How Come School Killers Don’t Seem to Smoke?

by Alan Brody

After the horrific shootings, there is always a swarm of agents with alphabet soup windbreakers that rummage through the wreckage. Leading this group is the BATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is generally there to find casings and match them to the weapons.

It’s hard to imagine how much difference this information will make since we already know who the shooter was and just how legally they got their top of the line weapon technology.

So why aren’t they making good use of their time on the "A" and the "T" - looking for alcohol bottles and discarded cigarette butts? Granted, psychopaths seem to shun alcohol on their highly organized trails of retribution. But what about cigarettes?

Good and bad people - even sober judges - smoke. So how come there never seems to be a trail of smoldering butts? No unfinished Marlboros to mark their High Noon moment? Never a cruel cigarillo to show their contempt for society and its second-hand smoke regulations?

This is not just the Virginia Tech killer, the mad boys of Columbine seemed to be similarly abstemious. Then there is the shooting at Pearl, Miss., Jacksboro, Tenn. - and even the Amish country schoolhouse where I just can’t think of any one of them puffing on a stick, Bogey-like. John Hinckley shot Reagan with nary a puff, ditto for Chapman with John Lennon.

It seems like bad form to talk cigarettes at a time like this, although Virginia Tech’s shooter Cho, did mention Hitler, and Hitler as we know, was a non-smoker. (A vegetarian too, but that is another issue).

Is this to suggest that smoking a pack or two a day might have helped? Maybe - studies like the St. Louis survey and a recent American Journal of Psychiatry paper show that smoking and depression are profoundly linked.

The Secret Service psychologist, Dr. Robert Fein, in his study of stalkers and assassins, called the "Exceptional Case Study,” agrees. He adds there is another connected and recurring issue in the profiles of these diverse killers – with the possible exception of Hitler: that they were all at first suicidal. Once they had accepted their own demise, everything else in their terrible quests seemed to fit in rather nicely.

Now cigarettes, that much maligned flourish of youth, have the reputation, at least as far as former secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano, Jr. is concerned, as being little more than a form of slow-motion suicide. Normally, you’d agree - who wants to be suicidal? But now we know what suicidal and depressed people can do once you free them of their bad habits, smoking may not be such a terrible thing after all.

Most reports, including those on the ASH.org website will tell you that 88% or so, of smokers have started by age 18. Except for these fellows, of course. (And it usually is fellows.) Obviously, smoking serves as a much needed form of initiation and these outcasts seem to have missed the boat.

Maybe we should invite them back. There’s something to be said for the idea of troubled people taking their suicide in slow, twenty minute increments rather than letting go in a hail of gunfire. Second-hand smoke may be a small price to pay. Besides, these shooters tend have been prescribed antidepressents but then stop taking their meds. That never happens with smokers – once they’re hooked they keep taking their smokes like clockwork.

So maybe we need to rethink the value of smoking. Of course, this would take some revisionist compromising. But dusting off the old “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Glock” campaign is worth another look. And Lucky Strikes could be a good thing in a world of calculating psychopaths. Kool could have done just that - cooled a killer down. Camel - that could have meant nothing more than a trip to the zoo.

Realistically though, our current cigarette brands aren’t quite suicidal enough. We may have to develop a more compelling, more clinically informed family of brands that communicate the idea: “Why shoot me when you could be smoking one of these bad boys?”

This is not necessarily a call for the resurrection of the tobacco companies. After all, Philip Morris recently left New York in a puff as mounting taxes and regulation seemed to pull the rug under their Park Ave. welcome. So they moved their headquarters back to Richmond, Virginia which didn’t help the situation anyway. Apparently, easy guns trump easy cigarettes.

What we really need are prescription-strength cigarettes that health professionals can custom-design for troubled souls. We could call them Cig-Rx. They could have clinical names like Pufficide DX, or 2 Paxil-a-Day. Or they could go to the heart of the problem with displacement fantasy brands like Death Rays, Anti-Harmony, Bad Deeds, My Punishment and the freshly mentholated, Unhappy Days. These solutions are cheap, generate taxes and nourish our farmlands.

All of this really happening anyway, we just don’t control it properly. Psychcentral.com reports that doctors Cheong, Herkov & Goodman found in the St. Louis study, that depressed smokers use their cigarettes quite successfully as a way to self-medicate. This approach appears to be growing. A September 2003 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry (160:1663-1669), shows that smokers today are now more 3 times likely to be depressed than non-smokers. This is a relatively new phenomenon: back when smoking was widely accepted, there was no significant difference in depression rates between smokers and non-smokers.

Twenty five years ago that all began to change. Fewer people were smoking, but those who did were more like likely to be depressed. Note how that coincides with the beginning of this wave of suicidal, depressed, well-armed and non-smoking killers with Chapman in 1980 and Hinckley in 1981. Could it be that the health movement got to the wrong people? If so, could they call off the dogs and let them smoke again. Could the troubled people just blow off their steam again, please. It may not be good for their lungs but it could save my life. If that didn’t work at least their aura of smoke and puffing would serve as an early warning system. If you could at least smell them coming, the head start alone might be worth all the horses in Marlboro Country.

Alan Brody is the author of Cigarette Seduction, www.cigseduction.com