That lead to me to researching what deeper thinkers than I have said about cigars… which lead me to Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s most famous quote about cigars, of course, is that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar (and not a phallic symbol).

However I found this 1994 article in Cigar Aficionado that talks about Freud’s obsession with cigars in plenty of detail. I’d heard that Freud loved his cigars and died of mouth cancer, but I didn’t realize the full story – he smoked about 20 cigars a day from the age of 24 and died at the ripe old age of 83. Not a nice way to go but not a bad innings. It’s well worth reading in full but I’ll throw up some of my favourite sections:

Freud began smoking when he was 24 years old, following in the footsteps of his father, who was himself a smoker right up to age 81.

In his old age Freud was quoted as saying: “[cigars have] served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life…I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.”

If Freud inherited his passion for cigars from his father and inspired his patients to keep him supplied, he also endeavored to instill a love of smoking in his disciples, colleagues and the young men in his family. Hans Sachs, a member of Freud’s inner circle, once remarked that “[Freud] was so fond of smoking that he was somewhat irritated when men around him did not smoke. Consequently nearly all of those who formed the inner circle became more or less passionate cigar-smokers,” according to Freud, Master and Friend by Hans Sachs, (1944), Harvard University Press.

Australia - The Nanny State

One of the most common complaints you’ll hear from cigar smokers in Australia is the increasing heavy-handedness of State legislation. It’s one things to ban smoking of any kind from places likely to be frequented by non-smokers, such as restaurants, sporting facilities, and offices. It’s entirely another thing to ban smoking cigars in a dedicated cigar club. If I may be permitted a loose analogy, it is like banning street prostitution and then also lumping into the legislation banning sex between consulting adults in a brothel. Brothels are legal in most Australian states but smoking cigars in a cigar club is not? That doesn’t make much sense to me.

Like many cigar smokers I know, I have never been a cigarette smoker. Therefore, I am quite conscious that many people (myself included) do not like secondhand smoke. I don’t like to smoke cigars in public places where it might offend. Only an asshole would want to stick their cigar smoke in other people’s faces. As much as I don’t understand why people don’t appreciate the aroma of a premium cigar, I would never wish to force it upon them, any more than I would try to force a tee-totaller to drink a finger of Talisker.

Which is all the more reason to have dedicated venues for cigar smokers.

As I understand it, the main reasons for the introduction of heavier smoking restrictions are as follows:

1. Protecting non-smokers from secondhand smoke.
2. Protecting smokers from themselves.

The first point is obvious and I doubt many of us would disagree.

The second point is more troubling.

In a free society, it seems that people should have the right to eat, drink and smoke whatever they choose, as long as they aren’t hurting others in the process. The excuse used by governments to curb smoking is the burden on the public health system, which is reasonable, but does this apply to cigars?

The science conclusively says NO. The most comprehensive report on the subject (which I’ve blogged about before), a 1998 report called “Cigar Smoking: Overview and Current State of the Science” by David M. Burns that is published on the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s site, is very clear on the subject:

The pattern of excess disease risk among cigar smokers is not identical to that observed in cigarette smokers. Mortality ratios among cigarette smokers are much higher than those among cigar smokers for coronary heart disease, COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and lung cancer.

An explanation for the difference in mortality pattern between cigarette smokers and cigar smokers lies in differences in the depth and likelihood of inhalation of tobacco smoke between these two groups of smokers. Most cigarette smokers report inhaling the smoke into their lungs, while over three-quarters of the males who have only smoked cigars report that they never inhale.

The fraction of adult cigar smokers who smoke cigars every day is much smaller than the fraction of cigarette or smokeless tobacco users who use every day. This suggests that cigar smoking among adults, while probably able to cause addiction to nicotine, is less likely to do so than cigarette smoking or smokeless tobacco use. Data from California, which show that the recent change in cigar use among adults is largely an increase in occasional use, also suggests that the addictive potential of cigars is lower than that for cigarettes.

When cigar smokers don’t inhale or smoke few cigars per day, the risks are only slightly above those of never smokers.

So it seems clear that suggesting the risks associated with smoking cigars is the same as smoking cigarettes is not based on science. It’s like saying that the risk of riding a motor bike is the same as flying in a commercial plane. It just doesn’t work that way.

Unfortunately, cigars are regularly being subjected to bad science and bad journalism.

A few months ago, Parade magazine ran an article called “The Dangers of Pipes and Cigars”. In the article, they reference a report done recently by Columbia University which, the article claims, showed that “smoking pipes or cigars doubled the odds of having an airflow obstruction.”

If this were indeed true, many of us would have to seriously reconsider our cigar habits.

The problem many cigar smokers have with this report, however, is that it is based on fluffy science.

As Smoke Magazine pointed out recently:

The Columbia study contained no new research, but an examination of a previous study that included just 56 individuals who smoked either cigars or pipes and did not smoke cigarettes.

Moreover, the study itself says “few participants smoked pipes or cigars…Effect estimates in this group were therefore relatively imprecise…” No kidding; what the survey actually showed was that among cigar-only smokers, the odds for decreased airflow to the lungs increased a trivial 1 percent when adjusted for age, race, sex, and height, and were 37 percent less than non-smokers when more carefully adjusted for 13 factors also including body mass, education, family history, and so on.

Additionally, the study report states “no U.S. studies have reported on the possible effects of cumulative pipe and cigar smoking on lung function.” This is wrong. In fact, the impact of cigar smoking was exhaustively reviewed by the National Cancer Institute in its monograph on cigars published in 1998.

Incidence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) was examined using the American Cancer Society’s massive CPS-I study, which included 15,072 cigar smokers. The result? For those who smoked an average of 1–2 cigars per day, there was no impact at all vs. non-smokers up through age 64, and for those who do not inhale, no impact through age 79!

Now consider that in the U.S. in 2009, smokers of all types of cigars averaged just 2.93 per week and smokers of handmade, premium cigars averaged a grand total of 1.59 per week!

But the CPS-I results are nowhere mentioned in the Columbia “study.”

As I’ve said on the blog before when I covered the CPS-I study, I take my health very seriously and so I’m always keeping an eye out on the latest science on cigars and health. It is unfortunate that a lot of the media coverage on the subject is pretty fluffy and either out-right biased or based on bad science.

According to the BBC:

Mr Robaina, the only person to have a brand of Cuban cigars named after him, had been a roving ambassador for the country’s state-run cigar industry.
But more typically, he could be found on his small farm in the Vuelta Abajo region of western Cuba, tending his beloved tobacco plants.

As Jason tweeted:
They were right!! Cigars must be bad for your health. Don Alejandro Robaina dies at the young age of 91. May he RIP.