Photo by Gerry Meldani on Unsplash
What a shock to find out – a day into lockdown! – that tobacco would not be available in shops. People had received notice regarding the ban on alcohol sales during this time and so had been able to stock up on wines, but banning the sale of tobacco is more controversial. What does tobacco have to offer us in the times of Covid-19?
We are not arguing health risks of tobacco here, just questioning the wisdom of disallowing smokers access to their nicotine fix. There are already pressures enough in staying at home without a change of scenery. Making unavailable something which would calm people addicted to nicotine is short sighted. Unlike alcohol, cigarettes do not impair the judgement of, say, husbands who would do things that they regret once sober. It will feed into the sale of illicit cigarettes, depriving the country of tax revenue. Also, few people know that the uses of tobacco go beyond smoking the stuff, and that the industry holds out the promise of manufacturing a Covid-19 vaccine in the second half of this year.
A calming affect in the house
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.
Legal cigarettes
One of the bugbears of the tobacco industry is being undercut by the sale of illicit cigarettes that pass beneath the radar and are sold for half the price you’d pay at the counter (find the articles listed at the end of our Tobacco page for more). Making legal cigarettes illegal at this time will create a bigger market for people who think that they are not able to stop.
Covid-19 Vaccine
We’ve included a block of information in our tobacco chapter for several years now – the other uses of tobacco. It was punted as a biofuel for the airline industry in 2019, and not by the industry but by environmentalists (see our blog “Biofuel production in sub-Saharan Africa should be prioritised for aviation“)! A little known fact is that tobacco helped the planet with a vaccine in the time of SARS and Ebola, and is about to do so again.
The press release earlier this month reads:
Medicago, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Quebec City, has successfully produced virus-like particles (VLP) of the coronavirus in just 20 days using proprietary plant-based [tobacco] technology. The company did so successfully after obtaining the SARS-CoV-2 gene, which is the virus causing the COVID-19 disease … [It hopes] to initiate human trials of the vaccine by July/August 2020.
Find the announcement here.
Quitting?
Some remarkable people may go with the flow and set their minds to quitting the habit at this time. For a while, that is. Of them a tiny percentage will pull it off.
Mostly, humans don’t like being controlled and will respond to the lockdown itself with some resentment whereas, if they could have had a puff on the balcony, it would have made the time more bearable and kept the focus on what it is meant to achieve – flattening the curve.
If you want to stop people smoking, give them a book by Allen Carr.
Find the AgribookDigital page on tobacco here.
