Cigarettes are Non-Essential, but Tobacco can Still Help the Fight against Covid-19

It is difficult explaining to a non-smoker how nicotine functions in shaping the world of a smoker. As an ex-smoker myself, I used to experience it as a creeping dryness of throat, a building agitation combined with a withdrawing interest in any proceedings whatsoever around me. People are different, and so responses to this deprivation probably differ too.

I was still a smoker when the team was visiting role players at the beginning of the agriculture project back in 2003. We would have six or seven meetings or so lined up, and knowing that smoking in the car was out of the question, I tried to schedule a smoke break here and there. Most of the meetings were so good-natured (and conversation hard to draw to a close) that we usually rushed from meeting place to meeting place without the opportunity of a smoke break, which led to my becoming progressively quieter, tipped into a space in which the deprivation crowded out any other imperative.

Compiling the chapters was absorbing, akin to writing several matric higher grade English papers a day, what with all the summarising and seeing what could be left out! Inevitably the dip would come, and I would feel controlled by the nicotine and began to resent it. I would take reading matter outside and do work while I had my fix. It was in the time of printing the second edition that I kicked the habit after accepting Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking from a friend. The book doesn’t frighten you with stories of how smoking is bad for your health (usually this just increases your anxiety, leading to a higher uptake of cigarettes and a feeling of helplessness!) Check the book out for yourself.

But it is also the non-smokers who know the difference of that fix to the family member, and will have to brace themselves for some dark moods in this time of lockdown.