The Only Thing That Counts Is Me

- Old Spanish Proverb

“If it weren’t for my smoking, none of you would be in Singapore” my Dad is fond of saying, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He grew up in a small town in Kerala, India. Grandfather was working in Singapore but his wife and children (including my Dad) were all back home in India. When Dad took up smoking (at the mature age of 12), Grandma wrote to her husband saying she could no longer control Dad herself. So Grandfather brought Dad to Singapore to raise him himself. After awhile, he decided Singapore wasn’t such a bad place to raise children and brought the whole family here. Funny how smoking turned out to be a good thing for my family!

None of us 3 sons are cigarette smokers but my younger brother and I do have the occasional cigar. Mom gives us the standard admonishment that smoking is bad for your health and bad for the health of those around you (from second-hand smoke). As far as cigarette smoking goes there appears to be ample evidence on its ill effects but is cigar smoking, especially in small quantities, just as bad? Or is it analogous to wine and whiskey – both contain alcohol but wine in moderate quantities is actually beneficial whereas whiskey is mostly detrimental.

I remember years ago when I first tried a cigar. I was attending a friend’s wedding and being single, I asked to be seated at the same table as all the bride’s single girlfriends. It was a stroke of pure genius – seated with me were 2 gorgeous models, a chic private banker, a stunningly beautiful advertising executive and a single mother who looked so good I couldn’t believe that she was either “single” or a “mother”. There being only 6 of us at the table, we were fairly quickly joined by 2 of the groom’s friends who obviously wanted to get to know the young ladies I had the pleasure of dining with. One of those chaps smoked cigarillos; small cigars which are about the shape and size of cigarettes. Unlike the acrid burnt ash smell of common cigarettes, his cigarillos smelled pleasantly of oak and leather. We all tried one and that’s how I first learnt to appreciate cigars. To this day, whilst I will rarely have more than 1 cigar in an evening’s outing, I might have 4 or 5 cigarillos instead of the cigar.

The fun part about smoking is of course the fact that you get to blow smoke. When you grow up, blowing soap bubbles just doesn’t cut it anymore. Breathing out smoke from your lips languidly with a smoldering look in your eyes is one of the coolest poses you could strike. But whilst cigarette smoke stinks, cigar smoke is frequently described as containing aromas of leather, spice, cocoa, coffee or nuts and thus adds to the picture. Many women who don’t smoke at all nevertheless enjoy being close to or talking with a man smoking a cigar because of the aroma. And having a beautiful woman or two in your presence can only help complete the picture of coolness that cigars evoke.

Cigars have spawned so many memorable one liners :-

The great English satirist, Sir Evelyn Waugh said “The most futile and disastrous day seems well spent when it is reviewed through the blue, fragrant smoke of a Havana cigar”.

Sir Winston Churchill quipped, “I always have Cuba on my lips” in reference to his penchant for Cuban cigars.

Rudyard Kipling wrote an entire poem about a man choosing between his fiancée and his cigars called “The Betrothed” which contains the oft-quoted line “A woman is only a woman but a good Cigar is a Smoke!”

And Russell Hoban in The Turtle Diary writes “But when I don’t smoke I scarcely feel as if I’m living. I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself.”

Which brings us neatly back to the original question, are cigars bad for you? Was Horace Greely of the New York Tribune right when he wrote “A cigar has … a fire at one end and a fool at the other”?

To get the most objective evidence possible, I went to the United States’ National Cancer Institute website. The results were pleasantly surprising. According to their chart, for all causes of death combined, smoking 1 to 2 cigars a day does not decrease your lifespan at all compared to a non-smoker (yes the chart shows a 2% increase in mortality but the data is correct only within a 5% error margin so any fluctuation within 5% is completely negligible). On the other hand, someone who smokes 1 pack of cigarettes a day has a 69% higher mortality rate! And let’s be realistic, smoking 1 to 2 cigars a day is a lot! Most casual cigar smokers such as myself average less than 1 cigar a week. Whereas 1 pack of cigarettes a day is considered light for cigarette smokers. In other words, reality is likely to be skewed even more in favour of cigar smokers compared to cigarette smokers than the statistics suggest!

The most damaging statistic against the gentleman who smokes 1 to 2 cigars a day is that he increases his chances of cancer of the larynx by 6 times compared to the non-smoker. That however is completely dwarfed by the fact that a 1-pack a day cigarette smoker increases his chances of the same cancer by a whopping 25 times compared to the non-smoker! In every statistic, the cigar smoker fares much better than the cigarette smoker. Just to pick another example, 1 to 2 cigars a day has no effect on your chances of lung cancer or heart disease but 1 pack of cigarettes a day increases your chances of lung cancer by 12 times and heart disease by 58%!

The difference in health effects between cigars and cigarettes were so wide that I began to wonder how it could be. After all, both involve smoking only tobacco. The fact that cigarette smokers inhale smoke into their lungs whilst cigar smokers do not of course accounts for the aforementioned difference in lung cancer risks. But surely cancer of the larynx and buccal cavity (mouth) should be more common in cigar smokers than cigarette smokers? Cigarettes have much less smoke than cigars and cigarettes have filters which presumably “clean” cigarette smoke even more before it enters the mouth. So why did the statistics show that even for cancer of the larynx and buccal cavity, cigarette smokers were much worse off than cigar smokers?

Pipes and rudimentary cigars were smoked by Native Americans for hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492 and the Europeans were introduced to tobacco. Cigars became common amongst the European aristocracy from the early 19th century onwards and little has changed since then in the way cigars are manufactured. A cigar consists of only tobacco leaves and practically nothing else. Different quality and shapes of leaves are used for the filling in the tobacco and the outer covering. The difference in taste and aroma amongst the good cigar brands comes only from the different quality of the tobacco leaves used, the drying, aging and fermenting periods of the leaves and the skill of the human cigar rollers. As far as I can tell, no preservatives or artificial flavourings appear to be used in high quality cigars. The lack of preservatives is why a good cigar will deteriorate unless kept at 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 70% humidity. If stored that way, a good cigar can last for decades. Good cigars can even be re-humidified if they dry out provided they have not been otherwise handled badly.

Whilst cigars were common in early 19th century Europe, cigarettes first became prominent in the 1853-56 Crimean War. With supplies short (especially luxuries like cigars), English soldiers learnt from their Turkish counterparts that small amounts of tobacco can be rolled up in paper and smoked. The first recorded instance of that practice is actually around 1614 when beggars in Seville, Spain picked up cigar buds from the street, unwrapped them to extract the remaining tobacco and wrapped up the tobacco in thin paper rolls to smoke. After the Crimean War, the English soldiers spread the practice of rolling tobacco in paper amongst the common people in England. From its inception therefore, the cigarette was the poorer cousin of the cigar and that remains true to this day.

The use of paper in cigarettes rather than a cured, specially selected tobacco leaf for wrapping certainly accounts for some of the ash taste and acrid smell of cigarettes compared to cigars. The much smaller cross section of cigarettes and their originally uneven tobacco filling by users must have necessitated a much harder inhalation to draw smoke and keep the cigarettes lighted. I postulate that that is how cigarettes might have first come to be smoked through inhalation into the lungs rather than just the mouth.

But whilst keeping those characteristics of using paper wrapping and inhalation to the lungs, the modern cigarette has nevertheless evolved dramatically since the beggars in Seville and the Crimean War. Artificial flavours are now added to cigarettes to improve taste and consistency. Preservatives have also been added so that unlike a cigar which dries up unless carefully stored, cigarettes can survive without any discernable deterioration for decades.

Just exactly how many additives are approved for use in cigarettes today? Twenty? Fifty? The answer is a shocking Five Hundred and Ninety-Nine! Don’t believe me? Checkout Philip Morris’s very helpful website which lists all the major ingredients of every brand and packaging type of cigarettes produced by them. Also be sure to note that under the tab “Tobacco and Flavour Ingredients for All Philip Morris USA Brands” they list 125 ingredients. Under the next tab “Non-Tobacco Component Ingredients for All Philip Morris USA Brands” they list another 120+ ingredients. This means that every Philip Morris cigarette contains over 250 different substances – a far cry from tobacco and paper in the Crimean War or the backstreets of Seville. Of course, all 599 additives approved for use in cigarettes are substances which are approved for human consumption by the U. S. Food & Drug Administration. In fact, many of them are used in other food products as well. You can eat them but the difference is, no one said anything about burning them and inhaling their smoke. Edible foods when burnt undergo radical chemical changes which can turn some of them into toxic substances.

Just how many chemicals are produced by the 250+ common ingredients in all Philip Morris cigarettes? Another 250 chemicals? 1000? The answer is a staggering 4000 different chemicals, many of which are toxic and cancer causing. These include fun substances like Hydrogen Cyanide which was used by the Nazis as poison gas against Jews in World War II and Carbon Monoxide which inhibits the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and can cause loss of consciousness, brain damage and death in sufficient quantities.

So there we have it – cigarettes are dangerous whilst cigars in moderate quantities are harmless because cigarettes contain hundreds of additives which produce thousands of chemicals, many of which are toxic. The truth is, cigarettes are a lie perpetuated on the poor and the young who can’t afford to smoke cigars.

The fact that cigarettes have to be inhaled into the lungs are a lucky break for cigarette companies because I suspect nicotine addition is faster and stronger if you have to inhale it into your lungs. Ever wonder why cigarette smokers don’t smoke cigars and cigar aficionados don’t touch cigarettes? Because aficionados smoke cigars for their taste and aroma. Cigarette junkies smoke to get their nicotine fix. If you’re young, poor and uninformed but want to experience smoking, you get your hands on a cigarette. By the time you can afford cigars it’s too late – you were lured by the cool mystique and rich aroma of cigars but you’re hooked on cigarettes, a smelly disgusting drug addiction.

Few are as lucky as Arthur Marx who tells the amusing story of how he was caught smoking in his bedroom by his father, the great actor/comedian Groucho Marx. Groucho took one whiff of the smoke, strode out and returned with an assortment of pipes, Dunhill tobacco and Dunhill 410 cigars. He spread all that tobacco paraphernalia out on the desk in front of Arthur and said, "If you're going to smoke, smoke some decent tobacco. That stuff you're smoking smells like horse manure."
"You mean, you want me to smoke?" Arthur asked.
"I don't want you to, but if you're old enough to join the army, you’re old enough to do what you want [and] if you insist on smoking, promise me one thing – that you do it in moderation. As long as you don't smoke too much, and stay away from cigarettes, it'll never hurt you."

I guess Horace Greely was partly right after all but about cigarettes, not cigars. It’s the cigarette which has a fire at one end and a fool at the other. Fortunately, Dad gave up smoking cigarettes over 20 years ago :)