Leith on life: Addicted to nothing

I don’t know why people make such a fuss about giving up smoking. It’s dead easy. I’ve done it dozens of times. In fact, I haven’t been a smoker smoker—you know, someone who buys a packet of 20—in a decade. This? This thing that’s smouldering in my hands, and whose 400-odd toxic substances I’m drawing deeply into my lungs? That’s a casual cigarette, not a cigarette cigarette. Different thing. If you persist, or if you’re unlucky, you only end up casually dead of it. Ho ho ho.

I gave up at New Year, again. But this time when, a day or two in, the need for a casual one made itself felt in my lungs—made itself felt, as addiction always does, as lack—I tried a sideways jump. Feeling like a proper Charlie, I asked the newsagent for a digital fag. And you know what? It worked. It resembles the real thing in only the most oblique way—with its dry, malty sweetness—but if you’re puffing on an e-cig, it’s enough to prevent that moment when the need to have a 10-pack in your pocket overcomes you. Nicotine satisfies nicotine addiction: who knew?

Advantages of e-cigs:

One, you feel like you are living in the future. The tip glows green. Green! And you have—relish the phrase—plugged your cigarette into your computer’s USB port to charge. If you’d told me 10 years ago that it would be possible to use that phrase, I’d have looked at you like you were Doc Brown from Back To The Future, goggles and all.

Two, they won’t (we think and, ahem, hope) kill you. Because all that’s in them is water vapour and stage smoke and nicotine, which—if not chuffed down with 43 known carcinogens and 3,957 other interesting and not in toto wholesome ingredients—is a pleasant mental stimulant which may help ward off dementia, according to something I read somewhere.

And three, of course, all that stuff about them being cheaper, not stinking, being semi-interesting talking points, being available in key lime pie or cannabis flavours, and being something you can smoke indoors—to the pleasurable annoyance of those killjoys who disapprove of them on the grounds of what they are pretending to be.

But most interesting to me is the way in which they seem, in a thrillingly zeitgeisty way, to confirm the great cultural landslide from the concrete to the abstract, the real to the virtual. We see it taking place in the realm of the printed word and the reproduction of music, in goods and services, in money (“everything that is solid...”), in human interaction—and now even in the realm of gaspers. My brother in law, who is further down this road than me, says that there comes a point at which, rather than the e-cigarette serving as a just-about-acceptable substitute for the real thing, the real thing (in the emergency of a flat battery or a spent cartomiser) becomes a just-about-acceptable substitute for the e-cigarette.

The simulation becomes primary. It is preferred to the original. And what’s more, the simulation travels further and further from the real thing. The idea is, you see, that once you’re on the e-cigs, you adjust the quantity of nicotine (which is the only active ingredient in the first place) down and down until you are “smoking,” or “vaping,” a zero-nicotine solution. That is, you are effectively smoking nothing at all. You are—perhaps on 40-a-day; perhaps seriously habituated—smoking an everything-free cigarette. Isn’t there a heroic, quixotic, exhilaratingly Baudrillardian purity to the idea?

Addiction is, as I said, experienced as a feeling of lack—and it’s a feeling of lack which is both fostered and alleviated, or both alleviated and fostered, by the substance. Hence the profound excellence of Oscar Wilde’s remark on the subject: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.” How much more exquisite will it be to be addicted—as in, actively addicted—to nothing. You’d want for nothing. And nothing would satisfy you.