Today, the world will spend $1.2 billion on tobacco products. More than a billion people will light a cigarette, and more than 10,000 will die of smoking-related illnesses. Our relationship with the cigarette – a seductive yet utterly lethal product – is as strange and passionate a romance as any this planet has ever seen.
This irreverent and unsettling BBC documentary tells the story of a single day in the life of humanity’s obsessive but ultimately fatal attraction to the cigarette. A whirlwind journey around the globe, from the heartland of American tobacco industry in North Carolina to the streets of mainland China, We Love Cigarettes offers up unforgettable portraits of men and women whose own lives are bound up with the worldwide addiction to nicotine.
Among them: British author, smoking aficionado and smoker’s rights champion James Leavey; Duke University researcher Jed Rose, inventor of the nicotine patch, who is studying how this drug nicotine works upon the human body; Dr. Chris Proctor, head of science for a British tobacco manufacturer – and an ex-smoker who quit because of “health risks”; British cardiac specialist Dr. Stephen Westaby, who has operated on the hearts of more than 4,000 smokers; corporate whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (memorably portrayed by Russell Crowe in The Insider), who has spent years waging a quixotic one-man crusade against the tobacco industry; and famed British painter David Hockney, who dismisses the campaign against smoking as a totalitarian war on pleasure.
In much of the Western world, our love affair with the tobacco has soured since the 1960s. In developing nations, however, the romance is still in its first flush. As many as 70 percent of the world’s smokers now reside in poorer countries, and nearly a third of all cigarettes today are smoked in China. Love it or hate it – and many of us, frankly, do both – the cigarette isn’t going to be out of our lives any time soon.
Bill Nighy (Notes on a Scandal, Love Actually) narrates.
More ichannel Documentary Highlights
HOW DOES YOUR MEMORY WORK? – Wednesday Feb. 9 at 9 pm ET/PT
Your memory is you. The catalogue of your past experiences is the raw material from which your identity is shaped. The more science understands about memory, the more remarkable it seems. How is it that something as complex as a memory can be conjured from the connections between brain cells?
This 2008 BBC documentary takes a fascinating look at recent advances in neuroscience that are helping us to grasp the essential nature of memory – from studies that reveal how young children begin to form their memories to research that is shedding new light on the loss of memory that accompanies old age. And the hour-long film profiles ordinary people whose stories illustrate the profound complexity of human memory: among them a 30-year-old British man whose damaged brain is unable to form autobiographical memories, leaving him trapped in an eternal present, and a young sexual assault survivor from Montreal who is helping researchers test a promising new treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
