Give mom a cigarette break

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 296 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

The first rule of the Secret Smokers Mother’s Club is that you don’t talk about the Secret Smokers Mother’s Club. At least you don’t talk about it to anyone who is a non-smoker and especially to mothers who are non-smokers.

Like Alcoholics Anonymous, none of the mothers who secretly smoke are willing to share their names. It makes sense, since many of them have kept their secret for years. “I never smoke in front of my kids. Never. No one in my life knows I smoke, except for one person and that is my husband. But no one else,” says one member.

According to reports, one in two smokers hides their habit from friends, family and colleagues. And, boy, do these women go to great lengths to keep this secret from their children. “If Noah is watching television and my husband is with him, I’ll take out the garbage, then run around the house and hide in the bushes, because I don’t even want my neighbours to see that I’m a mother who smokes. I feel disgusting about it,” she admits.

But that hasn’t stopped her from smoking, even after two children, and she has no plans to quit. “Because you know people judge smokers anyways, but mothers who smoke? To non-smokers, they’d consider that worth stoning me.”

Club members end up doing a lot of unnecessary chores to get their fix. “I’ll run out to the all-night grocery store,” says one mother. “I’ll tell my husband we’re out of milk, but usually we are anyway. And this store is not close. I don’t go to the store near my house, because I worry I’ll run into people I know. I go to another grocery store that takes me about 30 minutes to get there, so I get a couple of cigarettes in before I go back home.”

But do they notice the smell? These mothers resort to more subterfuge to mask the lingering aroma of smoke. “As soon as I come back from smoking, I wash my hands, my chest, I brush my teeth, and I have clean shirts all over the house, so I can immediately change into one of them,” says one mother.

Another member’s purse could be mistaken for an Avon lady’s kit because she has so many supplies. “I keep a small tube of toothpaste and toothbrush. I have a big bottle of body lotion that smells like vanilla. I have face cream that I rub all over my face. And I have a body spray from Victoria’s Secret that I spray in my hair and all over my clothes.”

This mother also got a great tip from a makeup-artist friend who sometimes smokes. She now carries around Downy April Fresh or Bounce sheets meant for the dryer. “I rub it on my hair and it works amazingly well. Also, they are really small to carry around, which makes it easier.”

If it takes so much energy to keep smoking a secret, why not just quit? These women know the health risks and they have children they’d like to see grow up. “It’s the one last thing of my old life,” explains one. “It’s mine and it’s all mine.” Another adds, “Because I sometimes like to be bad, and as a mother you can’t be bad.”

Then there is the dark side of the addiction. “I really love smoking so much,” says one. “I sometimes find that I’m waiting for my kids to take a nap so I can go smoke. And as awful as this sounds, I’m excited my son will be going to daycare in the afternoons this fall.” Another admits that when she’s having a nicotine fit, she loses her temper with her children more often.

But even though they puff away in secret, they look down on mothers who smoke openly around their children. “When I see a mother smoking, all I can think is, ‘You disgusting wretch,’ ” says one. “When I see a mother smoking and pushing a baby in a stroller, I’m horrified. But who am I to judge? At night, I’m in the bushes putting out my cigarettes in a beer bottle.”

Insite: the Harper government’s sweeping, narrow defeat

By Paul Wells - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 1:31 PM - 79 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

This morning’s unanimous Supreme Court decision on Vancouver’s Insite safe injection site is categorical, urgent and beyond appeal: the Court ordered Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq to issue an exemption “forthwith” permitting the clinic to keep operating. It took the minister barely two hours to announce she’ll comply. The defeat, for a government that has fought Insite at every turn, is clear.

It’s also pretty narrow. While dealing Stephen Harper a personal and unequivocal defeat on a file his government clearly took seriously, it reaffirms federal powers in ways that will probably come in handy down the road; it seeks to contain this decision to the single, existing facility; and (probably inadvertently, but all the same) it offers a strong political argument in favour of the Conservatives among voters who share Harper’s aversion to Insite. Continue…

Britain’s smartphone abusers

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Kainaz Amaria/Bloomberg/Getty Images

A new study from British telecom regulator Ofcom is warning of “a nation addicted to smartphones.” Thirty-seven per cent of adult smartphone users and 60 per cent of teenage users surveyed admitted to having succumbed to the ostensibly enslaving effects of being able to check emails and tweet one’s every thought from just about anywhere, the report said. Worrisome behaviour includes reaching for handsets first thing upon waking up, breaking up relationships via text message, and talking on the phone or thumbing away during meals. Nearly half of teenage users even admitted to using the devices while on the toilet—a confession that echoes another study’s finding that some users would be ready to fish their beloved device out of a public toilet. Yet, addictive or not, one thing is clear: smartphones are only getting more popular. In the U.K., over a quarter of adults and nearly half of teens own at least one.

Flowing from underground

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 1 Comment

Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Images

Step one of 12 for addiction recovery is admitting you have a problem—something a growing number of Pakistanis are doing, despite the fact the country has been “dry” since 1977. Alcoholism is reportedly booming: addiction clinics cite a growing demand for counselling, an Alcoholics Anonymous group has popped up in Karachi, and one prominent addiction counsellor recently told the Guardian that of the 10 million Pakistanis who drink, one million have a problem.

Under Islamic law, the punishment for boozing in “the land of the pure” is 80 lashes. But that doesn’t stop smugglers from bringing vodka across the Chinese border, and whisky in on boats from Europe. The country’s only brewery, set up to serve non-Muslims, flourishes near Rawalpindi. Bootleggers will also deliver right to the home.

There have been efforts to overturn the alcohol ban. As recently as 2007, parliamentarians called on the government to relax the laws, arguing that prohibition was turning more people on to hard drugs, or forcing them underground to drink. For now, though, rising alcoholism and religious fundamentalism will continue to coexist.

A magic calorie ride

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 1 Comment

Overeating, scientists say, may make people behave more impulsively | Gabriele Galimberti/Anzenberger; Hector Vivas/Getty Images

Bob, an office supervisor in Toronto, considers himself an addict. But the substance he’s prone to abusing isn’t drugs or alcohol—it’s food. “I would gorge on Raisinets, pizza, anything that I could get in quantity,” says Bob, 60, who asked that his last name not be used. He ran up a $4,000 Visa bill, almost all of it on food. Eating as a stress release, “I averaged about 15,000 calories a day.” He weighed 336 lb. at his heaviest. “I’m no scientist, but I think it’s an addiction,” he says. “When I read about how a drug addict behaves, my response is the same to food.”

The term “food addiction” is controversial, but recent studies have shown that high-calorie foods engage the same regions of the brain as drugs like heroin and cocaine. Over time, scientists say, a high-fat diet can impair the brain’s pleasure centres like those drugs do, encouraging ever-larger binges and making it harder to quit. Remarkably, a mother’s diet might even hard-wire her baby for obesity later on in life. “It’s too early to call it food addiction,” says Teresa Reyes of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who studies how the brain adapts to changes in diet. “But there is absolutely increasing evidence showing that the brain responds to high-sucrose, high-fat diets in a very similar way that it responds to drugs of abuse.”

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Can't get enough of compulsive hoarders

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, January 7, 2011 at 3:40 PM - 3 Comments

On a CSI episode, a hoarder is a suspect after a body is found under heaps of trash; South Park mashed up hoarding with Inception | Monty Brinton/CBS/Getty Images; Comedy Central

Move over, drug addiction: compulsive hoarding is the most popular real-life disorder on television. After the success of two reality shows about people who compulsively save all kinds of junk—A&E’s Hoarders and TLC’s Buried Alive—many shows in the last year have done fictional stories about the issue. Experts don’t seem to know whether or not this is going to be a good thing for public awareness of the condition. Gail Steketee, a professor at Boston University and co-author of the book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, told Maclean’s that a CSI episode called “House of Hoarders” offered “some accurate verbal information” about what hoarding is, but that “stepping on dead bodies amidst the clutter definitely overplays the problem.”

CSI wasn’t the first gruesome procedural to get to this topic. Earlier in 2010, Ann-Margret won an Emmy award for guest-starring on Law and Order: SVU as a woman who refused to throw away sheets that she bled on, and Bones dealt with the murder of a man who couldn’t bring himself to throw anything away in his smelly apartment. Hart Hanson, who created Bones and co-wrote the hoarding episode, told Maclean’s that his staff looks for timely topics to build murder mysteries around, and that hoarding provided a perfect arena for sleuths to investigate: “We liked the idea that the hoarder had something of great value hidden in amongst the crap—in our case, a radioactive gnome.” They were even able to tie the story into the previously established character traits of their hero, Booth (David Boreanaz), whose messiness “classified him as a ‘level one’ hoarder. He collected junk. And we put that in the story.”

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Khabi bull

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 12:37 PM - 0 Comments

Oiler goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin’s trial for the offence of “extreme” impaired driving was the talk of the town in Edmonton yesterday. Khabibulin, 37, may seem a little old to be horning in on the extreme sports craze, but that’s what Arizona charges you with when you’re caught going 70 in a 45 mph zone and you have a blood alcohol content of 0.16%. The Russian, pulled over in February, was found guilty late last week and was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in jail, the mandatory minimum. He had the bad luck to be busted in Maricopa County, home to the demented Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his “tent city” justice. Continue…

The crying-on-the-inside kind, I guess

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 1:24 PM - 20 Comments

After years of battling addiction on-air, Howard Stern Show writer/performer (and, in a very indirect way, CBC employee) Artie Lange has finally had his long-dreaded Richard Pryor moment, ending up in hospital after a bloody suicide attempt. The New York Post‘s story this morning, almost certainly provided by law-enforcement sources, was essentially confirmed by Stern on today’s show.

The incident presents Stern, nearing the end of his contract with satellite radio monopolist Sirius XM, with one of his greatest performing challenges. His entertainment philosophy has traditionally been “Anything personal I find out about my cast is fair game for the air”. Robin Quivers’ disclosures about being sexually molested by her father have been a running gag on the show for 15 years. But Lange’s act of frightening self-violence is on an entirely different level (though it arrives against an ugly, intensifying backdrop of deaths and criminal-justice run-ins for Stern’s “Wack Pack” of peripheral freaks and misfits), and Stern is obviously flustered and discouraged.

What strikes me about the incident is that Artie Lange could get his hands on a gun easily enough if he wanted to. Equally obviously, what he did was done in earnest. But self-harm doesn’t always mean that one is pursuing extinction per se. Over the period in which Lange’s personal problems and addictions have been fodder for the show, the comic has talked endlessly about his psychological issues concerning his father, who was paralyzed in a fall when he was in high school. One notices, however, that he was discovered on Saturday by his mother when she came to drop off food—which, as listeners know, she does almost every day. (Hell, listeners can tell you what specific dishes were probably in the tinfoil.) So my question is: who was Artie really trying to hurt?

The genius of addiction

By Andrew Potter - Monday, April 13, 2009 at 8:41 PM - 1 Comment

I think Russell Brand is some sort of sexually inspired comic genius, and that My Booky Wook is a brilliantly written bit of navel-adoration. He was on NPR’s Fresh Air a few weeks ago, and it was replayed last night. It’s worth listening to the whole thing — the man tosses off epigrams and witticisms like no one’s business, and it is only after the torrent of words has gone by that you realise that what you thought was a half-conceived aside turns out to be a shard of devastating insight.

Like the moment when he remarks, after being caught out in a bit of a fib, that “I’m an unreliable observer of my own life.”

Or this extended riff on the meaning of heroin, which takes the kernel from Trainspotting’s famous “Choose Life” voiceover and makes a PhD thesis out of it:

Opium diminishes the significance of all else. If you’ve got heroin nothing else really matters. Everything comes in second.

I’ve often thought opiate addiction is the materialization of the abstract idea of need. Most of us have an idea that we’re missing something from out lives; for some of us it is God, for others it’s a new pair of shoes, or the success of a football team that we follow, or the craving for the embrace of an absent lover. But with heroin, once you’re addicted to it, those needs, that hole that I feel is in all of us doesn’t feel nameless, some unknowable entity, but the clearly material, definable, accessible drug that it heroin.

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I’m Linda and I’m a self-help junkie

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

Forty-year-old Linda Pruce confesses that her problem started in September 1998. “I was sitting on my bed, breastfeeding my newborn, and wondering whether it would be wrong to smoke a cigarette while nursing,” she writes in a new book. “As I was figuring out the logistics of this dilemma—could I reach my cigarettes without breaking the baby’s seal on my breast? Could I blow the smoke toward the window rather than up the nostrils of my daughter?—I caught the start of Oprah’s fall season.”

Oprah “was speaking to me,” writes the Maryland holistic healer in Confessions of a Self-Help Junkie. “I was a fat, tired, chain-smoking mother of two with a travelling, ‘I’m only home on weekends’ husband.” Pruce wanted change, and the plan at the time seemed simple. She’d watch Oprah every afternoon and the “experts and published authors would tell me exactly what I needed to do.”

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What happened to Brandon?

By Colin Campbell and Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 16 Comments

An abandoned CN railway line cuts through the rural township of Oro-Medonte, just outside Barrie, Ont. Now a gravel hiking trail bordered by tall grass and a thin band of trees, it stretches off into the distance through farm fields almost as far as the eye can see. On a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon, a strong south wind is ripping off the last of the fall leaves. The trail is mostly deserted, but it is still the centre of a great deal of attention these days. Four Barrie police cars and a large van—a police mobile command centre—are parked where the trail intersects with a lonely rural road not far from Lake Simcoe. This is the spot where Brandon Crisp, a slight 15-year-old with dirty blond hair and green eyes, dropped his bike this past Thanksgiving Monday evening, started walking and seemingly vanished into the chilly night air.

Brandon had stormed out of his home in the east end of Barrie that afternoon, after his parents, Steve and Angelika Crisp, told him they were taking away his Xbox video game system for good. Wearing a burgundy hoodie and a light jacket, he angrily grabbed his backpack, stuffed with little more than a small blanket inside, and jumped on his bike, which he hadn’t pulled out of the shed in three years. Brandon would be back, thought his parents. Perhaps cold, hungry and a little embarrassed, but he’d be back. So sure of that, Steve even called his son’s bluff as he left, telling him he’d better take some warm clothes. By midnight, Brandon was still gone and the Crisps phoned the police.

Brandon had never caused his parents real trouble before. He had been a good student, and a good brother to his twin Samantha and older sister Natasha. Any disputes he did have with his parents centred on the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a violent, shoot-’em-up war simulation in which players act out missions as U.S. Marines or members of the British SAS. Over the past year, the Grade 10 student from St. Joseph’s High School had started spending more and more time with the game and less doing typical teenage things—from basketball in the driveway to bike riding. He was once an AAA goalie, but his social circle had shrunk down to just three close friends who also played Call of Duty over the Xbox Live system, which connects players over the Internet. More than once, Angelika, a light sleeper, woke to the sound of Brandon talking to other players online in the middle of the night. They couldn’t drag him away from the game, say his parents. He came home from school, put on his Xbox Live headset, and wouldn’t stop playing for hours at a time. “We’d always say get off the game, go outside,” says Angelika. Brandon didn’t listen.

Numerous times, Steve and Angelika, concerned that their son was obsessed with the game, confiscated it for a weekend. They even tried to find a solution through compromise, once proposing that Brandon draw up a video game schedule he thought he could follow. It worked for a few days, then he was back to his old ways. When Brandon skipped school—for the first time ever—the Thursday before Thanksgiving to play Call of Duty, his parents took the game away again. When he disobeyed them and pulled the game from its hiding spot, they’d finally had enough. They told Brandon he was permanently cut off. The Xbox was taken out of the house.

What they didn’t know at the time, his parents say, was just how much the game meant to their son and how troublesome that connection had become. Since his disappearance, the true extent of his involvement has become clear. While he had few friends in Barrie, his Xbox had a list of 200 people whom he played Call of Duty with online. Judged too small to keep up in hockey, the shy but competitive teenager found respect and success in the video game world, where he played on “clans,” or online teams. It wasn’t just a game, it was Brandon’s life—something he might even make money playing in professional tournaments one day, he once told a friend. “These are the things I didn’t realize,” says Steve, standing in a police command centre near where Brandon vanished, his hands wrapped around a bottle of water. “When I took his Xbox away, I took away his identity.”