It’s ancient history—possibly before the Cheers era, definitely before Friends—but there was a time, and it lasted for a long while, when Kraft Dinner was seventeen cents a package. And cigarettes were forty cents for a deck of twenty. Kraft Dinner and smokes for little more than half a buck. If we’d had good weather, and of course we didn’t—I summon these reveries from long-ago Newfoundland—it would have been paradise. A good, fat, fresh codfish could be had from the boat for a dime—but, tearful with remembered joy, I digress.
Those times are no more. Cigarettes now are almost as expensive as a similar volume of platinum, and of the two (Kraft Dinner, Export “A”), I am not certain which is more acceptable to smoke. Kraft Dinner may now be bought at certain convenience stores in the city of Toronto for a princely $1.50, a price nearly nine times the earlier one.
Kraft Dinner, however, has maintained its cachet. Packaged pasta has prevailed, where nicotine and its sibling tars, so rancorously and at such cost to the Canadian social fabric, have—alas—gone the way of anathema.
In fact, Kraft Dinner revolves in that all-but-unobtainable orbit of the Tim Hortons doughnut and the A&W Teen Burger. It is one of that great trinity of quick digestibles that have been enrolled as genuine Canadian cultural icons. Hamburgers, macaroni and doughnuts—Canada, this is your nation.
In passing, I must note that it is my personal view that the Kraft Dinner we get nowadays, despite the urgent assurances on the package, is not the “classic” of old. The pasta is smaller, and the powdered cheddar in a sack (which, when blended with butter and milk, is used to pave over the macaroni), is less thick, less intimate with the little elbows than it used to be. A definite fall-off, in my view.
I’ve summoned these reveries, not out of cloying nostalgia or in obedience to the dread mantra that hails everything from “the good old days” as infallibly superior to an ever-specious present. Not at all. Rather, it was all the talk of pot on Parliament Hill, all that murky double-speak of “decriminalizing,” while insisting pot was still illegal. The weary contortions of the Liberals trying to look really liberal—going soft on weed is the very amaranth of liberalism—while not surrendering their equally precious commitment to the nation’s health, and of course the well-being of the children.
Put reefer and Parliament in the same sentence, and linguistic contortions cannot be far behind. Nor did the hypocrisy of a government that has been fundamentalist on one mode of inhaling seeking to add parliamentary respectability to another mode—at least equally obnoxious, twice as smelly and real hell on the carpet. What really focused my attention during the pot debate, if focus may be allowed on such a topic, wasn’t the justice side of the argument, but its health corollary. It was the announcement by Health Minister Anne McLellan that her department was allocating $245 million—please stare at that figure—to advertise the dangers of smoking the pot that her colleagues were, by implication, proclaiming innocuous.
There was a time when a million dollars was thought to be an immense amount of money. But here is a government, on one of its off days, proposing as a sidebar, as a mere sputtering afterthought, to toss $245 million—two hundred and forty-five!!! Nearly a quarter of a billion—to blunt the portended impact of some of its own most progressive legislation.
When did money cease to mean anything? When did expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars, merely to deflect the impact of another government program, become so insanely trivial that the amount at stake barely crawled into some newscasts? When did they, meaning the politicians or the citizenry, become so numb, dare I say narcotized, to such vast expenditures?
Was it the estimated price of almost a billion dollars—one thousand million—to construct a useless list of the country’s firearms? Was it the other billion dollars that went sluicing through Human Resources and Development Canada? The rhetorical question that screams to be asked is, What are they smoking?
I forebear to explore beyond to ask the other blatant question: Does anyone, anyone at all, anywhere, believe that money spent by the government in pursuit of “public-service messaging” ever rattled the opinion of anyone whose sentience was greater than a stone’s?
Hear that sound? It’s a quarter of a billion dollars whistling its way to nullity. And so I thought of the long-ago days when even seventeen cents could supply nourishment and comfort, and those ever-so-long-ago days when a pittance was really a pittance, instead of, as now, a stack of bullion that once would make Croesus drool.
Social pressure accounts for the decline of smoking. It is surely not the risible Health Canada public-service messages, or the extravagantly inane scare pictures on cigarette packs, that have worked.
These latter are wildly over the top. There’s one picture of a carious mouth, a portrait of such dental horror that it must have been lifted from some mummy comic book.
If two-year-olds were ardent smokers, this campaign would have its perfect audience. Mix it up with a health-service warning from the tooth fairy and there wouldn’t be a two-year-old lighting up anywhere.
No, it isn’t the official stuff that cut down on the tobacco habit. It’s the frown of acquaintances, the increasing chill that ever-so-superior non-smokers send out to the last wastrel of their set who dares to take out the Player’s Light pack. It’s really very simple. Social opprobrium is the scourge that reforms. The only thing stronger than nicotine is the fear of friends’ disapproval.
Alas, reform is never a straight line. Just when it might be thought the art of inhaling was going the way of the hula hoop and the dodo, we have a report this week that there is something of a renaissance of pot smoking. Hemp is hip again.
Since 1994, the number of people smoking pot in this country has doubled. Even more impressive, a key component of the population—the very element most government campaigns are most urgent about “saving,” namely the young—has taken to pot with a vengeance. The same study also revealed that almost 30 per cent of 15-to 17-year-olds and 47 per cent of 18-and 19-year-olds used marijuana in the past year.
It went further, reporting—and I’m really glad to hear it—that “It’s easier to get marijuana on a school ground today than it is to get alcohol or cigarettes.”
(Just as a footnote here, I can’t remember when it was ever particularly easy to get booze on a playground, but then, I grew up in circumscribed and difficult times. The Most Holy Rosary Parish School of Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, had few supplements to the basic curriculum, and tots of vodka or rum during recess were most definitely not among them. It might have helped. There were problems in trigonometry that definitely needed some form of remedial lubrication.)
I think what we’re seeing here is another illustration of that wonderful irony that goes under the rubric of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Peer pressure and remorseless rudeness (driving smokers out of doors) has whittled away at the cohort that looked to tobacco for a friendly lift during each day’s many mortifications. But vague signals of approval toward marijuana as an alternate solace, its much-hyped value as a “medicinal” tool (remember the tired line from every party, “I only drink for medicinal purposes”) and the official moves to decriminalize pot have worked to celebrate the mellowing weed.
No one is going to frown at a pot smoker. She may be mollifying a pain. She is certainly not to be branded as a slave to Big Tobacco. And just look at her teeth: they’re perfect. No mummy’s curse has scarred that mouth. And the young, bless their adventurous and experimenting hearts, know more than any others what is hip and what is not. Cigarettes are so passé. Besides, they offer no real mood change.
Come to think of it, this may be the real appeal of marijuana. As well as the comforts of addiction, a joint offers a bland, smooth, edgeless few moments in a turbulent world. It puts a soft blanket over transient anxieties, suspends the critical judgment and enhances, beyond all measure of their intrinsic worth, the reception of some truly awful songs.
It is impossible to understand the popularity of some ancient bands and singers—the Mamas and the Papas, the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez (eech), Peter, Paul and Mary—without allowing for considerable numbing of the brain and a benign stupor that buried their dreadful lyrics beneath the radar of any self-regarding consciousness. The entire fame and popularity of Bob Dylan is only explicable on a similar subtraction of critical response.
I suppose the question that remains to be faced is whether the switch from one form of cigarette to another—pot is mainly smoked, and while RJ Reynolds may not be rolling them, joints are cigarettes—is a good thing. Do we have the same alarms about the second-hand waft from a doobie as we do from the less-noxious Export “A”? Are we to worry about the “passive relaxation” effect?
These are deep questions. They require meditation. Wind chimes, an old Cheech and Chong soundtrack, a few doobies and Health Canada beside us in the wilderness—we’ll figure them out.
The Cinderella City is about to enact one of the most comprehensive, ferocious, detailed and high-minded antismoking bylaws this side of Alpha Centauri. I am really glad to see this.
It’s been well known for decades now that Vancouver is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and further that it has resolved every major social and political problem known to man or metropolis. The Downtown Eastside, old-timers will recall, was cleaned up decades ago, and is now a most splendid housing-estate cum park, with a mix of citizens of every income and colour and culture—a true model to the world. Thanks to the forward-looking city governors of previous years, and their generous support of science and research into waste disposal, Vancouver’s garbage now evaporates, harmlessly, into the wide air as soon as it is placed on the streets. Garbage trucks can now only be found in the city’s famous network of museums.
Finally, where every other city in North America is a stifling box of car-packed gridlock and toxic exhaust, there hasn’t been a traffic jam in Vancouver since—let me see—about 1975, I think. The great monorails, the uncluttered bridges, the zillion bike lanes and the brisk, courteous efficiency of the city’s drivers as they zip, unimpeded, in their tidy little hybrids in and out of the downtown are the envy of every other municipal government on the continent. Shangri-La, thy new name is Vancouver.
So I’m glad the city council of that marvellous city by the mountains and the sea has finally gone to the mat, so to speak, on the last social scourge and only outstanding civic problem the city has.
Are the city’s proposed anti-smoking bylaws thorough, you ask? Let me put it this way: It’s just too bad there isn’t a Nobel Prize for Zeal, because, were there one, the civic fathers and mothers of Vancouver would be booking flights to Oslo even as I type their praises. The only failure in the bylaws, as I read the accounts of them, is that smokers are—not yet anyway—required to carry a handbell and sound their approach when they enter municipal boundaries
I especially like the bylaw for transient smokers. If a taxi is passing through Vancouver, neither the passenger nor driver may smoke—even if agreeable to both parties, and even if the taxi is licensed by another civic authority. This could be fine-tuned, though. Both the cab and its passenger could be defumigated at the city’s boundaries—it would be a pity to fustify an impeccable city.
Sidewalks, public buildings, bars, restaurants—well, you know they covered them. No smoking “within six metres of any entryway, window or air intake.” If you want to light up in Vancouver now, by my calculations the only legal spot would probably be on the median line of a major highway, or at the end of a long diving board extended from an apartment window.
But this is Vancouver. So let there be no surprise, as it approaches the sublime apogee of utter civic perfectibility, that it was mindful—that even here, in addressing its last plague—it had to consider its dues to multiculturalism, plurality and tolerance for all.
Vancouver will allow hookah parlours. That’s “hookah,” in case you stumbled. There are, I read, three hookah parlours, which offer their glass bowls and water pipes to some of the city’s newer citizens.
According to the World Health Organization, “a typical one-hour session of hookah smoking exposes the user to 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.” Now, any trivial inconsistency that nitpicking libertarians, or the live-and-let-live extremists, might have with this is more than trumped by the consideration that an hour on the hookah will combat “the depression common for newcomers” to the city. And if toking an hour on the hookah with two hundred times the volume of smoke from a single cigarette chases away the newcomer blues, well, hook up the hookah, toke away, I say.
Another petty glitch I spotted in a Vancouver Sun article suggests that “the one foggy point in the new bylaw was whether it will apply to crack cocaine and crystal meth smoking.” Picky, picky, picky. Crack cocaine and crystal meth? Bubblegum addictions. I’m sure the city council will get around to crack cocaine and crystal meth smoking when, and only when, they’ve reined in the jelly-bean rings on city playgrounds.
So, it’s a perfect set of bylaws. Accommodation for hookahs, a little ambiguity on the toy drugs of crack and meth, but a steel fence of regulation—even for those just passing through—on the only problem left in the city that is the only unflawed diamond in a zirconian world: damned cigarette smoking.
Three cheers to Vancouver and its Committee for Public Safety. Now, I gottah gettah hookah.