The secret smoker

ELIZABETH LELAND - eleland@charlotteobserver.com

Posted on Fri, Sep. 21, 2007

The Charlotte Observer, Charlotte, N.C., USA

He promised to quit before they married.

He stubbed out his cigarette, washed his face with scented soap and for two months he abstained. He said his wedding vows, toasted her with champagne and honeymooned at a resort, all without a cigarette.

Back in Charlotte, as he faced work again, he felt an irresistible urge to smoke.

He opened his desk drawer and there it was, a pack of Camel Lights he had hidden. He reached in. With more desire than regret, he got up and returned to his old haunt, an alcove behind his office where he knew he would find the other smokers standing around a terra cotta flowerpot.

The first couple of puffs tasted bitter the way he remembers his first cigarette in junior high. Then a familiar heady adrenaline rush kicked in, and he was hooked all over again.

He is The Closet Smoker, and that pack of Camel Lights in his desk is his dirty little secret.

You may know someone like him: an alcoholic perhaps, or a gambler or drug abuser. The pleasure they get from their addictions makes them do things they would not ordinarily do: indulge in risky behavior and lie about it.

The Closet Smoker knows better. In so many other ways he takes care of himself and the people around him.

He lifts weights, takes a multivitamin and avoids fast food. He enjoys a good bottle of wine and an occasional sushi dinner out, but he's not extravagant. If his car needs an oil change or tire rotation, he does it himself.

He's not yet 40, a professional in Charlotte. His boss says she's impressed by his savvy and creativity, and by the little things he does to help around the office, such as cleaning up the kitchen.

Most evenings, he cooks dinner for his wife. He phones his mother every day, or sends an instant message. Weekends, he might take his daughter golfing or to Carowinds.

On Sundays, you'll find him in church.

His best friends know his secret. Everybody at work knows. But not the people who mean the most to him, his wife, his mother and his daughter.

He's embarrassed to admit he lies to them. He says he wouldn't lie for any other reason. He feels guilty, ashamed that he's capable of deceiving the three most important people in his life for a cigarette. He worries what will happen if they find out.

They're right, and he knows it. He shouldn't smoke. It's bad for him. He researched smoking for a science project in eighth grade and discovered that a few drops of nicotine in liquid form can kill you.

Years of smoking, he knows, might kill him, too.

The nature of addiction

The Closet Smoker is sensible about most things. Yet his compulsion to smoke overpowers his common sense.That's the nature of addiction.

It's part of being human. Our brains are wired to reinforce behaviors we need to survive. Eating, drinking, sex. These behaviors stimulate pleasure circuits in the brain. Nicotine over-stimulates the circuits. It floods the brain with a neurotransmitter called dopamine that makes us feel good. Cocaine and heroin act in similar ways.

One reason nicotine and these other drugs are so addictive is they work on the same brain circuitry we use for survival.

Our brains become hijacked. We have to have more.

Scientists have turned to brain imaging to learn about addiction. They discovered that the decision-making part of an addict's brain, the region that controls judgment, is no longer as effective. That could help explain why we become hooked on things when we know we shouldn't.

Nicotine.

Cocaine.

Alcohol.

Steroids.

Gambling.

Shoplifting.

Caffeine.

Sugar.

Work.

Sex.

We're all capable of addictive behavior.

Anything to look cool

The Closet Smoker's initiation came in middle school. His older brother smoked, and The Closet Smoker occasionally sneaked one.

He wanted to like cigarettes. He wanted to look grown-up like his brother.

But what he remembers most from those early attempts is a burning sensation on the tip of his tongue and in his chest, followed by a fit of coughing.

He bought his first pack freshman year in high school. He was 15. State law then as now said no one under 18 could buy cigarettes, and for a while he bummed off older friends. Then he learned about a convenience store on the way to school where the clerk didn't check IDs.

He asked for Marlboros. Everybody he knew smoked Marlboros, the cowboy's brand, America's favorite cigarette. He wanted to be like everybody. He paid for that first pack with money he earned bagging groceries at the Winn-Dixie.

He tucked the little red and white box in his backpack and headed off to school, a member of a new fraternity.

He ignored the taste. It was more important to him to be like everybody than to actually enjoy smoking. And it didn't take too many cigarettes before the taste grew on him like the taste of another adult pleasure he had learned to like, black coffee.

He says most students smoked. The fortunes of their town, like so many towns in North Carolina, were built on tobacco. It was still the state's biggest cash crop when he was in school, and even now brings in $400 million a year.

Of course, teenagers smoked.

Many of their parents did, too. The Closet Smoker's dad smoked three packs a day for 30 years before giving it up.

High school students could smoke between classes, at recess and at lunch with a parent's permission. The Closet Smoker's parents didn't approve, but he says he got so he could get in a smoke in 45 seconds and no one ever caught him.

He remembers the night of a basketball game, hanging out in the parking lot with friends, most of them sneaking beer, then one person asked if anyone had a cigarette and another person wanted one, too, and then another. He was the only one with a pack, and he passed it around.

That night, he was The Man.

Loved ones worry

His first wife, he says, hated his smoking.Before they married, he was up to a pack and a half a day. Thirty cigarettes every day.

He says she complained about the smell, and the taste when they kissed, and the stale odor of his clothes, and the butts in the flowerpot on the deck.

Most of all, he says, she hated what smoking might do to him: the heart disease and bronchitis, asthma, emphysema, lung cancer and other cancers.

Everyone knows smoking kills. Half of all Americans who smoke will die because of it, about 400,000 people every year, twice as many people as die from alcohol, drugs, fires, car accidents, homicide, suicide and AIDS combined.

Kids in preschool know smoking kills. Yet more than 46 million people in our country smoke. The Closet Smoker, like many addicts, assumes it won't happen to him.

He tried to quit.

He really did, he says, and once he almost succeeded.

He went without a cigarette for several months after college and he felt much better. He had more stamina. He no longer had that nagging smoker's cough.

Then he took a job at a company where most employees smoked. They stopped working every day at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. for 15 minutes of smoking and socializing.

Within two weeks, he was in there with them.

He tried to hide his habit after his daughter was born, but when she was 4 she caught him.

He had sneaked out to the patio like a teenager. She went looking for him. She opened the door and there stood her father, a cigarette dangling between his lips.

Daddy, that's nasty!

He felt ashamed. He snuffed out the butt between his fingers and flushed it down the toilet. But he didn't quit. From that day on, he just made sure he never again smoked around her.

He doesn't want his daughter to smoke.

His parents didn't want him to.

His dad once offered him $1,000 if he would quit.

The deception

The Closet Smoker thinks he's fooling his new wife.

He smokes his last cigarette at work around 4:30 most afternoons, then washes away the smell from his face with scented soap. He drives home, car windows open, chewing gum or sucking mints. He chews gum on weekends just so she won't wonder why he's always chewing gum when he gets home from work.

He doesn't smoke in his car. He doesn't smoke on Saturdays or Sundays. He sometimes smokes when he's out to lunch, but mostly he confines his smoking to the alcove behind his office.

He and two co-workers knock on each other's doors on their way out, four or five times a day, more on bad days. The Closet Smoker says he enjoys the socializing as much as the smoking. If he didn't smoke, how could he justify taking so many breaks?

They stand in the alcove in 104-degree heat. They're out there in freezing rain. They can't be picky. Finding a place to smoke is not easy any more.

You certainly can't smoke at school. In your office? Few businesses allow it. Even outdoors in many places, you're a pariah; no one wants to breathe your secondhand smoke.

As bare and ugly as the alcove is, The Closet Smoker looks forward to being there every Monday morning.

What happens inside

Every Monday morning, after two days without nicotine, his first cigarette gives him a kick more powerful than any he'll get all week.He balances the Camel Light between his lips, then cuffs his hands around his lighter. A flame shoots up. The tip of the cigarette burns. He inhales, drawing smoke deep inside. Particles of tar, the same stuff used to pave highways, carry the nicotine through his windpipe, then down his left and right bronchi and into his lungs.

He holds onto the smoke for a few seconds before exhaling.

The nicotine flows through small tubes in his lungs called bronchioles and into millions of tiny air sacs that puff up every time he inhales. From there, it enters his bloodstream.

It takes about eight seconds to reach his brain.

Before he can take another puff, he feels the effects of the first. The gratification is immediate and that's one reason nicotine is so addictive.

He feels a lift of energy. His heart beats faster, his blood pressure rises. He is focused, more attentive. He feels ready to tackle work again.

What he doesn't feel are the poisons circulating through his body:

Cyanide, benzene, formaldehyde, methanol and acetylene, ammonia, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide, more than 4,000 chemicals in each cigarette, the same chemicals used to kill rats, make gasoline and nail polish, and embalm dead bodies.

The nicotine is what hooked him; it's the chemicals in cigarettes that may kill him.

They're the reason this summer he couldn't swim underwater from one end of his apartment pool and back again without coming up for air.

He says his wife blamed his lack of stamina on years of smoking, not knowing he is still at it.

A partial confession

Since they married, he says she has confronted him a few times about the smell of cigarettes.

His heart beat faster, his blood pressure rose, but not in a pleasant way. He says he confessed. Sort of. He says he told her each time that, yes, he smoked that day. He didn't tell her he smokes every day at work.

He says she hates the smell and the taste and, most of all, she hates what cigarettes might do to him. How could he promise to be with her forever, when he shortens forever by several minutes or more with every cigarette?

He says he had every intention of quitting. He's had every intention of quitting every time he's tried. Most smokers want to quit, but it usually takes several tries. The Closet Smoker says he has tried 15 to 20 times.

What he tells himself

Maybe he can't quit.So he gives himself permission, the way addicts do: "I firmly believe that a lot of lung cancer that's smoking related is because people sit inside and continuously breathe in the smoke. I don't smoke inside."

He rationalizes, the way addicts do, that his smoking doesn't affect his family because he doesn't smoke in front of them.

But The Closet Smoker is a smart guy and when he hears what he's just said, he knows it doesn't make sense. "Now that I've said it out loud, I guess it's a little short-sighted of me because I don't see it as directly affecting them. Long-sighted, my health and my early demise will affect them."

Most of all, he says, he hates deceiving the people he loves.

Smoking Kills, Yet We Light Up

One in 20 middle school students in North Carolina smokes cigarettes, according to the American Lung Association. By high school, one in five students in the state smokes, and the percentage grows slightly among adults. They smoke despite evidence that smoking is responsible for nearly one in five deaths in the United States. Consider these statistics from the CDC:

• Smoking causes 90 percent of lung cancer deaths in women, and nearly 80 percent in men, and many other types of cancer.

• If you smoke, you're two to four times as likely to develop coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States.

• Smoking doubles a person's risk for stroke.

In the Closet

More than 46 million people in the United States smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. No one knows how many are closet smokers. After news reports that ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, a former smoker, had lung cancer, New York magazine polled 100 smokers; one-third said they hid their habit from parents, bosses, children or spouses.

How We Reported the Story

Elizabeth Leland interviewed Professor Steven Childers of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, who studies the effect of drug addiction on the brain, and Dr. Cindy Miner, a deputy director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Leland also researched addiction and nicotine through publications such as "Psychology Today" and on Web sites of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Stanford University, Harvard University and others. She read about the history and economics of tobacco, and got data from the N.C. Department of Agriculture and the American Cancer Society. She interviewed The Closet Smoker and his boss. He agreed to be the subject of a story on condition that she not reveal his identity.

Elizabeth Leland: 704-358-5074; eleland@charlotteobserver.com.

STORY BEHIND THE STORY

My head gets all stuffed up around cigarette smoke, so reporting this story wasn't always easy. But The Closet Smoker intrigued me: I wanted to understand his addiction and how he keeps it secret.

Story source link: http://www.charlotte.com/505/story/287771.html

Copyright 2007 Charlotte Oberserver - All Rights Reserved