"I felt like an asshole," said 24 year old Chicagoan, Vincent Mulica about smoking in pubic. Mulica claims that the distress from the social stigma around smoking was more detrimental to his health than tobacco itself. Mulica cited an interesting relationship between the proximity of the nearest sign and his level of anxiety:
"If there was no sign in sight and I was seen smoking, I felt a slight level of disapproval. But if I was seen having a smoke next to a sign, I felt like a registered sex offender holding hands with the neighbor's 5 year old daughter."
He's been recently prescribed Xanax to deal with the feeling of condemnation he perceives from random people who see him smoking. He used to go to great lengths to avoid mental discomfort - sometimes crawling inside of a manhole to light up. Now he is much bolder in how he deals with any perceived antismoking sentiment from a passerby, asking things like, "What the fuck you looking at?" and "You want this Newport up your ass?" He recalls a time when his rhetorical questions were greeted with an answer and he wound up inserting a cigarette into someone's anus. "I threw that one away," he explains.
Mulica's ability to turn the tables on a perceived or actual resentment has given hope to other paranoid smokers, especially in Chicago. Aside from praise for his perseverance he's received numerous inquiries about his psychiatrist as well as solicitations for Xanax.
