Addiction & Mental Health

My Rollercoaster Battle with Being ‘A Smoker’

And how cigarettes and tobacco have appeared, disappeared, and then reappeared in pop culture

In the 1970s and 80s, if a person wanted to be cool, they might do well to have a cigarette dangling from their lips or fingertips, accompanied by an I don’t give a sh*t expression on their face. Sure, this logic seems entirely ludicrous now, but I grew up in an era where it seemed like all the badass people I admired were smoking.

Like in the movie Grease —remember the iconic scene at the end where Sandra smokes a cigarette to demonstrate that she’s a smart, tough girl now who isn’t going to take any more of Danny’s crap. Or one of my all-time favorite movies, The Outsiders. I had such a killer crush on cancer-stick wielding Matt Dillon… kinda still do.

By the way, TobaccoFree.com has a write-up about tobacco use in movies, with popular brands paying movie producers big bucks, still to this day, for placement of their products. Thought that was interesting. If you were making a movie and someone offered an extra half million to place a pack of their cigarettes in your films, as was the case with Sylvester Stallone, what would you do? Be honest now.

Couple this with the fact that in those days people could still smoke everywhere, and they took pretty much full liberty to do so. People smoked in restaurants, in airports, on airplanes, and even hospitals— crazy town! — except I don’t remember anyone smoking at the library, where I often spent a lot of time as a moody, outcast child.

Hmm. At least somewhere was considered too sacred to have a cigarette.

I’m also just old enough to recall the infamous Marlboro Man advertisements — on TV, in magazines, on billboards — which to this day is still considered one of the most commercially successful advertising campaigns of all time. By the way, I found this interesting short YouTube clip: “The Original ‘Marlboro Man’ Has Died at Age 90. He Never Smoked.”

My own rollercoaster journey as a smoker started when I was fourteen. So young, I know, but who at fourteen didn’t mistakenly believe they were all grown-up already?

I had just started high school and, of course, it was a whole new world. I’d grown up in a controlling and repressive cult-like church that eventually turned out to be little more than a scam, and even at fourteen I had become fed up with my parents’ seemingly blind adherence to it. So, I did like a lot of other teenagers. I became rebellious. I made friends at school who laced their coke bottles with rum, and smoked cigarettes in their cars during lunch.

The first time I sat in one of their cars and they offered me a cigarette I felt like I had arrived somewhere— I felt like I belonged for the first time in a long time.

This began several years of addiction to tobacco.

I still recall when I was fifteen and my mother found a pack of cigarettes in my purse. She gave me a firm lecture that seemed to go on for hours but I just rolled my eyes. Then, she tried to flush the cigarettes down the toilet but they wouldn’t flush. They just floated on the surface of the toilet bowl water. I cackled wickedly about it for days afterward.

I felt immense guilt for all my rebellious actions when she abruptly passed away just two years later when I was seventeen. If only I had known how precious those last fleeting moments and memories would be. But what could I do? After all, I was nothing more than a ridiculously stupid kid.

After that, smoking became something different entirely. I didn’t smoke because it was fun and rebellious anymore. I smoked to deal with the pain and to punish myself for being so awful and flawed.

Yes, smoking is a form of self-harm, too. Breathing in that delicious thick smoke that you know is terrible for your heart and lungs as well as the rest of the whole body. That little burn to the throat and that terrible smoker’s cough when you’ve had too many.

I didn’t come up for air until I became pregnant with my daughter. I knew plenty of girls who smoked while pregnant. But I just couldn’t do that. It didn’t feel right. So I quit. It was a great excuse.

I did well until after she was born and I stopped nursing. I thought, oh cool, I can smoke again.

So, for the next couple of years I did just that, but I would always go outside. As my daughter grew older, I was mortified to have her see me smoking. Even though I enjoyed it immensely, I felt completely embarrassed about it. By the mid to late 1990s, with all the successful anti-smoking campaigns, being a smoker was almost as bad as being a devil worshiper, which made quitting much easier. So, one day I stopped. Just like that.

Now, believe it or not, the most staunch, holier-than-thou, in-your-face non-smokers are ex-smokers. For the next twenty years, I had my nose stuck in the air and when I passed someone who smoked I would make them feel like the biggest piece of dogsh*t.

I was strong enough to quit and so can you, jerk!

No, I didn’t actually say that, but that’s the way I acted. Miss Prissy B*tch. Even a hint of the smell would throw me into a tizzy. I derived much personal satisfaction in yelling at people who tried to light up where they weren’t supposed to in the five years I worked at Disney World. They were asking for it, I told myself.

Well, karma can indeed be a b*tch as well. About five years ago now one day I was feeling stressed out and depressed. As many depressives do, I decided to escape by watching a few movies. And guess what, every movie I watched seemed to have someone who was smoking. Oh, it looked so good! I craved it like a surfer craves the perfect wave.

A rather strange fact is that since 2017, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and numerous other publications have all published stories about the curious return of prolific smoking in movies.

And so lo and behold, I bought a pack of cigarettes. Oh, but that first puff was sweet, even though my throat and lungs protested greatly. The lie I told myself is that I would just have one or two and that would be it.

Yeah. Right. Ever since then, I’ve been stuck on the rollercoaster. Once I stopped for a whole year and then I lit up on a day when, once again, I was feeling stressed out and depressed. This is my trigger, as it is for a lot of people who smoke.

This interesting article provides information on how addiction relapse works and explains how addiction to substances is a form of brain damage that only gets worse the longer the addiction goes on. Nice.

And this saga has played out repeatedly up until just a few days ago. I walked to a nearby park here in Tampa and held a little mock ceremony in honor of my last pack of cigarettes.

Will it last? The fact that I will soon be 50 scares me to death. I’m no longer young and my body isn’t as forgiving or resilient as it once was. Thoughts of my skin wrinkling up like a prune from smoking scares me plenty, not to mention what it’s doing to my inner body—think of all those completely frightening but rather effective commercials.

Addiction is a dangerous beast indeed, no matter what it is we seem to be addicted to. Turns out, once the pattern of coping through some various means of addiction is formed in our minds, it will always be there, lurking like a stalker ex-boyfriend. It can even return, as in my case, twenty some odd years later.

A sobering thought…. or maybe not.

Question is, do I blame all those movies I watched for encouraging me to smoke again? That’s an odd question to answer.

On one hand, my mind tells me that we are all singularly responsible for our own behavior and the choices we make in life. We have to be strong enough to resist temptation.

But on the other hand, I can’t say that smoking in movies doesn’t serve to provide a powerful suggestion, one that may indeed be difficult for a mere human with a yen to resist.

Here’s another article I found helpful, if you yourself are battling some kind of addiction: Addiction Relapse: Risk Factors, Coping & Treatment Options (americanaddictioncenters.org).

The article underscores the importance of not always viewing a relapse as something negative and thus starting a dangerous spiral of guilt and shame. Rather, we should view a relapse as an opportunity to reflect and learn more about ourselves and grow from the experience. Why is this happening and what do we need to change about ourselves so that this doesn’t happen again.

Sounds great to me, and with any hope, that last pack of cigarettes will truly be my last.

Thanks for the great story prompt Michele Maize: