It is a widely held belief that addiction and pleasure make for poor bed fellows. Addicts are portrayed as wretched and joyless creatures: they are pale-faced and sunken-eyed hungry ghosts, stalking the urban landscape, wholly preoccupied with the addiction before them, deriving no pleasure from its fleeting abeyance. The architects of this paradigm are the medical authorities, who tell us that addiction is a disease and the addict a victim. Addicts are worthy of our compassion – perhaps – and medical treatment, but certainly not our admiration.
For my generation, the face of addiction is the sallow faced heroin addict — a half human and a half existence lived somewhere between oblivion and agonizing sobriety.
This portrayal of the junkie has been so successful from the standpoint of the medical establishment that few of us who contemplate the lot of the heroin addict will ever try to imagine the pleasures enjoyed by the recreational user. It is no accident that most of us imagine complete physical dependency manifests after a single inexorable taste. How else could we rationalize the decision to continue using if indeed it is not a decision at all? For users, we imagine, the half life of the addict must seem preferable, albeit for just a moment, to whatever awful reality they are escaping.
Heroin is bad and it will ruin your life.
But this is codswallop!
In fact, heroin is an unspeakably good drug.
Heroin itself is completely safe. When its purity can be guaranteed (which, incidentally, is made impossible only by its criminalization) risk of death is virtually eliminated. Heroin is not easily addictive: one can mainline heroin several times a week for many months before developing the crushing physical dependency. If used responsibly, and intelligently, heroin will provide the recreational user with the most pleasurable experience they are ever likely to enjoy. Irvine Welsh, the house music loving author of Trainspotting, advises us to “take the best orgasm you’ve ever had…multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it.” Others have described the initial rush as a twenty minute free fall into an endless plume of feathers.
Sounds rather good if you ask me.
And yet, the spectre of addiction has completely obscured heroin’s remarkable sensual qualities. More so than any other narcotic, heroin’s undeserved reputation has been instrumental in shaping our attitudes towards pleasure and addiction, ensuring the two words never appear in the same sentence: the addict has no fun.
The campaign against cigarettes has drawn on this misconception. The medical authority’s voice has been so prevalent in the dialogue on smoking that the pleasures accompanying a healthy nicotine addiction – indeed, necessitate it – are never acknowledged. And yet, the pleasures are very real.
They are also very wonderful.
The first smoke of the day. Lighting up after a sumptuous meal. The unrivalled enjoyment which is added by a glass of beer or wine. Non-smokers hear of none of these joys. Perhaps they are incapable of imagining them, the poor, misguided devils.
This we see most clearly in the response to the heaven-sent e-cigarette. Invented by a Chinese pharmacist as he watched his father slowly die from lung cancer, the e-cig delivers nicotine to the lungs without combusting tobacco leaves. As such, it does not produce cigarette tar – the thick carcinogenic resin that adheres to smoker’s lungs, slowly bleeding mutagenic compounds into the surrounding tissues, creating potentially malignant mutations at a rate of one to every fifteen cigarettes smoked.
Smokers, then, can rejoice. I can attest to the fact that a good delivery system offers all the enjoyment and the sensation of a good smoke. What’s more, the e-liquid (the nicotine containing solution in the e-cig) comes in a variety of delicious flavours such as raspberry, chocolate and apple pie. Already, a market for gourmet e-liquid has materialized, promising 100% natural and organic ingredients to the nascent aficionado. This sounds like a cause for celebration. Unlike today’s heroin addicts, smokers can now enjoy the pleasures of a well-seasoned habit without that pesky risk of death!
And yet, some joyless gadflies in the medical and political communities seem determined to spoil our fun. Their reasons for doing so are difficult to comprehend, largely because they don’t have any.
Despite their claims to the contrary, a growing number of studies indicate that e-cigarettes are harmless, that they do not contain hazardous levels of contaminates, and pose no danger to second hand smokers (or ‘vapours’, as they should be rightly known). None of this has stopped the spoilsports from claiming the effects of e-cigarettes are unknown, as if this were an argument in of itself for restricting their sale. Absurdly, they point towards flavours like orange creamsicle, Coca-Cola, and Juicy Fruit as evidence that the industry is catering to children. Moreover, if e-cigarettes are harmless, what does it matter if young people become addicts? Do we object in the same way to caffeinated products? Do we protest when Tim Hortons hires young adolescents who, as a perquisite of their employment, enjoy endless cups of coffee completely free of charge? It is not surprising that caffeine, an addictive stimulant, has slipped under Canada’s radar: we are, after all, one of the world’s largest consumers of the coffee bean and have perhaps a vested interest in regarding this addiction differently to the rest.
And yet, attitudes towards addiction are at the heart of the anti e-cigarette movement. By divorcing addiction from pleasure in the popular conscience – though not of course in reality – addiction has become a repulsive and joyless prospect. For the stick in the muds, the spectre of addiction is so terrifying that they would sooner deprive the world a healthy alternative to cigarettes than concede that the habit might actually be fun, and harmless fun at that.
Until their arguments become coherent, and until they find some semblance of evidence that e-cigarettes are bad for your health, Canadians should issue a curt dismissal to the naysayers. Indeed, I encourage all of you to start work developing a new and thoroughly delicious habit, one which you can happily place beside the morning’s first well-earned cup of joe.