It’s safe to smoke but only in your dreams
Coda
Greg Bean

After many years as an ex-smoker, I took the habit up again this week, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

The news that I’m smoking again initially horrified my wife, and it will probably horrify my friends as well.

I lost both of my parents to lung cancer, and I’d been a two-pack-a-day man for many years when I finally managed to give up smoking “for good.”

Quitting didn’t happen overnight. I tried patches. I tried gum. I tried hypnosis. And once, I even tried aversion therapy. With that therapy, you can smoke all you want, but you have to do your smoking in a little booth with no ventilation and cigarette butts up to your ankles. They make you smoke as fast as you can, and every time you take a puff, they give you an electric shock with a doodad attached to your wrist. While you’re smoking and twitching, the other wanna-be quitters in your group stand outside the booth, making insulting comments about how stupid all that puffing and twitching makes you look.

None of it worked. I didn’t trust the hypnotist. The patches fell off. I became addicted to the gum, which was twice as expensive as cigarettes. And the only result of aversion therapy was that I could never again smoke a Camel without flinching.

Finally, I just went cold turkey and gradually became an ex-smoker. It wasn’t easy.

For several weeks after going cold turkey, I stopped dreaming about women and dreamed only of cigarettes. A couple of months later, I went back to dreaming about women, but only women who smoke. In six months or so, I was finally back to dreaming about nonsmoking women and issues with the black-hearted varmint I was working for at the time.

For the last couple of months, I’d been dreaming a lot about long road trips for some reason, and vintage automobiles. Then came the change.

As all ex-smokers know, you’re always an addict, even if you haven’t had a cigarette for a long time. And in my years as an ex-smoker, I’ve stumbled several times. For a while, I thought I had enough willpower to limit myself to one cigarette a day, but I soon realized the folly of that plan. At other points, I took up cigars or a pipe, thinking that if you don’t inhale the tobacco, you’re not really addicted.

I had to give cigars and the pipe up when I started inhaling those and realized they were probably doing more damage to my lungs than the cigarettes had.

Because of my own travails, I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for smokers who really want to quit, and find it nearly impossible to do so. I’ve never been addicted to heroin, but I believe those people who say that breaking an addiction to nicotine is as difficult as breaking an addiction to heroin. I can only speak from personal experience, but I probably tried, and failed, to quit smoking 50 or 60 times before I finally made it.

And now I’ve started again — but only in my dreams.

Almost every night for the last week or so, I’ve spent my sleeping hours dreaming dreams in which I’m smoking. Sometimes, I smoke Marlboros, but I’ve also enjoyed Camels, Winstons and unfiltered Pall Malls. A couple of times, I’ve even found myself smoking those delicious Nat Sherman Ovals, or one of those fat French cigarettes that taste like the dog’s breakfast.

The strange thing is, I know I’m dreaming when I’m dreaming, and at one point my dreaming self told my guilty self that since it was only a dream, I might as well enjoy it.

So I have. And I figure that as long as I confine my smoking to my dreams, I can keep on doing it for the rest of my life with no ill effect. I highly recommend it. In your dreams, no cigarette ever tastes bad. They all taste like the one you have with your first cup of coffee in the morning, or after an especially fine meal. You never get cancer or emphysema. The smoking dreams are so satisfying, in fact, that I find myself remembering them several times a day with special fondness.

But I do have a question.

In one of our Greater Media newspapers in the recent past, a letter to the editor mentioned a piece of legislation submitted to the state Assembly that would prohibit smoking while driving.

A bit of research turned up the information that Assemblyman John McKeon sponsored the legislation that would allow cops to issue an extra $250 ticket to a smoking motorist who is pulled over for another violation, like speeding.

The bill has quite a bit of support and is currently before the Assembly’s Transportation Committee for consideration. As usual, it is being touted as a safety measure, with McKeon citing an AAA-sponsored study that found that of 32,000 accidents linked to distraction, 1 percent were linked to the distraction of smoking while driving.

Presumably, the other 31,680 accidents in the study were caused by people distracted by other things. Monkeying with the CD player, for example. Maybe eating french fries. In New Jersey, we recently passed a law restricting the use of cell phones while driving — a law that has been a miserable failure — and we’re thinking about a law that would restrict pets from bouncing around in the car unrestrained. So we’ll probably get around to those other distractions, sooner or later. Now, though, we’re tackling smoking.

Although I think McKeon’s proposed law would be tough to enforce, and just one more way to punish a group of addicts for their addiction, it likely would not affect ex-smokers like me one way or another, if passed.

Unless I’m remembering one of those dreams in which I’m smoking on the way to work, and get in an accident.

Then, I’d be guilty of being distracted by thinking about smoking while driving, and that would be hazardous and completely unacceptable.

My question is: Shouldn’t they add a provision to this bill that would prohibit thinking about smoking while driving, and kill two birds with one stone?

New Jersey’s roadways are dangerous enough as it is, without people smoking or thinking about smoking. If people want to smoke, they ought to do it in their sleep, where it’s safe.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.