NO SMOKE WITHOUT A GREEK
Telemaque Maratos on the European country
which consumes most cigarettes, but dies from lung cancer least
TRAVELLING among the villages in the countryside of Greece — off the usual tourist track — one looks for the kafeneion, the only place to sit down for a while and have a cup of coffee.
Very early in the morning the place is full. Men only. The women work in the fields where they must finish in time to return home to cook and do the housework. Sex- ism is an incomprehensible concept here. There is not even a word for it, for a change. The windows are firmly shut and misty in the winter. Banter goes on across tables. The camaraderie is palpable and so is the air. Everybody smokes. 'Passive smoking' is another unknown idea. One villager told me, laughing, that passive smokers should be taxed 'because they smoke for free'.
Greeks are at the top of the league of smokers in Europe, but we also hold two other enviable records: we are at the bottom end of the incidence of lung cancer and live longer than any other European. 'It's the diet,' they say. But in the last decades we have piled the northern European diet on top of the healthy Mediterranean cuisine, adding all the animal fats to the olive oil we fry constantly. The famous 'Greek salad' is a touristic invention of the restaurants. I have never seen it in my house, or in any other.
No sooner had I come back from an international congress in Amsterdam, where worried tobacco people were dis- cussing 'Smoking in the 21st century', than I was invited to appear on a popular tele- vision show produced by one of the two major commercial channels, 'Mega'.
The host, Andreas Mikroutsikos, broth- er of the minister of culture and a com- poser, was dressed in gym clothes, working weights, and showing off his beautiful girl- friend who was wearing what looked like a body stocking or body paint or something.
The subject of the programme was smok- ing. The host immediately asked for an ash- tray, lit up — 'on the air' — and said that he had recently been in America where he was so disgusted by the restrictions on smoking that if he was not a smoker already he would have started then and there. The chairman of the Greek equivalent of 'Ash' was also there but was not allowed to go on with the death statistics. 'We do not want death here. This is about liberty. Freedom and the rights of the individual. We shall discuss cancer another time,' said the host, summing up the Greek attitude on the matter.
`The neck of the Hellene suffers no yoke!' said the host. In less heroic terms we can say we do not follow regulations blindly. Pious attempts to prevent smoking have been glee- fully jettisoned. Midland Bank started a smoking ban in their offices here after polling their employees, who voted over- whelmingly in favour of prohibition 'We hope this will make us stop smoking,' they said. They didn't. Last week the ban was abandoned. Other foreign firms persist, especially where management are infected by the bovine uspc syndrome. The ministry of mercantile marine has recently banned smoking on all ferries on short routes, even on deck. Smoking is also banned in the min- istry itself. The minister, however, smokes like everybody else in the building.
At least two owners of television and radio stations have tried to prohibit smok- ing in their buildings. All that remains are the 'No Smoking' signs. The most striking sight, however, is that of the surgeons who regularly light up, to relieve the tension, as soon as they take their rubber gloves off after an operation. Almost every surgeon I know smokes, which says something about the credibility given to cancer statistics.
Greeks here listen with incredulity to the tales of Americans sacked for smoking at home, arrested for smoking in a park in California, of those who are not allowed to smoke in an open-air train station platform in England; and are amazed at the ban on smoking on Olympic Airways planes over- flying Australia at 30,000 feet. Some peo- ple think it is a form of madness, like the strange cults that flourish so easily in America: Scientology, the Moonies — part of a neo-puritanical mutation.
They hear all the statistics, they see the warnings, but, in the last instance when they look around they do not see the vic- tims. There is surely no better pro-smoking argument than that.
The author is a columnist for Kathimerini (Athens).
Previous page
