Ya know, honestly, cigarettes taste damn good. Maybe it’s the fault of the tobacco companies, but there’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be found in the first inhale of a good cigarette as it warms your lungs and lights your blood on fire. There’s some sort of power in exhaling the smoke from your body. Yeah, sure, it’s leaving nasty shit behind. There’s some cognitive dissonance for you. But all in all, there’s power. Maybe that’s why so many native Indian tribes have a peace pipe or some other form of smoking; either that, or it’s become a powerful cultural binding tool. Because when you take time to think about it, there’s a lot of primitive style tribes that have some sort of bonding ritual, or adult-status-achievement ritual that involves smoking, drinking or eating some form of intoxicating natural plant life.
Then the industrial age kicks in and manufactured drugs kick in once the opium’s banned. Wonder if the invention of the manufactured cigarette coincided with the temperance movement in the US. A quick perusal of articles culled might seem to agree, but this author is too lazy to do much more than that. We’ll leave it for another day.
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