Obstinate anti-smoking lobby rejects science of safe alternatives
It’s not quite up there with Proust’s madeleine, but the fact is that whenever I hear an American talk of “candy”, I get resentful. Candy means only one thing to me: sweet cigarettes. They came in tens, in a small packet that didn’t kill itself mimicking a real Players or box, but gave off a satisfying rattle. That’s because the “cigarettes” were made of hardened sugar, with a grey ring around the top to simulate the ashy bit, finished off with red where the ember glow would be on a real cigarette.
As sweets go, candy cigarettes were no great shakes. Signs on, when they were abolished, nobody came up with a different mould into which the white sweet ingredient could be poured in order to provide a substitute. Unlike chocolate, which is loved no matter what shape it turns up in, sweet cigarette candy was without merit, once it was without its original shape. Those of us who missed it did so because we’d had such fun sticking imitation fags between our first and second fingers and posing as if we were in the movies. I had a friend who would nibble the “unlit” end of the cigarette down to a stub and then make a big production out of pretending to light the next one in the packet by applying the red end of the stub to it and sucking so hard her cheeks collapsed inward. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure she was impersonating her mother, rather than Lauren Bacall, at the time, and I’m pretty sure also that the action she imitated caused, over time, and tragically not much time, the death of her Ma.
