February 11, 2004 — 10 PM

Non-Fumeur

I’ve never smoked a cigarette.

Well, not one manufactured with just tobacco in it anyhow. Still, it’s an achievement, isn’t it? I have a couple friends who attach great import to this in their assessment of my character. They wouldn’t let me try one because it would be out of character. Other people are merely amused. Isn’t that cute. Still others roll their eyes. So you haven’t smoked! Get a life!

The point is, I cannot possibly fathom what it’s like to be a smoker. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted one, because everyone else was doing it. I’ve never bummed a cigarrete, or nicked a fag. Never have I felt the buzz of nicotine or blown smoke rings lazily into the air. I never flirt by asking someone for a light, or by inviting someone for a smoke, and if I ever offered someone a light, it was purely disingenuous. I do not have, and have never had, any reason to carry a lighter.

Hmm. It almost seems like I’m romanticizing the lowly cigarette, doesn’t it? Have all these years in la province du fumeur opaquely coated my judgment, like so many blackened lungs?

Am I not duty-bound, as a non-smoking native of Vancouver — a smoker-hostile city if there ever was one — to detest the filthy little beast? To cast smoking, and all those who partake in it, as the mortal enemy of all that is pure and good?

The thing is, I don’t buy the Cigarettes Are Evil argument. If they were as horrible as we’d like to think, people wouldn’t smoke. Who would engage such a filthy, disgusting habit? Well, people enjoy smoking. Anti-smoking advocates never admit this, and there’s hardly any such thing as a pro-smoking advocate these days, but it’s still cool. The proof of this is that the only effective measure we’ve found as a society to reduce smoking rates is to make them really expensive, to tax them out of people’s budgets.

Don’t get me wrong; they’re nasty all right. They’re full of ghastly chemicals, they cause horrific misery in people’s health, and the stench of their residue makes me curse every time I get home from a smoky restaurant or bar. I hate smelling like an ashtray, and I hate that, as a non-smoker, I still suffer. (Smoking is a religion in Montreal, and this will be the last city in North America to ban it in public places.)

Condemning smoking, however, and the people that do it, is a waste of non-filtered breath. One cannot de-glamourize something by making it seem naughty. One will never convince ardent smokers that they don’t like smoking by throwing scary statistics at them. We’ve had vile, graphic images on cigarette packs in Canada for years now, and nobody I know has ever said, “Oh my, so that’s what my lungs will look like. Eww! Smoking isn’t cool after all!”

The latest our government has to offer is some dweeb named Bob, who seems like a Regular Guy, and has quit smoking and will therefore be inspirational to all the other Regular Guys out there who smoke. This is sophisticated marketing? The “Bob’s On the Road to Quitting” screensaver?

Far more effective than any of this is to condemn the people that peddle this stuff to us — the cigarette companies. This shouldn’t be some brilliant, new idea. Adbusters has had Philip Morris in its crosshairs for a decade. The Insider, released five years go, dramatized the unsavoury habits of Big Tobacco, and that was a story of events that happened five years before that.

Yet for all we know, very few anti-smoking campaigns take advantage. Nobody likes to feel like a rube whose fallen for a slick sales job, and yet that’s exactly what tobacco companies have been trying on us all these years. Why don’t we try to combat this? Why is Philip Morris so much cleverer than most of its opponents?

ShardsO’Glass is the first brilliant stab I’ve seen at using some real corporate dirt to change people’s minds. And, in addition to being sly and clever, it’s a hilarious send-up of corporate spin.

Maybe frozen popsicles won’t stop people from smoking, but it might make some people think twice about buying cigarettes from companies engaged in such deception.

Or it might not. I’m not a smoker. What do I know?

Previously: Cherry Picking II

Subsequently: ¡Hola amigos!

February 2004
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