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Smoking and the pleasure principle

Giving up smoking is incredibly hard, even if you are fully aware how terrible it is for your health. For ex-smoker David Jesudason, the impulse to light up after meals and during moments of stress remains strong. Cigarettes gifted David coughing, wheezing and fatigue, yet they also gave him pleasure. Here he investigates whether there’s ever any real enjoyment to be had in the deadly habit.

Words by David Jesudason

  • In pictures
Brightly coloured, illustrated poster in a 1970s style detailing "8 helpful hints on how to stop smoking" and featuring a series of eight cartoon images and pieces of advice. The eight tips are: Find some good reasons to stop; Scare yourself; Never carry matches; Avoid smokers; Stop making excuses; Make them a bit more difficult to get at; Find something else to do with your hands; And remember it's a habit, not an addiction.
Smoking: ways to stop. Colour lithograph, Lionel Kalish. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Lionel Kalish.
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I started smoking when I was just 15 years old. Cigarettes, cigars and even pipes soon became punctuation for all my daily pleasures and stresses until I quit in my 30s. But, despite a decade of successfully not smoking, I still often think a cigarette is what’s missing after every meal, pint or annoying email. Mark Twain said giving up smoking was easy (because he did it a thousand times) but I’ve found that losing the impulse to light up is sometimes impossible. I seem to be choosing to forget the coughs, wheezing and fatigue, and instead nurturing a false nostalgia for a once pleasurable pursuit.

An advert for Chesterfield Cigarettes featuring a colour illustration of the actor Joan Caulfield. She's wearing a loose red dress and is set against a blue ocean background. She is holding a packet of Chesterfields in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. She is smiling. There's a text box on the right side of the poster, with a small portrait of a man beside it. The text says, "Be your own cigarette expert says Ralph A Goss". A slogan in large letters across the bottom of the poster says, "Always Buy Chesterfield".
Chesterfield cigarettes, 1950, Nesster. Source: Openverse. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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The very first marketers of smoking focused on the supposedly enjoyable aspects of nicotine. This myth has, of course, been debunked. Dopamine – the feel-good hormone – is released when a smoker decides to light up, meanwhile satisfying this “pleasure need” causes seven million deaths a year. There has been a public-health backlash against this kind of advertising, with tobacco companies banned from selling their products in such ways. Richard Klein, author of ‘Cigarettes Are Sublime’, claims that such measures were also introduced because of a new puritanism in the US.

A colour illustration featuring a red and grey block of flats set against a sky-blue background. The building is flipped open at the top like a cigarette packet, and there are several enormous cigarettes inside. The building/packet is surrounded by grey factories with smoking chimneys.
A block of flats which turns into a packet of cigarettes, surrounded by factories with smoking chimneys; representing the pollutant effects of cigarette smoking. Colour lithograph after I.V. Tomash, 1988. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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I gave up smoking when I was working as an editor for a business newspaper. I was forced to sub-edit some copy that included a line from a tobacco company describing smoking as “the last act of rebellion for the bohemian”. This obtuse quote – made just before UK pubs and restaurants were forced into a smoking ban in 2007 – angered me so much. It showed tobacco was still being sold as a cool commodity. Since 2007, air pollution in UK hospitality has reduced by as much as 93 per cent, and waiting and bar staff no longer have to risk cancer from passive smoking.

Colour photograph of a part of 20-pack of 'Boyards Caporal' cigarettes. The packaging is dark blue with white text.
Boyards Caporal French unfiltered cigarettes, Packet Late 1970s, sludgegulper. Source: Openverse. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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Maybe there is a small link between bohemian lifestyles and smoking that I should, grudgingly, acknowledge. Writers through the ages, and particularly in France, have waxed lyrical about smoking. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was a compulsive smoker, going through two packets of Boyards a day. Smoking never helped me to be productive as a writer, and I would find my mind drifting when I started craving nicotine.

Colour illustration featuring two men sitting at a table, smoking. One man is smoking a pipe and the other is smoking a cigarette. There are drinks on the table, and the men's hats are hung up on the wall behind them. Text at the bottom of the image reads: "Why, friend Hopkins, I thought you always preferred a pipe to them things. Never Sir, never, could bear a pipe. Scenes in London No. 25."
One man is smoking a pipe and another is smoking a cigarette. Coloured etching. Source: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.
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I guess I’m pretty anti-smoking now, but I can empathise with young people who spark up regularly – it’s become so taboo that maybe it’s the last act of rebellion that can shock their parents. My partner hates tobacco, though, and when smokers walk past our small children, she feels anger and resentment, despite enjoying roll-ups in the past. There’s nothing as bad as an ex-smoker, but Richard Klein goes further, claiming that a lot of healthy people are autocratic about the habit, citing non-smoking dictators, such as Hitler and Napoleon. Inconveniently for this controversial argument, the French military leader did have a snuffbox and he was keen to benefit from tobacco’s tax revenue, so he did draw some pleasure from baccy.

Colour illustration featuring two allegorical figures: a skeleton holding a scythe and a ball of fire stands next to a female figure in a green dress. She is holding a red flower in one hand, a bird perches on the other. The sun and moon are together in the sky above the woman's head. There is a stag with large antlers sitting on the floor behind the woman. There is a crow on the stag's back. The woman is standing on what looks like a wheel that's on its side. There are several items at the skeleton's feet including a shovel, a helmet, a crown and a brush.
Two allegorical figures: a skeleton holding a scythe and a ball of fire stands next to a female figure. Lithograph. Source: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.
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It was hard to give up smoking when I was in my 20s, as there was always someone who was cool in my friendship circle who smoked. In hindsight, these people probably had all manner of reasons for buying cigarettes, but smoking gave me an excuse to hang out with them. Nowadays their coolness could lead them to being called an influencer. Smoking has a lot of paradoxical resonances with 21st-century notions of beauty, especially as it’s a meditative pursuit, associated in a lot of people’s minds with youth. Even if the reality leaves people looking far from young.

Colour illustration of "The Jolly Smoker" featuring a man with an extra large head exhaling smoke from an enormous cigar. The man has an extravagant moustache, and is wearing a hat and belted smoking jacket. He is smiling. He is standing beside a large bundle of giant cigars and in front of a large brown box.
A man with an extra large head exhales smoke from an enormous cigar. Coloured lithograph, c. 1880, after T. Worth. Source: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark.
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The greatest fictional detective ever, Sherlock Holmes, could guess someone’s age and personality from the way they smoked. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s gumshoe was depicted as being able to reconstruct someone’s personality from the ashes left by their cigars. Holmes says, “To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird’s-eye as there is between a cabbage and potato.” You don’t need to smoke to derive pleasure from the way Holmes’s forensic brain analysed evidence such as ash, but it does also show how easily the habit can be romanticised.

A black and white poster with the text, "Have Another! Sure Death", and an illustration of a skull with a smoking cigarette in its mouth, a skeleton hand offering a cigarette, and a grave stone in the background.
A skeleton (representing Death), smoking a cigarette and offering a cigarette from a pack; implying that smoking causes death. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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Perhaps I’m looking at smoking and pleasure in the wrong context. Klein makes the valid point that denying there’s any pleasure associated with smoking has never worked, and we continue to light up despite government adverts warning us of the dangers. Today’s cigarette packets contain grotesque warnings showing the effects of cancer on the body but, while sales are declining, they’re still bought by people of all ages. When I was growing up, hard-hitting adverts did exist, but they didn’t put the teenage me off smoking. If anything, they made the habit more illicit.

A black and white photograph with sepia hue. It shows the head and shoulders of a boy. The boy is wearing a dark hat, striped waistcoat and white shirt. He smiles while holding a long pipe in his mouth.
A Neapolitan boy smoking a pipe. Photographic postcard by A. Finzi. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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The reason why I’ll never smoke again is because I have children and I’d hate them to become nicotine addicts. They’re at the age – one and five – where they look to me for their cues. If they saw me smoking, it would normalise the addiction. I started buying tobacco when I was 15, at a point when I was lost and felt devoid of hope. I hated my life and had moved out of my parents’ house, needing to find more loving relationships despite my vulnerable age. Smoking became a conversation point when I was lonely and it soon became a normal way to spend my money. Nowadays I don’t seek pleasure in nicotine but in a healthier, equally addictive substance: love.

About the author

Black and white, head and shoulders portrait of David Jesudason.

David Jesudason

David Jesudason is a freelance journalist who covers race issues for BBC Culture, Pellicle and Vittles. He was named Beer Writer of the Year in 2023, after his first book ‘Desi Pubs, A Guide to British-Indian Pubs, Food and Culture’ was hailed as “the most important volume on pubs in 50 years”. David also writes ‘Pub Episodes of My Life’, a weekly newsletter about the drinking establishments that serve marginalised people.