Coffee and Cigarettes

Written By: - Date published: 2:20 pm, February 3rd, 2024 - 12 comments
Categories: cost of living, culture, drugs, health, humour, quality of life, Social issues, Tobacco - Tags: ,

Coffee and cigarettes go hand-in-hand and hand-to-mouth. They are social lubricants but also good company in solitude. They are warm, comforting, and stimulating at the same time.

A cup of coffee contains many components, notwithstanding the many over-used additions of sugar (and artificial sweeteners for metabolically challenged consumers), flavours or spice (for culturally challenged consumers), and/or all kinds of ‘milk’ and ‘foam’ (for immunologically challenged consumers). The main ingredient is hot water (with or without added fluoride).

A cigarette contains many components. The list of dangerous toxic substances inhaled and ingested when smoking a fag is truly impressive. The main one is hot air.

The drug expert David Nutt compiled and published an infamous list of harmful substances in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. Tobacco was ranked highly (high on the list) because of its physical harm (particularly chronic harm), dependence (particularly psychological dependence), and social harm (particularly health-care costs). Coffee was conspicuously absent. This was followed a few years later by another study published in The Lancet that provided more detailed data used for ranking and confirmed the status of tobacco, but not coffee, as a harmful substance. The outspoken Nutt should have sat down for a natter over a coffee and cigarette with Gordon Brown whose Government sacked him for criticising their drug policy. You can read a little more about Nutt here on The Standard.

I love an instant coffee after a good dinner whilst inhaling the smoke of a cheap unscented candle bought at the 2-dollar shop. On a good night my cat and I might vacate the dinner table and move to the couch beside the dining table for a nice tête-à-tête while inhaling the smoke of incense from the 2-dollar shop and sipping from a nice glass of red Château Migraine (the cat only drinks water).

To do my part in making the World a better place for the generations of the future I only buy fair trade coffee & tea. Oddly, the local dairy does not sell fair trade tobacco. This shows the big industry players having the poor little growers in a chokehold. Such things make me fume.

I think we should all be allowed one or two personal vices in our mundane lives and that the Government should stop making these things unaffordable and butt out. The cost of living is getting higher than the cost of life, which is just so ridiculous, intolerable, and infuriating that I want my tax cut now to make me feel better and breathe more easily.

12 comments on “Coffee and Cigarettes ”

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  1. Robert Guyton 1
    3 February 2024 at 2:46 pm

    Yep. The cost to society of harm resulting from smoking tobacco is pretty much the same as that of drinking coffee /sarc.

  2. Kay 2
    3 February 2024 at 2:53 pm

    So we can look forward to seeing instant coffee added to the list of blocked items on the WINZ payments cards, along with cigarettes and alcohol?

  3. Macro 3
    3 February 2024 at 3:36 pm

    Hmmm. I don't know what it is – but I'm finding these Almond and Orange cookies I just baked very addictive.

  4. Tony 4
    3 February 2024 at 4:01 pm

    Quotable quote "The cost of living is getting higher than the cost of life" great line.

  5. Cricklewood 5
    3 February 2024 at 7:10 pm

    Does prohibition in all its forms ever work?

    • observer 5.1
      4 February 2024 at 3:36 pm

      If "all its forms" means absolute, no exceptions, then it generally doesn't. But there are few advocates for that view.

      Prohibition in selected contexts, increasing over time, clearly does work. It was once unthinkable that people couldn't smoke in cafes, bars, on planes and in offices. Now it's unthinkable that they would. It's a ban, and a success.

      • Cricklewood 5.1.1
        4 February 2024 at 9:09 pm

        Broadly agree although now I think we've reached or possibly passed the point where prohibition does more harm than good. Theres now a massive black market for ciggarettes and its a very lucrative trade without the penalties that come with the likes of meth. Our customs investigation / enforcement teams are tied in knots chasing meth and to a lesser degree cocaine so ciggarettes are pretty much routinely ignored. Basically anything under 200kg is so far down the list it isnt investigated at all. The profit margins are huge.

  6. newsense 6
    5 February 2024 at 1:10 am

    Another interesting thing for me is to compare the way dairy workers stories have been sensationalised as an urgent problem, but those of restaurant workers, liquor store workers, bus drivers and security guards are discussed matter of factly as if these are insurmountable problems.

    The main difference it seems is that while there are similar levels of remuneration, one employer benefits substantially from weaker anti-smoking legislation.

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