just words

Today I want to tell you about the tale of Mr. Cig.

In the early 1950s, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, founded in 1875 and famous for its Camel, Newport, and Pall Mall brand cigarettes, faced a big problem: public suspicion about tobacco was growing and, most importantly, sales were going down. So, they were forced to come up with a plan to save the company, and they had to come up with it fast.

Although physicians had long suspected links between smoking tobacco and respiratory disease, these suspicions were largely ignored until 1950, when epidemiologists Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published a breakthrough study showing an undeniable link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer. This study, of course, threw the entire tobacco industry into a panic. The best tobacco minds in the world came together to figure out a way to discredit this damning new information. They cut lucrative deals with the film industry, placing branded cigarettes between the fingers of every glamorous movie star; they tripled spending on public advertising, ensuring every billboard and city bus was plastered with the smiling faces of smokers; they even ran blatant disinformation campaigns on public radio, discrediting Doll and Hill as quacks. But no matter what the tobacco companies did, sales still went down. Sales were plummeting, in fact. That is, until one day in 1951, John C. Whitaker, President of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, after many fruitless internal meetings, stumbled upon a brilliant idea entirely by accident.

And that idea was: Mr. Cig.

As told in a famous anecdote published in a local paper in 1951, John C. Whitaker, out of ideas during an internal board meeting, scribbled a quick drawing on his cocktail napkin. The scribble was like that of a child’s: a giant cigarette man with black-circle eyes and a curved-line smile, holding out a lit cigarette twirling with little smoke lines to a crudely drawn child lying in what looked to be a hospital bed. At first, Whitaker thought nothing of the drawing until, as outlined verbatim in the aforementioned local paper, an executive sitting next to him eyed the napkin and asked, “What’s that you’ve sketched there, then?” to which Mr. Whitaker famously replied, “Well, good sir, that there is Mr. Cig.”

It was decided right then and there that Mr. Cig would become the new mascot of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. The idea was that Mr. Cig would go to local hospitals and hand out free cigarettes to the infirm, some of whom would be children, emphasizing the calming, anxiety-reducing effects of smoking tobacco, which the physicians employed by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. linked to faster patient recovery, as there was some evidence that a calm, positive mind improved physical well-being. This idea was hailed as genius, and plans quickly progressed. The company immediately hired a local seamstress to craft the Mr. Cig costume. She simulated the cigarette paper with white cloth, wrapping it tightly around a giant tube of thick particle board; then she took real wood, charred it gray and black with fire, and painted the top orangish-red to simulate a lit cherry; then used industrial-strength plastic to create a bowl-like structure, which she glued to the top of the costume with industrial-strength adhesive; then she glued the faux-smoldering wood into the bowl, which completed the overall structure; but it was still missing something: the smiling, cartoon-like face, which was crucial to appealing to sick people, especially sick children; so she took large pieces of black felt, two circles and a curve, and glued them just below the faux-smoldering wood; then, as a last step, she cut two holes into the costume where a human’s arms would stick out, which was a crucial feature, as Mr. Cig would not be able to hand out cigarettes without arms. This process took weeks of toiling, but the seamstress completed the costume before the deadline. The costume was then reviewed by the entire R.J. Reynolds Tobacco marketing division, who collectively deemed it good.

But before Mr. Cig could tour the hospitals, there was one final question: who, exactly, would don the costume? Who would have the honor of becoming Mr. Cig?

Well, the bad news is, to this day, the identity of the original Mr. Cig is a mystery. Some believe it was the head of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco marketing division, William Slocum, who was a strong believer in the Mr. Cig project and very involved in the planning. Others believe it was John C. Whitaker inside that giant, cartoon-like cigarette man costume. Some suggest it was the ghost of R.J. Reynolds himself, making one last cancer-causing sales pitch from beyond the grave. What’s more likely, however, is that the original Mr. Cig was simply a low-level employee from the R.J. Reynolds marketing division who was perhaps voluntold to don the costume, but even if true, that employee’s name has unfortunately been lost to time.

What we do know, however, is that throughout the remainder of the 1950s, Mr. Cig, with his big smiling cartoon face and faux-smoldering cherry topper, traveled across the United States from hospital to hospital, handing out free cigarettes to the sick and infirm, some of whom were children and many of whom were dying from the very same lung cancer caused by the cigarettes themselves. Mr. Cig was also prepped with various pro-tobacco talking points, many of which were backed by sketchy scientific data provided by physicians paid by Big Tobacco, and he would rattle off these talking points to every doctor and patient he visited. Sometimes he would even leave them with whole cartons of free cigarettes, which were accepted most graciously because the immediate calming effects of the tobacco did indeed alleviate patient suffering in the short term, albeit only unknowingly hastening their demise in the long term. Of course, Mr. Cig was aware of this but, being a faithful servant of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, he continued carrying out his reaper-like duties without question. But Mr. Cig did not just give out free cigarettes and pro-smoking rhetoric, as that would not be very profitable; he also set up cigarette machines in each hospital he visited, and these cigarette machines sold products at a high markup to leech as much money from the dying patients as possible, all while the hospitals received a small cut of the profits.

It is impossible to say how many lives were lost as a result of Mr. Cig’s efforts, but one thing is certain: what Mr. Cig did was utterly detestable. We can say this for certain because it is true.

Or is it?

Well, it is certainly true that if Mr. Cig had indeed handed out cigarettes to dying hospital patients, that would have been considered utterly detestable. The negative health impacts of smoking tobacco are well-documented and backed by decades of research, and there was strong evidence of this even back in the 1950s. But the problem is, Mr. Cig did not hand out cigarettes to dying hospital patients at all, because Mr. Cig never existed, or at least I am pretty sure he never existed. The story above, about Mr. Cig, is an elaborate fabrication on my part, based on supposedly real information documented in a single article posted online on November 24, 2025. You can read it in archive format here. It is roughly two paragraphs long and contains a supposedly real picture of Mr. Cig handing a lit cigarette to a hospital patient circa 1948. But as far as I can tell, this picture does not depict reality, and the events outlined never actually happened. There is no real evidence whatsoever backing up the existence of Mr. Cig outside of this short shock article, which itself has no citations.

But the problem here is not so much that Mr. Cig did not exist, or that the vintag.es article is blatantly lying to us; it is that, even now, after doing a bunch of research, I am still not sure if Mr. Cig existed or not.

When my friend sent me the Mr. Cig article via text message with the question, “Do you think this is real?”, I went down a sort of online rabbit hole to find out the truth, and I got stuck in that rabbit hole for about an hour. Most of my research was spent doing keyword searches, trying to find older articles to corroborate the Mr. Cig story he had sent me, but I could not find anything dated before 2025. I even checked the Wikipedia articles for various tobacco companies, playing fast and loose with the Ctrl+F hotkey on phrases like “Mr. Cig,” “Mr. Ciggy,” “mascot,” and whatnot, but that too was a fruitless exercise. I found a Facebook post that referenced the same article, and I found a Reddit post too, wherein people just accepted the story at face value because, hell, it seems like something a tobacco company would actually do. But I could find no real historical record of Mr. Cig. He did not seem to exist. I got to thinking that, if there is no real evidence, how come people seem to just believe this story to be true? And that’s when it hit me: people believe this to be true because, accompanying the article, there is a seemingly real picture of Mr. Cig, and this picture looks very realistic: black and white, showing a correctly proportioned man with an era-appropriate hairstyle, and the hospital bed looks as if it could have been from the 1940s or 1950s. Photos add credibility; they trick our senses in a way, make us put our cynical guards down. The only truly weird thing about the photo is Mr. Cig himself who, although creepy as hell, looks real enough, certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And there were no obvious alterations to the photo, at least not that I noticed upon first or second glance. But after seeing the photo a third time, it hit me: based on the location of the spiraling smoke lines, Mr. Cig is handing the man a lit cigarette with the lit end facing out, meaning that if the man grabbed the cigarette, he would burn himself. I thought to myself, surely the esteemed Mr. Cig, a paragon of cigarette-smoking excellence, would not hand a cigarette to someone in this way; certainly he knew the basic etiquette of passing a cigarette. And that’s when I knew that the photo of Mr. Cig was AI-generated.

But the problem was, even after coming to this conclusion, I felt that I was still no closer to the truth. Upon emerging from the Mr. Cig research rabbit hole, I was actually more confused than when I had first jumped into the hole. I found that, on the one hand, there’s strong evidence that Mr. Cig did not exist, considering the lack of historical record and the AI-generated photo, and it’s no coincidence that Mr. Cig only started showing up in 2025, the year photorealistic AI-generated images became a thing. But on the other hand, there is nothing saying otherwise. In fact, everyone online seems to think that Mr. Cig was a real mascot who actually handed out free cigarettes at hospitals. And, if enough people believe something, does that make it true? Does consensus dictate reality? Although I believe it very likely that Mr. Cig is a total fabrication, it now seems impossible for me to know for certain, and this disturbs me because it reveals something about the world we live in, something dark and twisted.

It reveals that we live in a world of falsehoods, an era of post-truth.

I’m not the greatest storyteller in the world, but the story I crafted up there, about Mr. Cig, was intended to be believable although entirely misleading. For example, I researched and used historical facts like the names of the actual people who worked at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. circa 1950, per public record, and I even referenced a real research paper published by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill. I did this because these types of factual details add a layer of believability to the Mr. Cig story, even though everything around those facts was totally made up. I was weaving fact with falsehood on purpose, not only to foster a sense of credibility with the reader but also to make a point. That being, this is a very common rhetorical trick used in journalism. People are more likely to eat bullshit if it’s hidden within a tasty-looking meal. But this is just the first layer of falsehood. In the year 2026, it goes much deeper than that.

In the past, if you were so inclined, you could simply fact-check the story, look things up about it online, go through an exercise similar to the one I outlined in the previous paragraphs to determine a story’s veracity, but nowadays the facts are not so clear-cut. Often you will find conflicting sources supporting both sides of whatever it is you’re researching. On the one hand, this has always been the case, especially since the advent of the internet and the echo chambers spawned from it, but nowadays, with the advent of AI, a bullshit term I’m only using because it’s common tongue, it’s incredibly easy for someone to generate a very real-sounding story and post it online. And to make it worse, as of at least 2025, it’s also now incredibly easy to generate a very real-looking photo to accompany that very real-sounding, albeit totally fabricated, story. Someone could even use AI to generate a real-looking research paper in PDF format to support the details of their fake story. So now, not only are we contending with tricky journalism and internet echo chambers, we’re also contending with totally fake but seemingly factual data that’s incredibly simple to generate. And the technology is only getting better. Just a year ago, AI-generated photos were full of obvious errors and telling glossy sheens, but now, as of the year 2025, ChatGPT can spit out photorealistic images that are nearly indistinguishable from those taken with the highest-end cameras, and we’re also seeing high-quality AI-generated videos and audio recordings. Meaning, with each passing day, it’s becoming harder and harder to discern fact from fiction. We are now living in a post-truth era.

You may be thinking something like, “Well, I can tell the difference,” but what about your crazy aunt on Facebook who keeps sharing fake stories about how Elon Musk created a tiny-home colony for people on Mars, can she tell the difference? And what about your hyper-conservative grandpa who keeps sharing stories about how all the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential rally photos were themselves AI-generated? And what about the countless people who share obviously AI-generated recipes, or innocuous, feel-good fake stories about dogs saving babies from being locked in hot cars or whatever? A few years ago, this kind of stuff was obvious, but now? Now it’s almost impossible to tell. Hell, there’s a whole subreddit called “Is it AI?” wherein people debate back and forth about the veracity of some very real-looking stuff. More and more, people are unable to tell the difference between reality and irreality.

Your first gut reaction to this might be to treat everything you read, see, and hear as fiction until sufficiently proven otherwise, but this line of thinking actually does you a disservice, because there will come a day when something you read will be very relevant to your life, yet you won’t believe it because, well, everything around you might be AI-generated, so why would you believe anything? And even if you do believe something, who’s to say that the people around you believe it? They’re drowning in the AI-generated slop swamp just like you, so they’ve been conditioned not to believe anything too. Hell, there may come a day when, let’s say, the president of the United States kills someone on live television, but who’s to say that the recording wasn’t just AI? What’s to stop the president himself from claiming that the recording was AI? In that case, perhaps half the country will believe the president and the other half won’t, but in reality, due to the level of AI-generated obfuscation going on in the world, neither side will truly know what happened.

This is the danger we are putting ourselves in. Mr. Cig is just the tip of the iceberg.

In this post-truth era, how long do you think you will be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction?

How long, do you think, until Mr. Cig tricks you?

I quit smoking back in November 2023.

I had been smoking since I was like seventeen or something. I remember I would sneak out of the house and go into the garage to smoke, and one time my mom caught me, and she actually cried. It was the first time I had seen her cry. She was always a stoic, almost emotionless woman, so seeing her cry was actually a profound moment, but I guess it wasn’t profound enough for me to quit smoking. Go figure. I remember, back then, wondering why, why she cried, why was smoking such a big deal, but now, as a parent of two kids myself, I think I know why. If I had caught my son smoking, maybe I would cry too, not because of the smoking, per se, but because of the symbolic nature of the whole thing, like a stark image of my son growing up in real time, innocence lost in the here and now, or whatever. Growing up is such a tragedy that, when you see it happening before your eyes like that, it’s hard not to want to bawl your brains out, but of course, when you’re young, you don’t think about that stuff, that’s the paradox of youth, right there.

Anyway, like I was saying, I quit smoking back in November 2024. By that time, I had gone up to like a pack a day. My brand was Marlboro Lights. I loved smoking, especially the first cigarette of the day, or after a long day of work or societal obligation or whatever, that sort of body-melting feeling after the first drag, that heady pressure like the brain is being enveloped in the best kind of storm cloud, the kind just off in the distance with heat lightning and low rumbling and all that stuff, and especially that sensation of smoke traveling its way down the trachea, subsumed by the lungs, then exhaling the leftover smoke like some sort of high-fantasy dragon. I can’t think of much else like it, to tell you the truth.

So you might be wondering, then, why I quit smoking. You might have already assumed a typical answer to that question, something health-related, like I was running out of breath or my blood pressure was high or I had developed a bad cough or I wanted to ensure that I lived long enough to see my kids become happy, flourishing adults or something like that. But, honestly, none of those reasons were why I quit smoking. I’m not that farsighted or selfless, I’m really not. I quit smoking because, when I sat down to read or write or play a video game or whatever, there was always this nagging thought in the back of my head to go smoke a cigarette. It was disrupting my focus, especially on things that I enjoyed doing. Back then I was smoking a cigarette every hour or so, and immediately after smoking, the timer for the next cigarette would start running down in my head, and I was very aware of it. I’d be playing like Final Fantasy XI or something, an online MMORPG, and I’d be thinking something like, “I’m going to smoke a cigarette in 32 minutes, which should be after about ten more Goblin Ambushers,” and I’d think like that about every activity I was doing, as if cigarettes were some sort of mythical demon, stalking me at all times, seducing me, beyond my control, like some sort of Nicotinic Lamia or Siren or Succubus or whatever. So, yeah, that’s why I quit, because it was consuming my brain. I was thinking about it all the time. Smoking had become my focal point, more important than all other things, sucking everything else in, like some sort of supermassive black hole around which all thoughts swirled. Oh, and because it was expensive as hell.

So, what’s the point of all this?

Well, I started smoking again, a few weeks ago. Actually, earlier than that. I had been smoking on and off at social events, especially work events, bumming cigarettes from people here and there, telling myself that I was now only a social smoker and that I could moderate it and all that stuff, but after a while, that morphed into wanting a cigarette at home, so now, as of just a few weeks ago, I’m smoking at home.

Well, kind of.

You see, my wife doesn’t know I started smoking again. I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes and I hid them in my office, and now, when I go on my daily bike ride, I take my Luckies out with me, stop at the neighborhood pond, the one with all the turtles and ducks and geese, and I spark up, watching those little turtle heads poke up and drift along the surface of the water, and all the ducks come up to me, expecting bread, because everyone around here feeds them, and all the geese that hiss at me because they’re total assholes, and I inhale and exhale like a modern-day dragon, and the whole hiding-it-from-my-wife thing adds an element of excitement to the whole thing too, as if I’m seventeen again, hiding it from my mother. Maybe this is my version of a mid-life crisis, but I would argue that I have one of those every week, so this isn't really anything new.

For now, smoking out there, on that pond, with those torpid turtles and those demanding ducks and those grouchy geese, is almost a zen-like experience, in a way, with how tranquil and melty and heady it is. I even saw a great blue heron one time. Next time, I'll try to take a picture, and post it.

I know I shouldn’t smoke. It’s stupid. I know I’m burning the child inside, making my mother cry, but I’m thirty-four years old and, if I want to burn a little part of myself sometimes, shouldn’t I have the right to do that? And I enjoy it, so shouldn’t I be allowed to do the stuff I enjoy, sometimes? That might sound a little hedonistic, but is it really so different from any other self-gratifying thing we do, like sit around playing video games instead of doing housework, or lazily watching TV all night? And before you say something like, “you’re just making excuses,” let me assure you that I know damn well that I’m just making excuses. You don’t have to tell me.

Anyway, I’m going to go play some SaGa Frontier II, then I’m going to read a chapter or two of Moby Dick, then I’m going to maybe work on the novel I’ve been stewing on.

But first, before all that, I’m going on a bike ride.