I suffered from insane-level allergies and asthma between the ages of 2 and 18. They claimed that the intra-house fog had nothing to do with this. They also made other zany denials of the undeniable, such as:

• Smoking does not cause cancer. If it did, my father’s 99 year-old grandmother who smoked for 20 years would have died from it.
• They were not addicted. They smoked because they liked the “taste.”
• My mom did not actually inhale. When she smoked, she stopped the smoke at her larynx (even though she kept inhaling air). The smoke stopped at the larynx and never hit her lungs.

To my mom, smoking was supposed to express sexual experience, power, and sophistication. Her own mom was also a smoker. Grandma’s life consisted of (1) smoking and (2) smoking while watching soap operas. It was the primary pleasure in her life.

all she had to live for. When I asked her about it, she claimed that she didn’t actually smoke the cigarettes.

“I don’t inhale,” she said. “I cut it off right here”—and she’d raise a knife-hand to the base of her neck.

The smoke never went south of the suprasternal notch, she said.

The idea was obviously inane. Did she visualize the smoke stopping at that point, and the fresh air continuing through it? Did she see the smoking concentrating into a bolus so that the rest of her inhalation around it?

Anybody over the age of three knew that there was no smoke-segregating device in the larynx. Did she think I was stupid enough to believe that? Did she herself believe it? I guess she felt the “throat hit” down to that point, but no further, so therefore it did not exist. In any case, it was depressing to see an addict concoct an image so foolish. Like a junkie saying, “The heroin only goes to my shoulder. The rest of my blood is all fresh.”

Two months ago (that is, 40 years later) my mom said the same thing! She still chain smoke and has heaving coughing fits about once every hour.

“Hey,” I said. “That cough sounds bad. Why don’t you cut down on your smoking?”

“Get off it, Chris! I don’t even inhale. I cut the smoke off right here …” and she raised a knife-hand to the base of her neck.

“You must be fucking kidding me!” I said. “That’s what fucking grandma said! I can’t believe you copied that! How is it possible?”

“Get off it, Chris!”

From nursery school to high school I reeked so bad that other parents would ask if my parents smoked when I during morning carpool. But chronic rhinitis, popping ears, asthma, and smelling like shit constitute only part of my anti-smoking bias. When I didn’t comb my hair right before outings, my mom would “brush” my hair by smashing the bristle-side or her hairbrush into my scalp and then scrape it along with more power that you’d need to grate the hardest of cheeses. And she did this with a cigarette dangling from her lips, and its plume would go right up my nose and into my eyes. How they could stand a concentrated plume beaming straight into their own eyes (for they both liked displaying the impressive mouth dangle pose) I never understood.

I don’t blame them. They were victims of marketing and the ever-present desire to look good. This is why anyone, except maybe a dozen Native American shamans, starts smoking—to look cool, tough, and sexy. No one craves cigarettes before they are addicted to nicotine. No one likes the smell. And no one likes the “taste.” (And the fact that tobacco pushers have successfully used taste as a feature in their adverts is the most implausible Orwellian inversion in advertising history. Yet it happened.)

All this is to say that I’m not recommending nicotine because I’m a ashtray-mouthed fucktard and I want everyone else to smell bad to even the playing field. That fact is, nicotine is a prove cognitive enhancer. It also has a protective effect against Parkinson’s disease and has some anti-dementia properties as well, as you already know.

The only problem with vaping is the gargantuan amount of time you will waste tinkering with the “mod” (the box with the batteries that send the current, short for modified flashlight tube, which images the DIY ethos nicely), the coils, the wicking, and mixing food flavoring concentrates into “vape juice.” Vaping is a fun and highly silly hobby—like painting tabletop war-game miniatures.

So I only inhale the vapor of high-diluted nicotine because it helps me think. In fact, nicotine is one of the few nootropics that is not a placebo.