A SLAVE OF SMOKE IN AN ANTI-SMOKE LAND

SYCAMORE, Ill. -- It was not quite 8 a.m. as Jan Binder stood on the
sidewalk in a cold Midwestern drizzle. Her fellow workers hustled past her
toward the office, some of them shaking their heads in dismay.

"They're thinking," Ms. Binder said, "she doesn't have the sense to come in
from the rain."

Despite the shivers, the tall woman with auburn hair stood in the drizzle,
her fingers clutching the last precious inch of a burning cigarette.

To be a smoker in America today is to be an outcast. It means being viewed
as weak, offensive and, perhaps most of all, dimwitted. These are people,
after all, who do not seem to have the sense to come in from a toxic
thunderstorm.

Most people who have never smoked cannot fathom why anyone would put a
cigarette in her mouth and draw the noxious fumes. It should be simple to
stop. But almost anyone who has smoked heavily knows otherwise.

There are few riddles in life more enigmatic than the spell that smoking can
cast, even to smokers like Jan Binder, a smart 38-year-old who has walked
the horror chamber of nicotine.

It was two years ago, in a hospital room, that a doctor looked into the eyes
of her husband, James, and told him, "Mr. Binder, you have lung cancer."

That evening her husband walked in the door at home, switched on a lamp,
turned to her and sized up his life.

"I don't regret anything," he told her, "except a few million cigarettes."

Seven months later, he was dead. He was 37. His daughter Mary was 7. Kate
was 5.

"When they told Jim he was going to die," Ms. Binder said, "and I saw the
look on his face, I knew I would never smoke again."

She was certain sheer will power could do it. But it was like willing
herself to stop drawing breath.

She has tried going cold turkey. She has tried the nicotine patch. She has
tried the drug Zyban.

Nothing has worked for more a week.

"People look at me and think, 'How can you still smoke?"' Ms. Binder said.
"And God knows, I don't want to smoke. But I am like a slave to it. It rules
your life."

This is a woman who scarcely lacks fortitude. Besides her full-time job for
a state education consortium that oversees programs for disabled students,
she fills her late husband's partnership in his pizza business, doing the
books and overseeing the payroll.

She digs deep into her pockets to pay for her daughters to attend private
school, to take piano lessons, to play soccer and softball. She rises before
daybreak to clean the house and wash school uniforms. She carries 50-pound
bags of water softener down the stairs to her basement.

But when it comes to those feather-light sticks of tobacco, she feels
helpless.

"Sometimes I think they should just lock me up," she said.

Her girls, Mary and Kate, have come to view cigarettes the way some children
think of monsters under the bed. They have thrown their mother's cigarette
packs into the trash. In some cases, they have taken each cigarette out of
the pack and broken every single one into pieces.

They have begged, pleaded and cajoled her to stop. And they have thrown
tantrums.

Kate erupted in the kitchen one afternoon after seeing her mother light a
cigarette, shouting that she hated her, over and over again.

Ms. Binder listened for a long time, motionless and ashamed. She knew that
the girls worshiped the memory of their father. In one of those moments of
weakness that every parent experiences, and regrets immediately, she looked
for mercy. Why, she asked the girls, did they so scorn her for smoking, when
they had given a pass to their father when he smoked.

"Because," Kate screamed, her eyes blazing with anger, "I didn't know he was
going to get tumors and die."

It is the rare smoker who does not wish to quit. A recent survey found that
two-thirds of smokers have tried seriously to stop, most of them at least
three times. Medical experts say nicotine has a powerful effect on the
chemistry of the brain, improving mood and in some cases masking depression.
One treatment for that is an anti-depressant like bupropion hydrochloride,
which has been marketed as Zyban as an aid to quitting smoking.

What is not as commonly understood, is the way that smoking makes people
feel guilty and ashamed, looking at themselves as failures for not being
able to kick a habit.

As a child growing up in the Wisconsin suburb of Monona, just outside
Madison, Ms. Binder rode with her family in the car almost every weekend to
see her grandparents in the farm town of Dodgeville. The car was always full
of smoke, a cloud that billowed from the cigarettes of her father, a high
school history teacher and football coach.

"I hated the smoke," Ms. Binder recalled. "It made me sick."

As a 12-year-old, walking home from Winnequah Junior High School, she
watched a girlfriend pull out a pack of cigarettes and light one.

"Give me one of those," young Jan Louise Rundle told her friend.

She took a puff and coughed, puffed again and coughed harder. Determinedly,
she kept smoking until she could draw the smoke into her lungs without
gagging. Moments later, feeling dizzy and lightheaded, she walked home to
her family's three-bedroom ranch on Arrowhead Drive.

The next day, she reached into her father's pockets and took one of his
cigarettes. She smoked it on the way to school, cupping it in her hands to
hide it.

In high school, she was a talented artist, the queen of the "Snowball"
dance, a star athlete. She was named to the all-state team of top basketball
players in Wisconsin. Through it all, she smoked.

She did not sit in the parked cars outside the school building and puff,
like many of the other students who smoked. That was far too dangerous,
especially for a girl whose father was a teacher at the school. She picked
her spots more carefully.

Sometimes, she used lunch money to buy cigarettes, plunking her change in
vending machines or buying packs at the corner store. If the clerk raised
any question about an adolescent's buying cigarettes, she simply explained
that they were for her father. But usually, there were no questions.

A generation ago, it was hardly scandalous for young people to smoke. Many
of their parents, after all, had started smoking themselves as teen-agers.
And the signals from popular culture made cigarettes seem acceptable, even
downright wholesome.

Anybody over age 35 can remember flickering images of Johnny Carson on the
living room television, smoking away as he chatted and laughed with guests.
Even Andy Griffith, as nice a sheriff and as fine a Pa as television ever
created, would occasionally relax with a cigarette in his Mayberry home.
President John F. Kennedy was known to sometimes smoke a cigarette. Baseball
star Richie Allen would smoke in the dugout before strutting to the batter's
box, where he often slammed home runs. And the great Green Bay Packers
coach, Vince Lombardi, smoked on the sidelines and racked up football
championships.

Teachers' lounges were usually hazy with smoke. Some high schools even had
smoking lounges for students. No table was properly set without an ashtray.
People smoked just about everywhere they went, even at wakes, puffing away
as they paid their last respects.

After Jim Binder was diagnosed with cancer, he tried valiantly to live a
pristine life. Facing death, he bore a crushing guilt, a husband and father
who would be leaving his family behind.

"He wanted so desperately to undo what he had done," Ms. Binder said

To extend his days, he ate organic foods and drank herbal tea. He meditated.
He prayed.

And he tried his very damndest to give up cigarettes.

But there were moments, early in the morning before the children would rise,
that he would sit out on the back porch, gazing into the distance, drawing
hard on a cigarette, shrouded in a smoky cloud that, for the moment at
least, served as a kind of scutcheon.

It is now his wife who carries the guilt, a mother who cries in the shower
about her fatherless children, and about their terrible, completely logical
fears when they see her light up. She has gotten rid of the ashtrays in her
house.

She has vowed so many times to her children that she will quit, often
setting a date. And when that time comes, she tries. The minutes crawl like
years, and she feels as if she is coming out of her skin, a jangle of nerves
and emotion. And suddenly her hand is reaching for a pack, almost
reflexively. Or she is standing at the counter of a convenience store, with
the $3 that will feed an insatiable craving.

"I am going to quit -- I have to," she vowed one recent day, as a cigarette
burned on a plate, a makeshift ashtray, in the kitchen of house that falls
quiet, too quiet, in the nighttime. "I just don't know how."

Checked-by: Don Beck