Smoking: The Butt Stops Here

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In a backlash to the antismoking movement, some smokers have taken to celebrating their indulgence, at least in the presence of their like-minded comrades. In Palm Beach, Florida, the tony Chesterfield hotel holds monthly cigar nights; the restaurant closes to the public, then invites cigar smokers, for $125 a person, to a black-tie evening of cocktails, a five-course meal and all the cigars they can smoke. It is just one of dozens of such cloudy gatherings that are organized coast to coast each month. Gordon Mott, managing editor of Cigar Aficionado magazine, calls them "the speakeasies of the '90s."

Actor Matthew Modine won acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival for his short film Smoking, in which a nerdy smoker tries to cope with ever more burdensome restrictions on his beloved habit. Modine sees poetry in partaking. "There are times which are just really fantastic cigarette moments," says Modine. "That postcoital cigarette, or that cold winter night walking down the street. There's nothing more comforting than holding a burning ember in your hands and sucking the smoke into your lungs. The coffeehouse cigarette. The cigarette after a couple of pints of lager."

Richard Klein, author of the 1993 book Cigarettes Are Sublime, also praises the contribution that smoking has made to our culture. "The power that cigarettes exercise and have exercised in various forms over the centuries," he says, "has something to do not only with their utility as a source of consolation and personal help but also as a tool for mitigating anxiety, as in wartime, and also as a spur to concentration."

Yet the antismoking forces have their idealistic side too. Dr. Jonathan Fielding, a UCLA professor of public health and former Massachusetts commissioner of health, argues that banning smoking once and for all will remove a barrier that is separating Americans. "Smoking has become associated with lower educational attainment and lower social status," he says. "It becomes divisive in a sense. In a country where we have too many things that divide people, this is another thing dividing us."

And both sides can argue history. Smoking proponents warn that the current antismoking campaign could end up like Prohibition in the 1920s: banning cigarettes would be impossible to enforce and would only increase their outlaw appeal. "I think there's a strict analogy here," says Klein. "Both drugs have been used by cultures since the dawn of civilization; they can have very deleterious effects on society, but trying to ban them by law brings about circumstances which are much worse."

But Mark Pertschuk, executive director of the national organization Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, based in Berkeley, California, thinks another historical paradigm is more apt. Around the turn of the century, chewing tobacco was popular, and spittoons were commonplace in bars and restaurants. When an epidemic of tuberculosis broke out and the disease was linked to spittoons, a doctors' group that eventually became the American Lung Association campaigned to have them removed. "At the time, it was considered to be outrageous and anti-American to get rid of spittoons," says Pertschuk. "When historians look back on this ((smoking)) controversy in 25 years, they will think it was very strange that there were ashtrays and smokers in bars."