Elegy for a Habit

I did not risk castration, as I would have in 17th-century Russia under the reign of Michael Feodorovich, or flogging with the knout or having my lips slit - the tsar's other preferred penalties. I feared neither being beaten with rods nor branding, nor exile: among my possible fates in Calvinist Switzerland in the same century.

I had also escaped the attention by some 400 years of perhaps the most ardent persecutor of my kind, the Ottoman sultan Murad IV, who would wander Constantinople in disguise and, catching someone flouting his prohibition, behead him on the spot.

But such punishments seem, if anything, rather mild (rather low-tar, if you will) compared with the slow death smokers fear now. Murad might have decapitated tobacconists (they later named a brand after him; irony is somehow smoky) but at least they died quickly. Stygian arteries, carcinoma-laden lungs, the slow suffocation of emphysema, impotence (oh, no!) and, we learned only the other week, blindness mark out the modern tobacco fiend's abbreviated future.

A vaccine against nicotine, which has reached the human-trial stage, is the very latest addition to the armoury of the anti-smokers. And, in Britain, the latter may find yet further cause for hope in the appointment of a new health secretary. At first, Patricia Hewitt said she would stay true to the policy of her improbable predecessor in the job, John Reid, an ex-50-a-day man and champion of tobacco as a well-earned proletarian pleasure. But, warming to the ministerial chair, she has since hinted she might consider making his proposed partial ban on public smoking a blanket one, if the proponents of the latter can demonstrate broad enough support. Her launch of a consultation paper next week indicates an open mind on the subject that the British Medical Association, the most ardent lobbyists for prohibition, must be dying to influence.

But I had scented change in the increasingly clean air some time ago. Every time I lit up, I felt like a sentry on night duty: that the glowing red tip of my Marlboro made me a target. Calvinists were not going to brand me, but the shame would soon be so great I might as well have "deviant" burnt into my flesh. I did not fear flogging, but they would tax my wallet to within an inch of its life. A quarter of the population was too many to exile, but they were shunting us - from shopping centres, airports, restaurants - into ever-shrinking ghettos where our smoking would not bother others; house confinement looked on the cards.

I had fewer and fewer places to inhabit, but it was my body that put the final nail in the coffin. Pins and needles struck if I stayed in one position for longer than a minute. My cough had become more frequent and regular and, finally, premonitory. I smoked my first cigarette aged 14: 17 years later, just after the Lancet medical journal called on Tony Blair to outlaw tobacco entirely, a year and a half ago this week, I smoked my last.

It has remained my last (not my second last, or third) but something strange has happened: I have stopped smoking and fallen for tobacco. Quitting has blown away the smoke screen of my ignorance to reveal the compelling depths of the modern world's fateful, and perhaps now faltering, habit. I did not substitute nicotine patches for the fags but tobaccology.

This could be the west's anti-smoking century whereas the 20th (I learned) was the culmination of its 500-year love affair with Nicotiana tabacum in every possible form. We are so habituated to smoking that we no longer think of it as extraordinary, but, of course, it once was. Expectant mothers sucking on their bargain-basement cigs outside the maternity ward, pipe-puffing intellectuals, plutocrats drawing on velvety Coronas - they might not know it but all hold pieces of meso-American history in their hands.

It was probably the pleasurable smell of holy smoke - tobacco burning as incense in religious ceremonies - that inspired the Amerindians to invent the habit. And, although they smoked for pleasure as well - after dinner, for example - the practice retained for them a strong spiritual dimension. Even today, the surviving Maya describe shooting stars as cigar-ends thrown away by the gods.

The west took up the habit and brought it down to earth. Christopher Columbus discovered America and smoking at about the same time. It was his men, in the late 15th century, who, cautiously tracing the coastline of the strange continent in their sailing ships, first caught the natives chaining away on the shore. They answered with muskets, marched inland and came upon a whole new world of tobacco.

The herb became a hit soon after Columbus took it back with him to Europe. Most of its uses had already been established and required little modification. Chewing it, smoking it in pipes and cigars, snorting it - these were all Native American nicotine delivery systems. The west has a possible claim only on the cigarette, as the invention of 16th-century Seville beggars recycling discarded cigar butts in scraps of waste paper.

Doctors today would splutter, but the newly smoking sailors were so impressed by the indigenous medicinal uses of tobacco they brought them home, too. A tobacco brew became a vaunted curative throughout Europe, the tobacco enema was hailed as a virtual panacea. Burning the herb as a prophylactic against plague became particularly popular - if not efficacious - in England. Seventeenth-century Eton boys were obliged to smoke a pipe daily for their health.

For the next two centuries, the proportion of smokers in the population - a minority - remained more or less steady. The west's love affair with tobacco did not reach its apogee (so far, at least) until the middle of the 20th century: the century of mass production, of which countless uniform cigarettes are the perfect symbol; the smoky century, of billowing factory chimneys, burning forests and crematoria. In the Britain of 1949, 81 out of every 100 men, and 39 of every 100 women, smoked.

But this was also a turning point. In 1950, Richard Doll and A Bradford Hill published an article in the British Medical Journal that concluded, in measured but deadly serious tones: "smoking is a factor, and an important factor, in the production of carcinoma of the lung".

Within a decade, the research of Doll and Hill, and others in the US was becoming scientific orthodoxy. The link between smoking and cancer also began to consolidate in the public mind. Smoking levels in the west started falling and have continued unevenly downwards ever since. The tobacco industry has been caught in skirmish after skirmish with governments and the medical establishment; now it faces an all-out assault.

But smoking has long had its detractors. Hitler (also a vegetarian) hated smoking and would not allow it in his presence; Nazi scientists did much research into the harmful effects of tobacco. Does that make today's anti-smokers cryptofascists, by association - as they are often accused of being? Richard Evans, a leading historian of Nazism, says the brownshirts would make uncomfortable bedfellows with the BMA or the lobbyists of Action on Smoking and Health. The "essence of body fascism", he says, was to see the body only "as part of a human mass. Thus gymnastics always had to be mass gymnastics, for instance. Modern anti-smokers are concerned with improving individual life expectancy and quality of life for individuals."

Yet pro-smokers also claim to champion the individual - by promoting freedom of choice - and, they might point out, smoking does appear to be a particular bugbear of potentates. Louis XIV and Napoleon join Hitler, Tsar Feodorovich and Murad IV in detesting it. James I, another member of the autocratic crew, was one of the world's first and greatest anti-smoking campaigners. In his tract of 1604, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, he rails against "a custome loathsome to the Eye, hateful to the Nose, harmful to the Brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the black stinking fumes thereof, nearest resembling the smoke of the pit that is bottomless".

In its certitude and tendency to harangue, A Counterblaste is irresistibly reminiscent of The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, the bestseller by that modern king of quitting, Allen Carr. One day, Carr writes, the "most marvellous" in his life, this then four-packs-a-day smoker experienced the epiphany, the "beautiful truth", that allowed him to give up. A former accountant, he suddenly realised that smoking had no value. Much of his book simply reiterates this basic assertion: that smoking "tastes awful, costs us a fortune, and kills us". One chapter is entitled The Advantages of Being a Smoker - and is completely blank.

The good thing about Carr is that he enjoins you to continue smoking until you have finished the book. The bad thing is his failure to realise that, in being pointless and ending in death, smoking is exactly like life, and so I read the last page and lit up. Carr's sub-Lockean theory of smoking was, for me, too crude. I needed a philosophy which acknowledged that tobacco was indeed a great pleasure and giving it up a weighty renunciation.

For Richard Klein, in Cigarettes are Sublime, smoking represents western culture's only advance in the knowledge of pleasure since antiquity. (No wonder the French smoke so much.) While Carr speaks of giving up as "like coming out of a world of black shadows into a world of sunshine", Klein describes that place as one of "a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure".

Klein invokes Jean-Paul Sartre, a chain-thinker extraordinaire, who in his youth contrived what we might call the Esoteric Way to Stop Smoking. Sartre's method also required an epiphany: the realisation that sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette. "In truth," Sartre writes, "I did not care so much for the taste of tobacco that I was going to lose, as for the meaning of the act of smoking. [I had to reduce] tobacco to being only itself: a leaf that burns; I cut [its] symbolic links with the world. Suddenly my regret was disarmed and quite bearable."

Bearable - for about a week. Sartre went on to smoke for another 40 years and died, having, as he put it, "run out of thoughts", the blood circulation in his brain reduced to a trickle. But his very failure was instructive. One of his strongest symbolic binds concerns identity. Sartre was so much a smoker that he could, perhaps, never not be one. I was a smoker, too. What would be left of me once the smoke had cleared away?

Like many smokers, I had begun as an act of transgression; my first cigarette was Oedipal. I was soon smoking heavily and people came to identify me as a smoker. The cigarettes stood in for various qualities I wished to possess: worldliness, rebelliousness, recklessness and cool. This little packet kept me at least as hooked as the nicotine: the evidence is that a physical habit only really grips above 20 a day.

Despite my imagined distinction, however, my quitting quandary was just society's problem writ small. In trying to stamp out smoking, governments risk reinforcing precisely the attitude they need to undermine. The collective smoker cocks two yellowed fingers at mum, dad or the "nanny state". He smokes, as I did, partly for the pleasure of defiance.

It was, most historians agree, mass production and the mass diffusion of the 19th century model of the cultivated gentleman smoker that underlay the growth of the smoking 20th century. In a great, paradoxical act of collective individualism, the working class took - or were sold - the formerly refined habit of cigarette smoking and made it theirs. What remained part of the smoking self in the transition, however, was the liberal idea that a person's health and habits are their own concern - an attitude that kept rubbing up against an increasingly interventionist state.

Now, as the professional class bins its cigarettes on the way to the gym, the proletariat looks to be appropriating the habit once and for all. Yet, if my experience is a guide, cigarettes prove a flimsy peg for identity. As the distance between me and my last smoke grew, I felt pangs, cravings, a sense of loss - I am still haunted by Marlboro ghosts - but I did not become any more insubstantial.