Welcome to From Insults to Respect. Today’s topic, addiction. When we see we have become addicted to something and find we are having difficulty breaking the habit, we may begin to lose some self respect. And sometimes our actions related to our addictions lead to others losing respect for us. So, it makes sense that we spend a little time giving this topic some thought.

Regular readers of this blog know that from time to time I like to enrich some ideas about a subject with some relevant thoughts that Bob Dylan has shared on his Theme Time Radio Hour show. His entertaining mixture of insightful observations with songs, humor, and poetry leaves us with a deeper sense of the topic at hand.

It just so happens that Bob has done three shows on themes related to today’s topic–“Smoking,” “Drinking,” and “Coffee.” Let’s begin with smoking.

Bob’s Show on the Theme of Smoking

Bob introduces his theme on smoking with the background music of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and the following words:

Today’s show is all about smoking. We’re not here to encourage it or to glorify it. You’re smart enough to look up all the facts. What we’re going to do over the next hour, is to give a looking and a listen to what happens when the tobacco plant collides with popular culture. As Oscar Wilde once said, “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure; it is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” We’ll be examining tobacco in all of its forms, from plant, to ash, with stops at cigars, cigarette, snuff, and chewing tobacco. So sit back, smoke em if you got em, and enjoy the next 60 minutes as we blow a few musical smoke rings your way.

Then, Bob launches into a song by Tex Williams and His Western Caravan: Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette):

Now I’m a fellow with a heart of gold
With the ways of a gentleman, I’ve been told
A kind of a fellow that wouldn’t even harm a flea
But if me and a certain character met
That guy that invented the cigarette
I’d murder that son of a gun in the first degree.

It ain’t that I don’t smoke myself
And I don’t reckon they’ll injure your health
I’ve smoked ’em all my life and I ain’t dead yet.

But nicotine slaves are all the same
At a pleasant party or a poker game
Everythin’s gotta stop
When they have that cigarette.

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette
Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate that you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette.

One of the problems when you smoke is when you’re not smoking, you can have one of those nicotine fits. Here’s how nicotine fits work. Nicotine is physically addictive; it alters your brain functions. Every nerve in your brain’s nervous system has these very tiny neurotransmitters. Nicotine works on some of them, tricking your body that it needs more of these receptors. When you started smoking, your body started responding to the nicotine, and started growing these extra receptors. Over the years, your body has gotten used to these extra receptors, and needs the nicotine to feed them. When you stop smoking, your body thinks your body’s transmitters have been shut off. Your body seeks equilibrium. That’s what the craving for nicotine comes from. When you have a craving for nicotine, the only thing that will help you, is another cigarette. 

Your body does so, according to this theory, because at first the nicotine leads to your receptors firing more frequently than usual. This leads to feeling more alert, which some of us experience as rather pleasant. But your body recognizes that if you were to keep firing those receptors at the pace that occurs when you first started smoking, certain functions in your body will end up exhausted. Thus, your body starts to reduce the number of these receptors. In the scientific literature, this process is called “down regulation” or “tolerance.”

Once the down regulation process is complete, you end up with enough receptors to function fairly well as long as you are smoking. However, shortly after you pause from smoking even for a few minutes, you end up not having enough of these receptors to do what they were originally designed to do. It is this shortage of receptors that occurs when there is not enough nicotine in your system to keep your receptors firing at a rate that would typically occur if you were not addicted to the drug that leads to the uncomfortable, sluggish, stressful feelings that lead to a craving for the next cigarette. When you light up, you feel relief because now the reduced amount of receptors are sufficient to carry out your major life functions in a less distressed manner.

To me, cigars are a much better situation than cigarettes. Cigarettes are compulsive and cigars are kinda, languid, luminous conversation. Like you’re gonna sit for a couple of hours and talk to somebody. If you gotta smoke, I would say, at least have a long conversation with someone you like, rather than just compulsively sucking down a cigarette. That’s how I’m gonna lie to myself so I can keep smoking cigars.

Bob’s Show on the Theme of Drinking

Bob begins this show with the following words:

“Sit down and enjoy yourself as we discuss the world of liquid libation, booze, sauce, hooch, white lightning, fire water, hard stuff, pick me up, gin and juice, moonshine, canned heat. We’re going to start off with George Zimmerman and the Thrills doing “Ain’t Got No Money to Pay for this Drink.”

With a great rollicking sax backing up the lead singer, a few of the lyrics go like this:

I ain’t got no money to pay for this drink,
But boy I need it bad,
My wine headed baby’s taken everything I had.

Here we see a basic theme of addiction; something very upsetting happens to the addicted (my baby’s taken everything I had) and they have come to believe that they have to turn to the addictive substance to deal with the resulting emotional experience. Moreover they will seek the substance even when they no longer have the money to attain it.

After the song, Bob plays us a little audio clip of Ray Milland’s Academy Award winning portrayal of Mr. Birnam, an alcoholic in the movie, “The Lost Weekend.”

“Just give me a drink,” says Mr. Birnam with exquisite anguish.
The bartender, in a disbelieving voice: “Mr. Birnam, this is the morning!”
“That’s when you need it most, in the morning,” Mr. Birnam replies with disgust. “Haven’t you learned that yet! At night, it’s a drink, in the morning, it’s medicine!”

During Bob’s show on drinking, several of the songs show us the dark side of this activity from the perspective of family members. My personal favorite is, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin'” by Loretta Lynn. Here’s a few of the lyrics:

Well you thought I’d be waitin’ up when you came home last night
You’d been out with all the boys and you ended up half tight
But liquor and love they just don’t mix
Leave the bottle or me behind
And don’t come home a drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind.

Like smoking cigarettes, drinking is often associated with particularly good times, and that’s part of the addiction process. Bob makes this point when he introduces us to American TV host and comedian, Jimmy Kimmel, who tells us why he enjoys beer so much:

Beer is, it’s not just a drink to me, it represents something, it reminds me of being in college and high school, and discovering getting drunk, and having a sixteen pack in the trunk of my friend, Tommy’s car, drinking it hot out of the can in a parking lot in Las Vegas. Something about beer equals good times to me. 

Bob goes on from here to play a couple of songs that bring home this notion that for some, the association of drinking with good times, going out and meeting people, dancing, and partying is all just plain fun. But the vast majority of the songs he plays throughout this show mixes the fun stuff with some pretty sad stuff as well.

Bob’s Show on the Theme of Coffee

Welcome to Theme Time Radio Hour, full of caffeinated dreams, schemes, and themes. Pour yourself a hot, steaming cup of joe, cause we’re going to be talking about the amber liquid of life. No matter what you call it, it’s a drink made from a shrub of a tree. I’m talking about coffee. They call it a man’s gold, and like gold, it brings to every person a feeling of luxury and nobility.