument, let us stipulate that second-hand tobacco smoke in the restaurant or workplace actually represents a health threat which ought to be considered significant by any rational being who operated an internal combustion engine to get there. My question is, why are we all arguing about second-hand smoke…when there is no need to have any?
I own an ingenious device called a SmokeTrapper. It is distinctly different from any other “smokeless ashtray” sold. This is the difference: it works.
Where can you buy this wondrous gizmo?
Well, you can’t. Not anywhere. Apparently the mighty North American industrial plant was unable to produce the parts at competitive rates, so SmokeTrapper got theirs from Japan. There was a little wobble in the dollar/yen exchange rate a few years back—and the firm went navel-uppermost, just as their moment in history was arriving.
Every other such device currently on the market fails on the same fundamental principle: they all try to suck smoke down through a filter underneath the ashtray. This results in a widget that looks much like a standard ashtray—and is about as useful. Smoke doesn’t want to go down. Some genius finally noted this—and designed a widget that sucks smoke up through a filter. His or her concept looks very little like an ashtray.
But the Centers for Disease Control states that it removes over ninety-three percent of the total smoke from each cigarette.
What does this complex high-tech wonder consist of? Start with a ceramic cup, with a notch in its top edge. Roll a sheet of stainless steel into a cylinder, cut a square port low in one side and fit the cylinder snugly over the cup, so that the notch shows through the port. Plug the upper end of the cylinder with a plastic housing containing a removable filter-puck, a standard computer fan, two C batteries (with optional AC input) and an off-on switch. Fit burning cigarette into notch, throw switch: no smoke. Total size: equivalent to a Big Gulp. Weight: about the same as a portable CD player. Noise: quieter than your computer. Smell: zero, if you change filters regularly.
Before I quit, I used mine while doing public readings and signings, during panels at conventions, performing in coffeehouses, visiting the homes of friends who are genuinely allergic—and never received a single complaint. Most often, nobody noticed unless I drew attention to it. I used another in my bedroom, the cigar version: a broad flat base with a slot to hold a cigar instead of a cup with a notch. (As a fringe benefit, since there’s no point in using it unless you keep the cigarette resting in the slot between puffs, you can’t fall asleep with a cigarette in your hand.)
I called the company when they went broke and bought up all the filters they had left in stock—but by the end I was reduced to cracking open old ones and recharging them with aquarium charcoal. The representative I spoke with said the defunct company would be overjoyed to peddle their patents (US Patents 4043776-239540) for just about any reasonable offer. But they had no way to unde
rwrite a search for more venture capital; it never happened.
I’ve been trying ever since to publicize the idea. A number of years ago, for instance, when Vancouver was debating its resolution to totally ban smoking in all public places (my, has that been a godsend to the restaurant industry just outside of town!), I called up the reporter who was covering the resulting bun-fight for one of our local dailies and suggested there was no reason for it. This was an intelligent and ethical man, a nonsmoker who nonetheless seemed to feel uneasy at seeing a large fraction of his fellow citizens harassed and demonized and his city’s restaurant trade damaged. When I described the SmokeTrapper, he became very excited, and promised to arrive the next day with a photographer.
He called back two hours later. His editor had killed the story. “He said it would constitute advertising.”
“For whom?” I screamed.
“Well, I asked that, too,” he admitted—and then changed the subject. He hung up quickly, clearly embarrassed and ill at ease.
Fanatic anti-smoker editor? Possibly. But perhaps that editor simply saw no advantage to his paper in preventing a good bun-fight.
My modest proposal is this: why don’t we set up a crown corporation to buy up the SmokeTrapper patents and produce the little dinguses by the millions? Every restaurant, office building, airport and hospital in the land needs at least three dozen, right now. Every smoker needs at least a couple. I was overjoyed to pay about $60 apiece for mine, some years ago—and I believe a responsibly-run firm could make us all a huge profit selling them much cheaper than that today. (The price of computer fans has come down, for one thing.) There’s even more money in the filters, in the long run: believe me, it’s tedious rolling your own. The market is planetary.
Let us fill the land with SmokeTrapper clones. Take the torches away from the mob, and let there be a little peace around this castle again.
Imagination Has Its Downside
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 1998
REAL PROBLEMS, you can grapple with. It’s imaginary problems that’ll give you fits.
A rumor begins that a bank is unsound. The rumor is false: the bank is sound, the problem imaginary. But the bank will close soon anyway. It’s impossible to reason with the unreasonable.
Outrage over rumors that some tobacco companies may have experimented with higher nicotine yields is another example. “Those monsters want to make tobacco even more addictive!” What can you possibly say to people who believe tobacco could be more addictive?
Go to the airport departures area: observe us addicts in our pitiful ghetto outside the door. Why are we all puffing so deeply, one cigarette after another? Because we all know the higher the nicotine level in our bloodstreams, the longer it will be before we feel the craving another cigarette. Raise the patient’s morphine dose, it takes him longer to ring for the next shot. Increase the nicotine content, we’ll smoke less.
Why would a tobacco company want its customers to smoke less? Perhaps because they’re rational. Customers who smoke fewer cigarettes will continue buying them for many more years, remain healthy enough to pay for them and annoy their superstitious nonsmoking neighbors less. Lower the risk (presently one chance in sixteen of death), and more potential customers may choose to take it. If this spoils anyone’s image of tobacco executives as mindless monsters, inhuman evil slimeballs, gleeful death-peddlers—good.
The ideal cigarette, for everyone, would be high in nicotine, while as low as possible in the harmful ingredients: the tars. Sadly, the tobacco companies haven’t found a way to make such yet.
Happily, I know a way. Sadly, it’ll never happen. It would raise imaginary problems.
Harvard Medical School just released a definitive study of a possible alternative nicotine delivery vehicle. They tracked thousands of subjects, for more than twenty years and conclusively proved this substance is absolutely medically transparent. Smoking fifty cigarettes of it a day for twenty years has no significant effect on lung cancer rate, emphysema rate, asthma rate, measured lung function or overall death rate. Sprinkle nicotine on it, and all the smokers could live long happy lives, harming no one. Extremely happy lives, if they like. It’s called cannabis.
Even someone determined to believe smoking marijuana is bad for an adult (and these days, you have to be determined enough to ignore nearly all the available evidence) must concede that we can grow cannabis with no psychoactive ingredient—hemp clothing is sold everywhere. So why don’t we grow a lot more, steep it in nicotine and make safe cigarettes?
Too intelligent. Instead let’s lynch a few tobacco executives, and then tell all the dying addicts, “Sorry—we couldn’t help you any, but at least we avenged you.” We’ve solved an imaginary problem.
Science in Fishnet Stockings
FIRST PRINTED JULY 1997
JUST BECAUSE A BLOKE in a white coat says it doesn’t make it so. An “expert” is just an ordinary person a long way from home.
And these are hard times for many experts. Funding for scientific research is at its lowest level this century (which is to say, ever). At present, if you want to consult an astronomer or a theoretical physicist, your best bet is to call a cab.
So says Dr. Hale, the astronomer of Hale-Bopp (and other) fame. He complains loudly about the huge number of unemployed scientists in North America today. Even he, with all his accomplishments, has been unable to secure steady employment or ongoing funding. He claims we misled an entire generation of students into believing there were careers in science waiting for them after graduation…and now many are waiting tables or pushing brooms.
I asked two scientist friends if their experience in Canada bore out Hale’s charge. “God yes!” Guy Immega, the roboticist, exclaimed. “Every time I advertise an entry-level position with my company, two dozen Ph.D.’s apply, all hungry.” “Are you crazy?” said Ray Maxwell, the mechanical engineer. “The outfit I work for is desperate for qualified professionals; we’d settle for bright grad students.” Clearly much depends on what sort of scientist you’re talking about. But Guy and Ray agreed that Hale was right in essence: that overall, there are probably more unemployed scientists in Canada today than there were scientists in all the world a century ago—and that the ones who are employed often must work with drastically shrinking budgets.
And there are only so many cabs to be driven.
Most scientists want to be moral, ethical beings. Their trade has never been a really good way to get rich. But ethics and morality are for those with full bellies. Throughout history, one consequence has always followed economic collapse. When times get really hard, it’s time to get out the fishnet stockings.
At least, this is the only excuse I can devise for the folks at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and the University of Cagliari (I swear) in Italy, who jointly released a shocking report on marijuana last week. At first I thought their findings were being slanted by the media…but close examination shows the media simply printed what they were told, without thinking about it, as usual.
I am not discussing the virtues or drawbacks of marijuana here. I am only addressing what we did and did not learn about it from the report in question—because what its authors did is very interesting. We’ve all seen Street-Hooker Science, in which the scientist simply fakes data supporting whatever predetermined conclusion someone is willing to fund. That is not—quite—what we’re dealing with, here. This is more like Call-Girl Science.
Let’s start at the beginning. Neuropharmacologists Friedbert Weiss and George Koob (we could almost stop there, but we won’t) decided to examine whether marijuana might be addictive, because, they say, they noted that 100,000 people in the US alone seek treatment for marijuana dependence every year.
Stipulating for argument this dubious figure, we’re talking about four hundredths of one percent of the population. Now consider that 100,000 in comparison to just the Americans who regularly smoke cannabis—let’s accept the lowball estim
ate of twenty-five percent of the country. Now we find that a whopping sixteen hundredths of one percent of regular users either feel they have a problem, or are required (by a judge, lover, parent, employer, etc.) to say they do. (A much higher percentage of aspirin users report real medical problems, such as bleeding.)
Terrified by this pandemic, Weiss and Koob sprang into action…and soon were joined by visiting colleagues from Spain and Italy. Hearken now to just what they did. First, they (well, their graduate students) collected impressive data which proves—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that a person who smokes marijuana feels good. That would have been plenty for, say, Pasteur or Koch, but the team pressed on. Next they amassed more data proving just as inarguably that a person who’s been smoking cannabis regularly for a long time, if forced to stop, will probably feel bad for awhile. Hold on, the best is yet to come: the conclusion. “Therefore,” they said, “marijuana is a gateway to heroin.”
Aren’t you breathless? They didn’t fudge a single datum. They simply neglected to do any quantifying of the data…for example, by comparing the unhappiness they chose to call marijuana “withdrawal” with that experienced by someone who cannot get his morning coffee, nightly Aero bar, hourly cigarette or thrice-daily shot of heroin. Every number in their report, I’ll wager, is truthful. It’s only in the words, at the end, that mahooha appears—in the implied assertion that the data and the conclusion have anything to do with one another. You tell me: is that more, or less, honest than simply cooking the data would have been?
The other way science can wear fishnet stockings, besides outright lying or card-palming, is by keeping its mouth shut. Any scientist who sees that report knows it’s garbage; how many have said so publicly? (Years ago, when it made good anti-tobacco ammunition, several scientists gleefully proved that a cigarette smoker who switches to a brand with lower nicotine will smoke more, to maintain his addiction. Where are all those folks, now that the evil swine who call themselves public health authorities in both the US and Canada have openly announced their scandalous intention to lower the nicotine content of cigarettes? Why aren’t ethical scientists loudly pointing out the obvious: that this genocidal madness will force smokers to smoke more…killing us even sooner and robbing us even worse in the meantime to compensate?)
The Crazy Years Page 5