Description:

People who have seen old screenshows have no doubt seen and wondered about the little white sticks people sometimes put in their mouths and lit, and perhaps even connected them with the 'cigarettes' referred to in literature. These small cylinders contained cured tobacco plant leaves that acted as a drug, sort of a highly addictive stimulant, when smoked. Cigarettes and to a lesser extent their larger variant, 'cigars', were once quite popular in Britain.

Unlike in the case of cannabis, however, the British government was quite successful at banning the cultivation of tobacco in Britain during the latter part of the Global Collapse, motivated in part due to the highly detrimental health impacts of long term smoking. The product has, of course, fallen out of use except with a wealthy minority who obtain them discretely from New World Order smugglers.

Prior to the Collapse, cigarettes were quite a popular product globally, with most governments heavily taxing them and placing restrictions on their packaging, advertising and sale due to the aforementioned addictiveness and negative health impacts.

In the modern New World Order, smoking cigarettes in public is considered a public nuisance and you can't just light one up wherever, but other than that, there are virtually no restrictions whatsoever on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes. As alluded, they can be a popular item for smugglers. If you travel in the Order, you will find smoking cigarettes to be quite ubiquitous. Smoking, in fact, remains the leading cause of lung cancer in the Order today.

The Common word for cigarette is, confusingly, 'na sikar'. It came from English as 'sikaret' and got shortened down. The larger variant can also just be called 'na sikar', or sometimes 'na akpe sikar', 'the big cigarette', to disambiguate.

As a verb, 'sikar' is an intransitive pali verb meaning to smoke a cigarette. The modifier form 'sikarys' means smoky, or stained and smelly from tobacco.