Drunk cigarettes don’t count

I smoked my first drunk cigarette standing outside of a party while waiting for my group of friends to finish using the bathroom. My friend handed me a single out of a pack of American Spirit Blues as I set up my post, leaning against the wall in a passageway between two houses. The breeze blew at an angle where the fire from the lighter burned my thumb as I tried to line the tip of the cigarette up with the flame. I took a solid pull and blew the smoke up in the air as a small gesture of courtesy for those walking past, and I remember thinking that the puff left hanging in the sky vaguely resembled the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy. 

Cigarettes are not necessarily my vice of choice, especially not while sober. The drag of a cigarette feels like a punch to the back of my throat and the light buzz isn’t something that is worth the initial attack. The lingering smell isn’t my preferred scent, nor is the light cough or raspy voice you are rewarded with after you’re done. The risk to reward ratio just isn’t there for me personally, but I don’t mean to belabor points that we have all learned in every drug awareness campaign on the planet — I just mean to say that the last thing I thought I would thoroughly enjoy was a cigarette. 

When the nicotine that night found its way into my bloodstream, it was like I miraculously understood why there is such a negative gravity surrounding cigarettes — it felt amazing. I could suddenly grasp why someone would purposefully shave off years of their life for such a fleeting feeling. I felt relaxed yet alert, fully free to enjoy the passing of my own thoughts, no matter how loud the music around me was. But with this pleasure came its close companion: guilt. The single most dangerous habit to develop was sitting in between my index and middle fingers, crawling its way through my heart and into my brain — and I was enjoying it. 

A lot of the social justification for smoking cigarettes that I have encountered in the wild all stem from the same passive, fatalistic ideology. The future is dark and unknown, and the act of smoking provides a familiar glow. Artificial intelligence and short-form media will turn our brains into mush anyway, and microplastics will seep deeper and deeper into our blood regardless of how you spend your time. In the face of such uncertainty, what is the harm in lighting up every now and then, or all the time? It’s not like smoking, or any habit of its nature, requires justification. But for something that is so objectively bad for you, I feel it’s only right to have a lighthearted mantra that warrants participating. 

What appeals to me the most about cigarettes, though, is the culture surrounding them. Sitting on a balcony passing a dart back and forth in the middle of a light conversation, dropping the filter to the ground and stomping as if it was a period to a run on sentence. Bumming one off of a stranger, trusting them enough to hold an open flame to your lips and wasting time on a sidewalk while watching the events of a night out pass in front of you. No matter how chaotic a night can become, there is always a calm within the storm waiting for you, so long as you’re okay with the health complications that come after. Having a pack of cigarettes in my pocket puts me in a position to have even a chance at moments like these, and I believe that these moments are simply worth sacrificing your health for. The cigarettes smoked at times like these simply don’t count — they are perfectly healthy pockets of time that all the credible health companies are conveniently unable to account for.

I don’t mean to sit in the privilege of good health and shamelessly glorify a habit that has ruined the lives of many. Cigarettes are harmful to yourself and those around you, and there is no argument in the world that can refute that. There are poisons everywhere in life. It’s just unfortunate that many of them taste and feel really good — but that is nothing to feel guilty over. I would never blame Eve for eating the forbidden fruit, nor would I want her to live her life in regret. There are decisions that you make that are damaging, but life is too complex to get caught up in moral trivia. Maybe, then, some actions just shouldn’t count. 

Drunk cigarettes not counting doesn’t represent an inebriated lapse in judgement or a careless whisper to excuse a poor decision. To me, it’s the conscious embrace of a meaningful moment when it is given to you, outside of the judgement or regret that you might feel for participating in it. We are given limited time on this earth, and we spend lifetimes counting and reflecting on our actions. The freedom to move without judgement is something you can spend your entire life searching for — I just happened to find it in a repurposed Altoids tin.  

That night, after my friends washed their hands and stepped back outside to meet me, I dropped the butt to the ground and stepped on its sparks. That moment existed outside of the natural flow of time that evening, outside the typical moral and clinical rules that govern what is right and what is not. A guilty pleasure is pleasure after all, and to deny that would be to deny what makes the so-called “cold and indifferent” universe strangely considerate.

Dylan Hunter wants you to know that cigarettes are dangerous, when they count.