Cigarettes have been a part of Eric Barnett’s entire life. His mother smoked during his childhood, and he started at the age of 9. He recalls those days with a smile on his face and a sadness in his voice.
“Mom smoked Viceroys back then,” he told Filter. “She had a drawer full of those coupons that came with each pack. She never spent the coupons but I remember using them when I ran out of money playing Monopoly. She said I was a little cheater when I tried to use them to pay rent.”
In 2015, when Barnett got out of prison, he went home to see his mother, Gloria. “She sat at the kitchen table, a smoke in one hand and a mask in the other. I asked her what she was doing and she told me it was her breathing treatment.”
“There was a smoke burning in the ashtray when her lungs collapsed.”
In retrospect, he knows he shouldn’t have been surprised. “She’d been living with emphysema, COPD and asthma for a long time. It was a gradual thing—she didn’t just get ill one day, she just kept getting worse.”
Gloria died on February 23, 2023. She was 71. “There was a smoke burning in the ashtray when her lungs collapsed,” Barnett said.
It wasn’t the first time smoking had killed someone in his family. Years earlier, in 2004, his grandmother, Bettie, had died at 77 from emphysema and COPD. She’d smoked a pack and a half a day for most of her life. When the doctors told her she needed an oxygen concentrator to breathe, she quit smoking cold-turkey. She lived on supplemental oxygen for 10 years before she finally passed.
Barnett received that news inside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, called Lucasville by the prisoners held there. “It was the hardest hit I’d ever taken up till then.”
He still smoked himself at the time—this was before Ohio prisons banned it. In those days he ran a football ticket, an unauthorized gambling operation. Cigarettes were the main currency. A patron would purchase his picks for a number of packs of cigarettes. If he hit, he’d get a 10-to-one return on his investment.
Like many other prisoners, he immediately took up the habit again upon his release.
Despite his grandmother’s death in 2004, Barnett did not quit smoking until 2010, after the prison ban came in. But like many other prisoners, he immediately took up the habit again upon his release in 2015.
His mother, Gloria, and stepfather, Skip, had both continued to smoke throughout. During his incarceration Gloria became ill. First asthma set in, and really affected her mobility. Soon COPD and emphysema took hold of her lungs. Gloria began to use a mask to breathe, just as her mother, Bettie, had done before her.
When he eventually saw his mother in this condition, Barnett advised her that if she didn’t quit smoking, she’d die just like grandma. But she’d heard it all before. She’d tried to use nicotine gum as a substitute—she even tried vaping—but the pull just wasn’t the same for her.
Vapes are among the most effective smoking-cessation tools. But even so, they aren’t the option most suited to everyone. People also often have to persevere for a while, trying different devices, nicotine strengths and flavors, before they can permanently switch.
And as for Barnett telling his mother she should quit for health reasons when he’d recently started smoking again himself, well, it just didn’t have much impact.
In 2021, when Gloria had become so ill she couldn’t get around by herself, her husband, Skip, retired to take care of her and be around if she needed help. Skip was a working man. Drove a truck his whole life. But this was important.
Two months after he’d retired, his cough deepened. He was diagnosed with lung cancer.
This news was not easy for Barnett to deal with. He had returned to prison, this time here in Washington State, about a year previously. His father had retired to take care of his mother. Now, who was going to take care of both of them?
“It says right on the pack, smoking will kill you.” But it doesn’t look as if knowing this will cause him to make changes in his own life.
Forced by the state into abstinence from tobacco products, Barnett didn’t even have a good cigarette to calm his nerves.
“It was 10 months to the day after I lost my mother that my dad died: December 23, 2023,” he said. “Smoking is deadly. It says right on the pack, smoking will kill you.”
But at the moment, it doesn’t look as if knowing this will cause him to make changes in his own life.
Though Barnett had already learned, in the hardest possible ways, of the harms of cigarettes, he didn’t know—not unambiguously, at least not until I told him so—that vapes are far safer.
When he was free he vaped cannabis, and enjoyed vaping for this purpose. “But I like smoking,” he concluded. “When I get out, I’ll buy some Winstons, or Pall Mall non-filters, and smoke.”
At the time of our conversation, nothing I said changed his mind.
Harm reduction knowledge of any sort doesn’t really reach prisoners. The walls that keep us in also serve to keep information out. Tobacco harm reduction information is no exception—in fact, it’s particularly unlikely to get through.
Some states, like Washington, have begun to allow classes that cover bloodborne pathogens, for instance—and there’s some communication, though not enough, about overdose and disease transmissions.
Prisoners, in their minds, don’t smoke—so we don’t need to educate them about it, right?
But no one talks about tobacco harm reduction. That’s in part because many prison authorities have banned all nicotine products and see it as a win, because now prisoners, in their minds, don’t smoke—so we don’t need to educate them about it, right?
They would have seen it as a win when Ohio’s ban forced Barnett to quit in 2010, six years after his grandmother died and over a decade before his parents died. His only way to continue smoking then would have been to buy tobacco at hugely inflated prices on the illicit market that the ban produced, risking the debt and violence that surrounds contraband tobacco in prisons.
But the ban didn’t come with help to quit smoking. It didn’t come with any information about smoking, or information about the safer nicotine options that help millions of people to quit cigarettes and stay quit. It just came.
Because of that failure, when Barnett releases in two years, he plans to start smoking again the day he gets out. That’s what happened last time, even after five years of enforced abstinence. Not even family tragedy prevented it.
But it is preventable. Simple steps could transform the lives of thousands of people like him. If prisons provided clear and accurate information about tobacco harm reduction options, and allowed use of products like vapes and pouches, it would have a profound effect.
Prisoners have a saying: What you do while you’re inside is what you’re going to do when you get out. This is about forming healthier habits and behaviors. We are literally a captive audience. I don’t smoke, but so many people in prison do. We have a manifest need to hear a lifesaving message. And word of mouth could carry that message into the free world.
Photograph by Doomok, J via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0
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