Stopping smoking not easy

Everyone smoked in the 1950s. In any case, it seemed that everyone smoked. On every corner a person was met by tobacco advertising.

Everywhere — in offices, in gyms, on the streets — they kept Marlboro, Winston, Rothmans between their fingers. These names were as familiar to everyone as varieties of chocolate, coffee. The most refined gentlemen presented cigars or pipe tobacco.

Not only almost everyone smoked, but everywhere. In old movies, we see blissfully inhaling while taking a seat on the bus. In the US, a train and plane passenger immediately lights up, and often not only a cigarette, but also a cigar, filling the entire small passenger compartment of the carriage or aircraft with clouds of smoke.

It never occurred to anyone that this smoke could be harmful to others. Those who do not smoke (there were, generally speaking, few of them) did not dare to challenge the right of smokers to smoke wherever they pleased. It was understood as a sacred right and no one dared to encroach on it.

In the Soviet Union, which was the antagonist of the West in every respect, there was a completely different situation. Smoking has long been banned in public places. Signs were hung everywhere urging people not to smoke or litter. It never even occurred to anyone to smoke, for example, at the airport or on the bus. However, in airplanes, as in the West, it was allowed. This was considered one, so to speak, of the privileges of air passengers.

But already somewhere in the seventies, this privilege began to be severely limited. First, a smoking ban was introduced on short flights up to 2 hours, then the bans were extended. Later, smoking was banned on airplanes altogether. But this is already somewhere in sync with Western measures.

Back in the late seventies, the Western press interpreted the universal ban on smoking in the Soviet Union as a generic sign of a totalitarian society.



And indeed, those who came from the Soviet Union to the West enjoyed the nicotine air of Freedom, which was, in general, heavily saturated with the spirit of propaganda. But the enjoyment of tobacco smoke did not last long, and soon the time came when the West undertook to eradicate smoking and it turned out that what was in the Soviet Union could not even stand comparison with the draconian laws that were applied against smokers in the non-Soviet societies. Some regimes have used completely inhumane methods. So the dictator of Turkmenistan one day completely banned the sale of tobacco products, which doomed hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens to torment. The same thing happened in Brunei.

Smokers began to be expelled from everywhere and the “territory of freedom” began to rapidly shrink, leaving tobacco lovers some tiny nooks and crannies in which they gathered in large crowds and poisoned each other. It was quite disgusting to go there, because there really was such a spirit from which there was nothing left but to quit smoking. The Soviet Union had already disappeared by that time, Russia was, but it still held on to the old principles, for example, it was allowed to smoke on planes after 3 hours of flight, so long-haul flights were still a comfort zone.

People crowded there who could not imagine themselves without smoking at all, and especially at the end of the plane, where it was allowed to smoke, something unimaginable was going on. It was impossible to rest there.

Aeroflot began to lure smokers onto its flights, and the half-empty American Airlines and other American carriers watched with envy as Aeroflot’s flights, packed to the brim with passengers. A press campaign has begun against Aeroflot for allowing onboard smoking. As a result, under the threat of a ban on flights to America, Aeroflot had to go for the introduction of the same draconian bans as those of American companies. Thus, smoking on long-haul flights has ceased.

It was only in the 1970s that the need to prevent passive smoking was raised to protect health of the younger generation. But even this simple idea was initially taken with hostility. For the idea that what is pleasant cannot but be useful, which has been established over the centuries, was equally characteristic of both advanced nations and primitive peoples.

I remember a recent episode of a trip to the Arctic. When giving advice about gifts for polar nomads who live by breeding reindeer, I was especially stressed on the need to bring alcohol and cigarettes. Assuming that this would be a gift for the head of the clan, I was incredibly surprised at how they disposed of the treat from the “Great Land”. Having put the family in a circle in height from a very old man to a baby, the owner of the yurt (a dwelling made of sticks covered with skins) opened a bottle and poured it into a large spoon, treated first a shrivelled old man, then an old woman, and so on until the last inhabitant, who looked no more than three years old. No one refused, on the contrary, they reverently accepted the 96-degree swill that could flare up from a match. Each was served a lit cigarette from a pack I presented, opened by the same owner.

Then I thought that the so-called civilised society, only a few decades earlier, had said goodbye to primitive hedonism. And we have nothing to be proud of.

Saying goodbye to smoking is just window dressing for complacency. Cigarettes were replaced by shisha, followed by electronic cigarettes, vapes, and Icos. I’m not talking about the legalisation of so-called soft drugs.

The path of truth is narrow and straight, the paths of self-deception are many and tortuous.