Nicotine by Gregor Hens    {Reviewed by THOMAS} What Thomas de Quincey is to opium, Gregor Hens is to nicotine, the most ordinary of drugs. As what is medically termed a 'never smoker', I was particularly interested in Hens's insights into his own addiction and into the psychosocial fabric of a world deeply penetrated by smoking (one in five New Zealand adults smokes). Hens, no longer a smoker (although, as he points out, “the brain's structure changes once it has become accustomed to the nicotine and these structural changes remain even when the addiction has long been vanquished”), is neither an apologist for smoking nor an activist against it, but rather seeks understanding of the role that addictions of all kinds, but nicotine addiction specifically, play in the lives of addicts and of wider society: “I don't learn through my dealings with the thing, but rather through contemplating my behaviour during my dealings with the thing,” he says. What is the lure of cigarettes, how do they affect the mind of the smoker, and why is it so hard to give them up? “Why are people unable to fulfil a wish when nothing stands between them and the object of their desire?” Whatever your relationship with nicotine, you will find Hens’s rigorous self-examination and ability to recreate the subtleties of his experiences insightful. Here he describes his first smoking experience: “My awareness took on a new, never-before recognised clarity; it was as if a curtain had been pulled back to let in a breeze, a fog bank had been blown away. Before me lay a wide, sharp landscape all the way to the horizon. It was my inner world - my feelings and thoughts - that had taken on distinctive contours that I found beautiful. I felt and saw, perhaps for the first time, a great experiential context. Life was no longer composed of individual moments, of wishes and disappointments, that pass by indiscriminately and in quick succession. I not only saw images, not only heard single words or sentences, but experienced an inner world. I was offered an experience that was narratable for the very first time.” And, of the experience of restarting smoking having given it up: “When I smoke the first cigarette, it is as if I can look inside my own brain, as if I can discover every thought in its formation, every thrill in a neural pathway, every synaptic leap, every seminal feeling developing from my thoughts.” This relationship between chemicals and experience needs to be understood if we are to be truly free not only of indisputably harmful substances such as nicotine but also of the world of social and creative vulnerabilities in which we are immersed and in which substances provide mechanisms of adaption.  >> Watch this interesting discussion between Hens and fellow ex-addict Will Self.