For many, where cigarettes are concerned, discouraging is a form of ensuring their continuing to smoke. For some, it may cause them to start. A corollary of this conclusion asserts that it is not enough to know that cigarettes are bad for your health in order to decide not to smoke. The noxious effects of tobacco have been observed since the moment of its introduction into Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. Since the early nineteenth century, it has been recognized that the alkaloid of nicotine, administered to rats in pure form in minute doses, instantly produces death.
No one who smokes fails eventually to get the signals that the body, with increasing urgency, sends as it ages; in fact, every smoker probably intuits the poison from the instant of experiencing the first violent effects of lighting up, and probably confirms this understanding every day with the first puffs of the first cigarette. But understanding the noxious effects of cigarettes is not usually sufficient reason to cause anyone to stop smoking or resist starting; rather, knowing it is bad seems an absolute precondition of acquiring and confirming the cigarette habit.
Indeed, it could be argued that few people would smoke if cigarettes were actually good for you, assuming such a thing were possible; the corollary affirms that if cigarettes were good for you, they would not be sublime. Cigarettes are not positively beautiful, but they are sublime by virtue of their charming power to propose what Kant would call “a negative pleasure”: a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the “bad” taste the smoker quickly learns to love.
Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility. Warning smokers or neophytes of the dangers entices them more powerfully to the edge of the abyss, where, like travelers in a Swiss landscape, they can be thrilled by the subtle grandeur of the perspectives on mortality opened by the little terrors in every puff. Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good — not good, not beautiful, but sublime (Hilts, 1996).
Alcoholics Anonymous long ago discovered the limits of assuming that a simple act of will, performed in response to an imperious injunction issuing from the self or some external authority, would cause alcoholics to stop drinking. The suggestion that one can “Just say No” entertains the very illusion that motivates the habituated person. Any habit carries with it the endlessly repeated belief that one has sufficient self-control to stop, abruptly, at any moment: believing one can stop is the preeminent condition of continuing.
Just saying No, over and over again, while continuing to smoke, becomes the motivating aim, the consuming pleasure pain, of Italo Svevo’s hero in the novel The Confessions of Zeno. His whole life is spent in enacting the illusory belief that he can smoke “The Last Cigarette. ” But the last one always turns out to be just one more cigarette, another in the series of last cigarettes; taken together, they form the narrative of Zeno’s paradoxical existence, serving as milestones marking the passage of time and the progressive stages of his unheroic but strangely gallant life.
Endlessly trying to stop smoking leads to a life of doing nothing but smoking. In the present climate, the discursive performance of smoking has become a form of obscenity, just as obscenity has become an issue of public health. Of course, censors always claim that they work on behalf of the moral and physical well-being of the body politic, which they wish to protect from the harm that is supposed to follow from the proscribed symbolic behavior. Since smoking is wordless, it is a form of expression especially vulnerable to being suppressed by censors who hesitate before banning speech.
The increase of attacks directed against smoking in the last decades could be seen as the harbinger of the wave of censorship that threatens to engulf America. Healthism has become part of the dominant ideology of America for reasons that seem alternately naive and sinister, serving to mask the depredations of a cruel industrialization and to foster the immediate interests of a major sector of the economy. It has distorted and obscured more appropriate views of our biology and of the relation between life and survival.
It has given rise to forms of hypocrisy whose transparency is more visible abroad than here, but with consequences for the quality of life in this country and for social freedom that are visible all around us. Moralists always want to vote cigarettes up or down; realism requires us to acknowledge that, like all drugs, they are a mixed blessing. No society has succeeded in getting along without smoking tobacco, which suggests that the practice will outlive the current wave of antitabagism, or will coexist with it as it always has.
As with all drugs, one ought to resist the sort of intolerance that morally reduces these substances to their active chemical ingredients. Champagne and beer, whiskey and vodka, sake and soma, are indistinguishable in the eye of temperance — but the conditions under which they are normally consumed, the significance of their use in society, and the pleasures they procure differ widely. Similarly, tobacco in all its forms, and cigarettes in particular, cannot be judged solely on the basis of the effects of nicotine and tars.
But, conversely, one must not therefore be led to believe that the harmful chemicals in cigarettes are somehow separable from the uses to which they are put. Cigarettes are bad for you, like all drugs, and that is what makes them so good to those who use them. No addict can imagine his drug without the discomfort and inconvenience that accompanies its use. Smoking cigarettes is both damaging to your body and to your bodybuilding goals. Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemical compounds.
The most well known of these compounds is nicotine, which, despite some reported positive effects such as elevation of mood, is much more harmful than helpful. Nicotine increases the risk of heart disease and stroke, and has only a negative effect on growth. Aside from the above, nicotine and other well known agents in cigarette smoke are known to cause many other diseases and cancers. Lung cancer, gum cancer, and lip cancer are some examples. There are many well known health problems associated with cigarette smoke, but there are also general lifestyles accompanied with it.
Smokers are known to be more irritable than nonsmokers, and normally see more problems with sleep patterns. Anxiety is also more predominant in smokers than in their nonsmoking counterparts. On a bodybuilding level, male smokers have been known to have higher estrogen and lower plasma-testosterone levels than nonsmoker’s do. Smokers will claim that there are benefits to smoking, but there are none. Smoking cigarettes is no different than scratching a mosquito bite. Whatever pleasure is gained from it would not be there if the bite wasn’t there to begin with! Cigarettes don’t give you any pleasure above and beyond what you had as a nonsmoker.
Its effects on your body in terms of possible health effects are plentiful. Top it off, the hormonal and metabolic effects of tobacco cause lack of mental and physical energy, endurance and recovery and you will experience these problems in both your everyday life and in the gym. http://www. bodybuildingpro. com/smoking. html The dangers of cigarette smoking are particularly insidious; most of the health consequences are slow, gradual, and cumulative. The immediate impact that the use of other substances may have, like drunk driving, drug overdose, or incarceration, may help persuade young people not to take such risks.
The long-term consequences of cigarette use may be easier for many young people to ignore because they feel inherently invulnerable to these far-off risks, and many young smokers believe they can quit smoking before the long-term health “bill” comes due for their smoking behavior. However, the evidence suggests that most people who begin smoking regularly in adolescence will continue to do so, regardless of their intentions to quit. For example, of those who smoked a half-pack a day or more in high school, over one-third said that they expected not to be smoking in 5 years.
However, 5-6 years later, nearly 80% of those who intended to quit were still smoking a half-pack or more a day (Hilts, 1996). Why do rates of smoking increase after young people leave high school? Are there things about most post-high-school experiences that tend to encourage increased amounts of cigarette consumption? An alternative question may be more to the point: Is there something about the typical high-school environment that constrains young smokers from consuming as many cigarettes as they might wish? Clearly there is.
Virtually all high schools have rules not only against students smoking in school but also against stepping out of school buildings for a smoke between classes. An increasing proportion of colleges, universities, and workplaces also have “smoke-free” buildings; however, individuals in these settings are generally free to step outside from time to time to take a cigarette break. In other words, it is likely that many high-school smokers would prefer to consume more cigarettes per day than they do, and the rather abrupt increase in consumption after graduation reflects the reduction or removal of situational constraints.
One implication of this line of thinking is that if the trend toward smoke-free workplaces continues, the progression to higher levels of consumption after high school may be reduced to at least some extent. Other factors that might contribute to an increase in the amount of smoking after high school include more time spent away from the parental home (some parents probably inhibit their minor children’s smoking in their presence or in their home), and an increased amount of funds being available for purchasing cigarettes.
However, we found little indication that changes in living arrangements made a substantial difference in smoking rates, nor that becoming employed full time (presumably increasing available funds) made a substantial difference (James & Grinspoon, 1984). Turning now to the age-related decline among women during their late twenties and early thirties, In other words, much of those declines can be attributed to factors such as marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood, which involve increasing proportions of women during those later years.For men, by way of contrast, the age-related declines were smaller, and adjustments for other factors had virtually no impact.
Reference:
http://www. bodybuildingpro. com/smoking. html Bakalar James B. , and Lester Grinspoon, 1984. Drug Control in a Free Society (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press). Hilts, Phillip J. Smokescreen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover Up. Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley, 1996. Hilts, Karen, Edward L. Smoking: The Story Behind the Haze. New York: Nova Science, 1996.