From March 29th, Irish smokers will have fewer places to indulge their habit as the Government tries to stop what the Native Americans started, writes Shane Hegarty
The cigarette: four inches of rolled tobacco that changed the world; that laid the foundations of modern America, fuelled European colonialism and is credited with winning wars and kick-starting modern culture. It is an occasional currency, a muse, a killer. It is an inspiration for some fine anecdotes. Pianist Victor Borge was once asked why the ivories on his piano were so yellow. "The elephant," he replied, "smoked too much".
On March 29th, the Government will take the next step in stopping what the Native Americans started. Tobacco had been smoked and chewed widely on the American continent for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans and when Columbus and his men stepped ashore the New World in 1492, the indigenous Arawaks gave them a gift of fruit, spears and "certain dried leaves". Columbus thanked them and returned to his boat; where he ate the fruit, kept the spears and threw the tobacco away.
It showed a lack of business nous. This was the plant that later rescued the early pilgrims after several decades of fatal misadventure. In 1565, while travelling in Florida, navigator John Hawkins came across a small colony of French smoking the dried herb. He brought some back to England with him, where it proved very popular indeed. A hardy crop, flourishing for even the most naive of farmers, the first crop was sown in Virginia in 1612 and within seven years tobacco was the colony's largest export. It gradually built its economy around it. Fortunes were made, colonists flocked to the New World and the tobacco leaf ultimately becoming a form of currency. Demand for labour gradually fuelled the slave trade over the next two centuries. J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, later claimed that it triggered the English Renaissance and that the country's history could be parcelled into two eras: "the pre-smoking and the smoking".
Walter Raleigh did not bring tobacco to England; but, as a favourite at the court of Elizabeth I, he was responsible for it becoming so fashionable. He and his pipe were quite a novelty. Story has it that he was reclining in his chair one day when his servant entered the room, saw him smoking and, believing him to be on fire, threw a bucket of water over him.
The drug was glorified as a powerful aphrodisiac and many believed it to be a fine medicine which "purgeth superfluous phlegm and other gross humours". However, with tobacco arrived the anti-tobacco lobby, whose first great champion was Elizabeth's successor James I. In Counterblaste to Tobacco he described choking on this "horrible stygian pit that is bottomless". The arguments would become a little more hysterical before science intervened. In 1907 a Christian Temperance pamphlet outlined such dangers as "cigarette eye" ("A fine young boy of 18 sits in a dark room, his eyes swollen and painful, the cause - cigarette smoking!") and described the tragic case of the "bloodless boy" (whose "main artery did not contain a drop of blood. It had dried up".) It was not until the 1930s that the first links were made between smoking and cancer.
Cigarettes became the 20th century's fastest growing consumer product while lung cancer became the 20th century's fastest growing disease. Many were as yet unprepared to accept such unusual theories. In the 1950s, one doctor offered a stout defence of cigarettes when declaring that to give up smoking from fear of lung disease would be as ridiculous as giving up eggs and bacon for breakfast from fear of heart disease.
However, nothing matches the wit of Joseph Cullman, head of Philip Morris (makers of Marlboro) in 1971, when he answered a question about the lower birth-weight of babies born to smokers with the claim that "Some women would prefer having smaller babies".
The cigarette contains 4,000 substances, including chocolate, beeswax, fig juice, lemongrass oil and nutmeg. That delightful mix, though, is somewhat ruined by the addition of arsenic, radon, ammonia, sulphuric acid, butane, hydrogen cyanide and nail polish remover. In the smoker, up to 15 per cent of the blood can be carrying carbon monoxide around the body instead of oxygen.
By the middle of the century, the cigarette had conquered Europe. It had had a great Great War. Cigarette rations were introduced for soldiers, who found them more convenient than lighting up a pipe while under fire and who also used them as currency. It meant the recruitment of a new generation of smokers and when the Americans entered the war, Gen Pershing told Washington: "You ask us what we need to win the war. We need tobacco, more tobacco - even more than food." It was again a currency among soldiers in the second World War, as it was among the ruined cities of Europe.
Hitler's vigorous anti-smoking crusade could not prevent cigarettes from being the main currency in the months before the fall of Berlin.
The silver screen made a star of the cigarette. The great cinema noir of the black and white era is framed in smoke. After winning fewer roles during the 1980s, it made a comeback to during the 1990s, when it was so prevalent in Hollywood that one in every five kids' movies included cigarette logos. Philip Morris kindly provided cigarettes to Men in Black and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, after previously being on hand to supply Grease and The Muppet Movie.
It was a television natural. Quiz shows, chat shows and political debates would commonly end with the credits rolling over a silhouette of people smoking. Those who watched the recent retrospectives of John F. Kennedy's assassination may have been taken aback by the sight of newsreaders with a cigarette in one hand and breaking news in the other.
The cigarette has been written about by historians, social analysts, doctors and philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre, a poster boy for the cigarette, viewed the world through the wisps rising from his Boyard. For the smoker, he said, the universe exists as something to be experienced while smoking.
Today, 31 per cent of the Irish population smokes. Some 72 per cent of those have tried unsuccessfully to quit. Cigarettes kill more than 6,000 people here a year. In Greenland - which has the highest lung cancer rate in the world - more than 80 per cent of its population of 56,000 smokes. According to medical journal the Lancet, in 2000 2.43 million died from smoking in the developed world, but the developing world was catching up strongly with 2.41 million smoking related deaths.
As the market declines in the Western world, it is in the developing world that the cigarette finds refuge. In more liberal markets, tobacco companies use more blatant techniques to attract new, young smokers. A World Health Organisation survey found that about 11 per cent of the children in Latin America and the Caribbean were offered free cigarettes by a tobacco company representative in 1999 and 2000. At that time, according to a BBC investigation, British American Tobacco were sponsoring football tournaments in Gambia at which they would hand out free fags to the teams.
In this corner of the world, ingenuity tries to match prohibition. The "light cigarette" is a successful marketing tool, but is just as carcinogenic as a standard one. In 1995, one UK marketing company advised Gallaher, the makers of Benson & Hedges, that they package cigarettes "like sweets, Love Hearts, Refreshers".
Across the world there are approximately 1.1 billion regular smokers. 5.5 trillion cigarettes are sold around the world each year. By 2030, it is estimated that cigarettes will kill 10 million people annually. "The world," as P.G. Wodehouse once remarked, "is our ashtray".
What is it?
The thin white stick that divides the world neatly into smokers and non-smokers
Why is it in the news?
The Government has announced March 29th as the date from which smoking will be banned in most workplaces, including the pub.
Most appealing characteristic
It makes you "cool".
Least appealing characteristic
It makes you dead.
Most likely to be spotted
Among groups of smokers huddled and shivering in the cold outside pubs, offices, restaurants.
Least likely to be spotted
Anywhere else