The Smoking Society

If only Karl Marx had not written

'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,
the heart in a heartless world, just as it [religion]
is the spirit in a spiritless situation.
Religion is the opium of the people',

However paradoxically true it seemed when written,
it says so little, now we are awash with media irony.
I wish he had written instead that 'the measure of a society,
if not consumerism, is how well it collectively creates
and supports a painful and destructively addictive nature,
whilst disguising that nature as virtue in the people
it was/is being fostered in'. But for Marx to write
that he would have had to recognise before others
who knew him better than he knew in himself
what he consistently  failed to recognise
-how he was inspired to write through smoking
and his inspiration made his writing his opiate.