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Although the authorities alerted the police regularly to drive away the dealers, these transactions were fairly unstoppable. Anyone caught using or in possession of drugs inside the unit was expelled, and some were when I was there; but who was to ban patients from smoking outside the hospital doors? Morally, these were the entitlements of the damned. Down among any dead men – the traitor before the firing squad, the poor sod in the trenches with his torso blown away, the young paraplegic whose penis would never feel again – a cigarette was an emblem of compassion. Who would ever deny the needy whatever tiny pleasure was possible? Certainly not the occupational therapists, who would on the quiet craft ingenious devices to allow tetraplegics to continue to smoke – hand straps to let them grip fag packets, a length of wire with a loop on the end to hold the cigarette, so they could reach it to their mouths. There were no pious bleats about being forbidden to facilitate patients’ smoking, just discreet pragmatism and an absence of judgementalism. The bosses looked the other way. I loved that, even if it was just one more measure of how great a catastrophe had befallen us.