Nixit and the Pharmaco-Capitalist Soul: Hauntings Under Piramal Pharma

Posted on 27th October, 2025 (GMT 07:40 hrs)

ABSTRACT

This essay interrogates Nixit—a nicotine lozenge produced by Piramal Pharma—as an artifact of contemporary bio-political control. By examining its chemical composition, rhetoric of health, and psychopolitical subtext, the paper situates Nixit within the neoliberal economy of purification, where addiction is not eliminated but reformatted for consumption. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalysis and Foucault’s biopolitics, alongside the cinematic allegory of Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (2007), the article reveals how the pharmaco-industrial complex transforms rebellion into obedience, recoding the smoker’s desire into a commodified act of self-regulation. Incorporating Nietzsche’s genealogy of internalized violence and Derrida’s notion of hauntology, it further argues that the lozenge embodies the spectral persistence of repression under the guise of care. In the age of “managed freedom,” even the act of quitting becomes a performance of compliance—sweetened, packaged, and sold as virtue.

“All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul.’”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

“The soul is the prison of the body.”
— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)

“You came here to quit smoking. You didn’t come here for freedom.”
— No Smoking (2007)

I. Introduction: When Cure Becomes Capture

In neoliberal India, where wellness is a commodity and discipline a virtue, the act of quitting has itself become a consumer experience. Nixit, marketed by Piramal Pharma as a nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), promises to “help you quit smoking.” The slogan implies emancipation—an act of reclaiming control over one’s body. Yet beneath this rhetoric of liberation lies a subtler logic of capture.

The subject is not freed from addiction; rather, addiction is privatized, moralized, and repackaged as compliance. The health industry no longer treats the addicted as deviant but as potential customers in an ever-expanding bioeconomy of cure. Each product promises detoxification but only within the marketplace of purity—a space where emancipation is purchased rather than achieved.

As Foucault (1978/1990) observes, modern power does not merely repress; it produces, regulates, and optimizes life through what he calls biopower—the diffuse system of institutions, norms, and technologies that govern life under the guise of care. The lozenge thus operates not as a symbol of freedom but as a microtechnology of control—an edible emblem of the state-pharma nexus disciplining the body through taste, dosage, and habit.

II. The Pharmaco-Politics of Purity

The composition of Piramal Pharma’s Nixit—nicotine (2 mg), menthol, sorbitol, and artificial sweeteners—reveals the paradox of its purity. The same psychoactive molecule responsible for cigarette addiction is retained, only relocated into a “clean” pharmaceutical medium. This transformation exemplifies what Latour (1993) calls the modern constitution: the myth of purification that divides the impure from the pure, the natural from the technical, without ever dissolving their entanglement.

In Nixit, nicotine becomes respectable. Through the bureaucratic alchemy of clinical trials and medical certification, the toxic becomes therapeutic. The smoker, once pathologized as deviant or weak, is now rehabilitated into a model neoliberal subject—self-disciplined, informed, and responsible. It is a subtle but profound shift: from the public condemnation of addiction to its moral and commercial domestication.

This is Foucault’s (1977) disciplinary power in its sweetest form—the move from visible punishment to internalized regulation. The lozenge thus embodies the neoliberal transition from coercion to consent, from prohibition to prescription. It is not the elimination of vice but its reorganization into a market-friendly form.

IIa. The Non-Pharma Paradox: Nixit as Over-the-Counter Therapy

While Piramal Pharma’s Nixit bears the emblem of a pharmaceutical brand, its status in India is that of an over-the-counter (OTC) consumer good rather than a prescription drug. This distinction is crucial. It places the lozenge within the domain of the marketplace rather than the clinic, transforming pharmacological care into a purchasable behaviour. The product is sold freely in convenience stores and online platforms alongside chewing gums and mouth-fresheners—a placement that disguises therapy as lifestyle.

A closer look at its publicly listed formulation reveals the contours of this ambivalence.
To be “exact”, each lozenge contains 2 mg of nicotine, menthol, sorbitol, mannitol, sodium carbonate, flavouring agents, and aspartame (E951) as an artificial sweetener. None of these ingredients require medical supervision, yet their combination sustains the same biochemical dependency the drug claims to cure. Nicotine remains a potent neuroactive alkaloid that binds to acetylcholine receptors, elevating dopamine levels and reinforcing habit. Menthol, though marketed as soothing, prolongs nicotine absorption by anaesthetising oral tissues. Sorbitol and aspartame lend sweetness but, in excessive use, are linked to gastrointestinal distress and metabolic disruption.

Thus, the lozenge’s supposed “safety” is a regulatory convenience rather than a pharmacological truth. The toxicity of smoking is not neutralised; it is redistributed—disguised within the sugar-coated grammar of wellness. The smoker becomes both patient and consumer, their dosage calibrated not by a physician but by the packaging unit of desire itself.

The OTC classification also exempts Nixit from the rigorous clinical scrutiny demanded of prescription drugs. Its legitimacy derives from branding rather than biomedical validation. What is sold is not a cure but a narrative—a story in which purification is achieved through purchase. The absence of a prescription becomes the very proof of moral autonomy: one regulates oneself without the mediation of authority, an echo of Foucault’s “governmentality of the self.”

In this light, Nixit exemplifies what could be called non-pharma pharmacology—a therapeutic simulation that occupies the interstice between candy and cure. It administers not medicine but permission, authorising the subject to perform recovery in public while maintaining dependency in private. The lozenge’s toxicity is therefore not chemical alone; it is ethical and epistemic. It blurs the line between healing and habit, between treatment and taste—precisely the blur on which the bio-economy of neoliberal health thrives.

IIb. The Spectacle of Cure: Branding, E-Commerce, and Digital Salvation

In 2023, Piramal Pharma acquired the smoking cessation brand Nixit and soon re-launched it within an aggressively digital ecosystem of care. Its marketing strategy mirrors the neoliberal spectacle of wellness—where the aesthetics of quitting are as vital as the act itself.

The company’s campaigns present Nixit as both product and pedagogy. Advertisements on platforms like Amazon and Flipkart showcase the lozenges and gums as sleek, sugar-free tools of self-discipline, flavored in frost mint and calibrated across a twelve-week “freedom plan.” Here, quitting is modular: each week promises measurable moral progress, each dose a quantifiable redemption.

Following the acquisition, Piramal launched a comprehensive e-commerce push, partnering with the media agency OMD India in February 2025 to handle its integrated digital mandate. The collaboration aims to optimize visibility through algorithmic care—deploying strategic communication to transform self-restraint into shareable virtue.

In these campaigns, wellness is not merely sold; it is curated, streamed, and personalised. The nicotine lozenge becomes a lifestyle artefact, performing health for the digital gaze. The rhetoric of control is amplified by convenience—sugar-free, portable, algorithmically recommended. The cure circulates like data, invisibly embedding the pharmaco-state into the infrastructures of everyday consumption.

III. Toxicity and the Politics of Substitution

The question, then, is not whether Piramal Pharma’s Nixit detoxifies the smoker but how it rebrands toxicity. A 2 mg lozenge delivers roughly the same systemic nicotine as several cigarette puffs, yet its delivery is odorless, invisible, and therefore socially acceptable. The smoke disappears, but the dependency remains.

Here we encounter what Žižek (2008) calls interpassivity: the enjoyment of not enjoying. The smoker performs abstinence while outsourcing the act of indulgence to a socially sanctioned proxy. Nicotine, once demonized as an agent of death, re-enters the body cloaked in the moral legitimacy of medicine.

Public health discourse collaborates in this masquerade. Campaigns that celebrate “quitting aids” reproduce what Foucault (2008) suggestively apprehended as the neoliberal rationality of self-care—a mode of governance that converts life into capital and discipline into desire. The subject learns to feel virtuous not for resisting temptation but for consuming its regulated counterpart. In this sense, the pharmaceutical market does not cure addiction; it simply monopolizes it under the banner of health.

IV. Psychoanalysis of the Mouth: Desire, Discipline, and the Violence Within

For Freud (1929/1961), the oral stage represents the site of primary satisfaction, where the infant’s pleasure is tied to nourishment and control. Smoking, in this framework, is a re-enactment of the oral drive—a ritual of taking in and releasing, of mastery and dependence. The cigarette is both phallic and maternal, a portable source of pleasure, anxiety, and defiance.

When society criminalizes smoking yet commodifies Nixit, it performs a psychic inversion. The violence once exhaled outward—in the visible plume of defiance—is now internalized. Nietzsche (1887) recognized this dynamic as the moment when violence turns inward, giving birth to conscience, guilt, and the “spectral” self that polices the body from within. The lozenge, dissolving inside the mouth, literalizes this internalization: aggression becomes absorption, rebellion turns to ritual.

Derrida’s (1994) hauntology—the persistence of what is violently effaced—finds a darker resonance in the DHFL aftermath. It is not the cigarette that haunts the lozenge but the dispossessed who haunt the edifice of Piramal’s pharmaceutical and financial empire. The spectres of the defrauded return, not as mere memories but as ethical residues or traces of an unatoned violence. Nietzsche’s insight that the soul is constructed from the internalization of cruelty acquires new meaning through human malleability here: the victims of financial extermination (finacide) carry within them the sediment of that external violence, transmuted into conscience, protest, and haunting. What Piramal’s Nixit seeks to sweeten and pacify is precisely this unresolved haunting unrest—the return of the injured, repressed soul that refuses erasure.

Marcuse’s (1964) repressive desublimation resonates here: pleasure is permitted, but only in forms that reinforce domination. The act of rebellion dissolves within the system that sells its antidote. The smoker’s transformation into a lozenge consumer mirrors what Bauman (2000) calls liquid modernity: an era where even dissent must be fluid, sanitized, and purchasable. The Nixit user appears health-conscious, disciplined, and socially responsible—precisely the qualities the neoliberal order demands.

V. Allegory of Control: Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking

Anurag Kashyap’s film No Smoking (2007) dramatizes the nightmare of therapeutic authoritarianism. Its protagonist, K, enters a rehabilitation center called “Prayogshala” (The Application/Experimentation Lab, to be precise) promising freedom from addiction, only to discover that freedom itself is systematically dismantled under the guise of “help.” Every attempt at disobedience results in a grotesque punishment—his fingers amputated, his autonomy reduced.

The film’s Kafkaesque structure transforms addiction into a parable of control. Kashyap externalizes what Nixit internalizes: the machinery of moral coercion that redefines liberation as submission. K’s struggle mirrors the smoker’s relation to the lozenge—both trapped within the logic of cure-as-capture.

Where Kashyap’s world is bureaucratically violent, Nixit’s world is pharmacologically seductive. The former compels obedience through fear; the latter, through flavor. Yet both embody the same Foucauldian truth: power no longer forbids; it entices. Control no longer demands subservience; it invites participation.

Kashyap’s dystopia operates through ritual, surveillance, and confession—the addict must narrate his guilt before an omniscient institution that claims to know his desires better than he does. The “Prayogshala,” with its labyrinthine corridors and invisible watchers, literalizes the panopticon: a space where visibility is total and agency is nullified. The act of smoking—once private, defiant, sensory—is transformed into a bureaucratic infraction. In this sense, K’s punishment is not only physical but epistemic: his desires are rewritten by an external script of wellness.

Nixit lozenges, produced by Piramal Pharma, enact a subtler iteration of this same script. They promise self-mastery through chemical mediation, translating moral discipline into a consumable object. The lozenge becomes both cure and commodity, packaging virtue in mint and menthol. The smoker, seduced by the promise of “control,” becomes a participant in his own subjugation—willingly consuming the mechanism of restraint. Where No Smoking’s guru demands confession, Nixit demands compliance through taste; both render freedom transactional, measurable, and marketable.

In Kashyap’s film, the clinic’s totalitarian architecture ensures that even rebellion is recuperated into the system—it is anticipated, priced in, and punished. Similarly, in the marketplace of wellness, every craving is already commodified, every act of resistance folded into a cycle of consumption. The Nixit lozenge, then, is the neoliberal heir to the Prayogshala: an apparatus of control disguised as choice.

Ultimately, both Kashyap’s film and Nixit’s brand rhetoric illuminate a shared paradox of modern selfhood—the transformation of autonomy into a product, of freedom into adherence. The therapeutic regime, whether institutional or commercial, no longer seeks to cure addiction but to perpetuate dependency—on systems, on products, on the perpetual promise of reform.

VI. The Bioeconomy of Constrained “Freedom”

Neoliberal governance thrives on the illusion that freedom can be consumed. As Rose (2007) notes, the modern individual is not coerced into conformity but enticed into self-management through technologies of the self—from wellness apps to pharmaceutical aids. Nixit epitomizes this logic: it transforms the act of quitting into a moral transaction, blending obedience with self-care.

Within this bioeconomic loop, health becomes both currency and commodity. To be well is to be productive, to consume rightly, to maintain the body as an efficient machine. In this regime, freedom is measured not by autonomy but by compliance with the market’s version of self-control.

The Nixit user thus becomes the model neoliberal citizen: disciplined, responsible, and self-surveilling. The body becomes an investment portfolio; purity, a performance. What was once rebellion—the smoker’s act of defiance—is now reterritorialized as a mint-flavored ritual of obedience.

This economy of wellness converts the rhetoric of liberation into an instrument of governance. The imperative to “take control” or “choose freedom” reconfigures desire as data, and craving as a manageable variable within a pharmacological ecosystem. What appears as a personal decision is in fact the outcome of algorithmic persuasion—advertising, behavioral nudges, and corporate psychologies that align moral virtue with consumer choice. Freedom, in this paradigm, is not the absence of control but its internalization.

Nixit’s bioeconomy operates through the soft coercion of taste and tone. Its lozenges do not command abstinence; they invite discipline. The body, once the site of unruly craving, becomes the terrain of optimization, a micro-managed project of reform. Each mint dissolves not just nicotine but ambiguity—translating pleasure into productivity, and desire into a measurable performance of willpower.

The moral language surrounding such products—“commitment,” “progress,” “control”—naturalizes the fusion of ethics and economics. Health becomes a ledger of responsibility, where success is quantified through consumption. The act of quitting is no longer a refusal of dependency but its rebranding; the subject remains tethered to systems of production, now recoded as therapeutic care.

This is the essence of the bioeconomy of constrained freedom: a world in which wellness is weaponized as governance, where autonomy is indistinguishable from adherence. The consumer’s body is at once a site of pleasure, surveillance, and profit—an instrument calibrated for perpetual maintenance. To live well is to live in compliance; to be free is to optimize oneself according to the metrics of the market.

The lozenge, in this schema, is less a cure than a contract—an agreement between the body and capital, mediated through chemistry and desire. The taste of mint is the flavor of submission, sweet enough to mask the mechanisms of control.

As Foucault suggests, power in the biopolitical era “lets live and makes live,” producing subjects who govern themselves in accordance with the imperatives of life and health. Rose extends this, showing how neoliberalism governs “through freedom,” transforming autonomy into a managerial function of the self. And as Banet-Weiser (2012) observes, branding converts this self-management into affective labor—where authenticity and wellness become consumable forms of capital. Nixit’s promise of “control through care” thus exemplifies the contemporary synthesis of biopolitics, marketing, and morality: a bioeconomy in which the self is both product and producer, endlessly optimizing, endlessly obedient.

VII. The Indian Pharmaco-State: Capital, Care, and the (Im-)Moral Economy of Detox

The rise of Piramal Pharma Ltd’s Nixit cannot be separated from India’s larger history of pharmaceutical capitalism. Since the liberalisation of 1991, the state has served as both regulator and promoter of private enterprise in health. Piramal Pharma exemplifies this pharmaco-state—a formation that medicalises life while commodifying care.

Its rhetoric of “wellness for all” aligns with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Make in India capitalism, where pharmaceutical growth is national pride disguised as public health. Yet this narrative obscures the uneven geography of suffering: the same corporations producing lozenges of liberation are often implicated in industrial pollution, unsafe trials, and toxic manufacturing zones. Addiction is purified at one end of the value-chain while toxicity is outsourced at the other.

In India’s (im-)moral economy of detox, purity is aesthetic, not ethical. The middle-class consumer’s obsession with “natural,” “clean,” and “herbal” products reflects a new spiritual capitalism—where purification is achieved through consumption, not renunciation. Nixit enters this landscape as both scientific and spiritual: a lozenge that merges modern pharmacology with the fantasy of moral cleanliness.

A. Capital + Care: The Pharmaco-State Nexus

Piramal Pharma’s structure helps illuminate how care becomes capital. The company spans contract development and manufacturing, hospital generics, over-the-counter consumer-healthcare products. Its growth through demerger and listing in 2022 emphasises scale and investor value. In this context, the pharmaco-state is constituted by overlapping regulatory, financial and ideological logics: the state provides legitimacy and facilitation; the firm delivers commodified care; the consumer participates as patient-client.

The link to the BJP’s political economy emerges in manifest and covert registers. For instance, electoral-bond data show that Piramal Group has donated to the BJP. Such flows indicate how pharmaceutical capital anchors political patronage and policy favour. The iconography of the “national pharma champion” under the Make in India banner provides moral cover for corporate expansion. At the same time, the regulatory state often remains weak vis-à-vis environmental externalities, labour-rights, and toxic exposures in manufacturing hubs—thus enabling a spatial displacement of harm from affluent consumers to marginalised production zones.

B. Detox, Discipline & (Im-)Moral Economy

Within this pharmaco-state the logic of detox is doubled: on one hand, individuals are encouraged to eliminate “undesirable” habits (smoking, addiction) via marketed aids; on the other hand, the same system conceals the industrial toxicities generated by pharmaceutical-industrial processes. The lozenge of liberation sits alongside the factory smokestack of production. The consumer buys into the aesthetics of health, but the costs—ecological, social, labour-based—are externalised.

Purification thereby becomes a spectacle of consumption. The citational “natural” lozenge abstracts away from the fact that the corporate subject is implicated in global value-chains, financial speculation, and in some cases, political cronyism. The middle-class subject buys freedom while remaining embedded in systems of governance that deploy power through markets, not coercion.

Interlude: The Semiotics of Danger — Tobacco, Pesticides, and the Politics of Warning

The pharmaco-state’s duplicity is legible even on packaging. Consider the dissonance between tobacco and pesticide warnings in India. Tobacco products are legally required under the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (2003) to display graphic, visceral imagery—blackened lungs, dying bodies—covering 85% of the packet, a visual pedagogy of deterrence. Yet, the containers of pesticides and fertilizers, which kill thousands of farmers annually through exposure and misuse, carry only perfunctory textual cautions—small, bureaucratic labels governed by the Insecticides Act (1968) and the Fertilizer Control Order (1985). These rules mandate language, not imagery; caution, not confrontation. The warnings, often confined to folded leaflets or the back panel, remain decorative rather than deterrent.

To see this clearly is to read a table of moral priorities disguised as regulatory design.

Aspect	Tobacco (“No Smoking” Warnings)	Pesticides / Fertilizers
Regulatory Driver	Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA), 2003: mandates 85% pictorial coverage with graphic imagery (diseased lungs, cancer patients) as deterrence.	Insecticides Act (1968) / Fertilizer (Control) Order (1985): focus on safe handling and storage. Warnings are functional (“Poison”, “Wear protective gear”), not moral or deterrent.
Product Purpose	Recreational and addictive; public health policy aims to reduce consumption.	Essential agricultural input; warnings emphasize correct use, not avoidance. Overuse—not use—is the danger.
Health Focus	Explicit: visual depictions of disease, death, and addiction.	Implicit: text-only, small-font technical cautions (“Avoid skin contact”, “Do not contaminate water”). No graphic warnings.
Enforcement & Compliance	Strict oversight through FSSAI/customs; violations lead to seizure.	Weak enforcement; labels often incomplete or untranslated across India’s multilingual packaging.
Historical Context	Global anti-smoking movement (WHO FCTC, 2003); India adopted graphic warnings post-2009.	Green Revolution legacy (1960s): prioritised yield and productivity. Health impacts and worker exposure only marginally addressed.
Economic / Policy Trade-offs	Non-essential, hence heavily restricted and moralised.	Essential for food security and export economy; moral censure impractical, thus warnings remain muted.
Advocacy & Reform Pressure	Strong NGO and WHO advocacy ensures continuous tightening.	Limited farmer safety advocacy; reform delayed (Pesticide Management Bill, 2020 still pending).

The distinction is not scientific but ideological. Tobacco’s toxicity is made spectacular because it is non-essential; pesticide toxicity is normalised because it is infrastructural. The smoker’s body is rendered as a moral failure, while the poisoned agrarian body is absorbed into the calculus of productivity. The cigarette packet thus moralizes; the pesticide bottle excuses.

Regulatory texts confirm this asymmetry.
Under the Insecticides Act (1968) and its Rules (1971), pesticide packaging must display warning signs—skull-and-crossbones icons, color codes for toxicity, antidote instructions, and the phrase “Keep out of reach of children.” Failure to comply constitutes misbranding under Section 29(1)(a). Yet the visual presence of danger is minimal, often limited to a symbol printed in the corner of the container. The Central Insecticides Board and Registration Committee (CIB&RC) oversees registration but not the semiotics of warning; no requirement for graphic imagery exists.

For fertilizers, the Fertilizer (Control) Order (1985)—amended in 2025—requires batch numbers, nutrient ratios, and application instructions, but health warnings are absent. As fertilizers are positioned as life-promoting, their ecological and toxic afterlives—nitrate contamination, soil degradation, eutrophication—are linguistically neutralised as “usage guidelines.” Their toxicity is bureaucratically renamed as “nutrient imbalance.”

The difference, then, lies in the narrative grammar of governance:
tobacco packaging is confessional and punitive—demanding repentance through visual terror; pesticide and fertilizer packaging is procedural and permissive—teaching obedience through technicality. The former dramatizes the body’s death; the latter hides it within productivity’s syntax.

Ongoing regulatory efforts remain cosmetic. The Pesticide Management Bill (2020) proposes enhanced labelling, farmer compensation, and bans on highly hazardous formulations (e.g., monocrotophos, responsible for the 2017 Yavatmal deaths). But even these reforms remain anthropocentrically minimalist—focused on safety, not justice. Similarly, the Nutrient-Based Subsidy Scheme and 2025 amendments for organic fertilizers improve instruction, not deterrence. Advocacy networks such as PAN-India continue to demand graphic warnings, PPE inclusion, and multilingual health risk messaging—but enforcement lags behind profit.

In summary, statutory warnings exist but reveal a moral hierarchy: where addiction is visible, contamination is invisible; where the cigarette is condemned, the pesticide is forgiven. The lozenge, poised between the two, becomes the redemption device—its mint sweetness masking the continuum of industrial toxicity that sustains both smoke and soil. In such semiotic hierarchies of care and control, even danger has a class position: the cigarette packet moralizes, the pesticide bottle excuses, and the lozenge redeems.

C. Theoretical Implications: Governance, Biopolitics and Neoliberal Self

This pharmaco-state thrives on a Foucauldian inversion: power is no longer purely repressive but productive, shaping subjects who are encouraged to self-regulate through consumption. The clean lozenge stands not simply for abstinence, but for the self-monitoring subject whose freedom is expressed through brand-compliance. The political economy of detox becomes a mechanism of social control under the guise of wellness.

In India, the splintering of the public sector, deregulation of industry in the 1990s, and the subsequent embedding of global pharmaceutical capital into domestic health regimes created a “governance through care” model: the state cedes direct responsibility and instead promotes “responsible citizens” who manage their health via market products. Within this frame, corporate actors become quasi-state agents—delivering care, shaping lifestyles, influencing policy.

Thus the lozenge becomes emblematic: a transactional object where freedom is packaged, licensed, marketed. The patient-consumer is invited to participate in a national health project, yet the structural dependencies—on corporate care, global supply-chains, financialised medicine—remain obscured. The moral economy of detox masks forms of exploitation: labour in API plants, disposal of pharmaceutical waste, regulatory gaps in trials and environmental health.

The state’s tobacco-control policies reinforce this logic of substitution, individualizing responsibility while ignoring the social conditions of addiction. Thus, the Nixit consumer becomes the ideal neoliberal citizen: self-disciplining, self-blaming, and self-healing through the market. The lozenge, in its quiet dissolving, performs the pedagogy of obedience.

VIII. The Paradox of Smoking Bans Amid Soaring AQI in Indian Public Spaces

The paradox of Indian modernity extends beyond the marketplace into the very air we breathe. The state that bans smoking in public places under the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act (COTPA, 2003) simultaneously presides over public atmospheres so toxic that merely inhaling becomes a form of involuntary smoking.
Delhi’s winter AQI often exceeds 700—air equivalent to smoking 30–50 cigarettes a day, according to the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index (AQLI, 2025). The same airports and malls that fine smokers ₹200 for lighting a cigarette record particulate concentrations that would qualify as chemical warfare under WHO exposure limits.

To paraphrase Kafka: the citizen is punished for carrying a lighter while standing inside a furnace.

Factor	Smoking Bans (COTPA)	Air Pollution (AQI Crisis)
Source Control	Individual habit; visible, punishable.	Systemic emissions from 10M+ vehicles, industries, and construction; diffuse, normalized.
Health Framing	Acute, moralized (“Smoking kills”).	Chronic, depersonalized (“Smog happens”).
Enforcement	Strict, localized, performative.	Weak, collective, politically deferred.
Visibility	Smoke stigmatized.	Smog aestheticized (“Delhi winter haze”).
Policy Interest	Low-cost virtue.	High-cost restructuring.

The irony is civilizational: clean air is rarer than a clean conscience. Non-smokers die of “passive pollution,” their lungs blackened not by Marlboros but by the exhaust of development itself.

From Cigarettes to Carbon Bombs: The Unseen Emissions of War

If tobacco and traffic are local theatres of toxicity, war is its planetary version. Global militaries are the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases—a fact curiously exempt from most climate agreements. The U.S. Department of Defense alone emits more CO₂ annually than 140 entire countries. During the 2023–25 conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea corridor, satellite data recorded carbon spikes equivalent to burning tens of millions of barrels of oil—yet none of these are counted under the Paris Accord inventories.

Every missile strike, every sortie, every supply chain of “defense logistics” translates into particulate combustion. The irony deepens: while the smoker is shamed for exhaling carbon monoxide, the state exhales megatons in the name of security. The right to health is suspended under the aesthetics of sovereignty.

In India, too, this dissonance persists. The same state that censors cigarette ads sponsors defense expos, coal expansion, and fertilizer subsidies—industries collectively emitting far more toxins than tobacco ever could. Environmental epidemiologists estimate that India’s annual military-industrial emissions exceed 65 million tonnes of CO₂, roughly equal to the combined emissions of its entire aviation sector. Yet these remain classified—invisible pollutants legitimized by nationalism.

Thus, the pharmaco-state and the petro-state share a common gene: both moralize individual vice while industrializing collective destruction. The anti-smoking poster and the missile launch video are two faces of the same semiotic regime—each translating death into design, each aestheticizing violence through rhetoric of protection.

Smoking as Self-Annihilation: The Erotic of Slow Death

Smoking, at its core, is not merely an act of consumption—it is a ritual of disappearance. Each drag is a small rehearsal of death, a self-authored eros of decay. In the puff and exhale, the self stages its own impermanence, translating anxiety into ash. Bataille might call it expenditure without return—the sacred waste that capitalism cannot fully domesticate.

To smoke is to affirm mortality, to participate willingly in the body’s combustion, to aestheticize the act of perishing. Yet even this intimate rebellion—this dance with annihilation—has been privatized and sanitized. The lozenge replaces the flame; the self-destructive gesture is repackaged as moral hygiene. The existential becomes algorithmic. The only acceptable death today is the one mediated by medicine.

In this sense, Nixit’s sweetness conceals the death drive Freud named Thanatos: the instinct toward quiescence, the wish to end. But the pharmaco-industrial complex cannot allow true cessation; it transforms the will to die into a subscription model—addiction deferred, not dissolved. What was once rebellion against control becomes obedience in its most distilled form.

The smoker once burned to resist the world; now, s/he dissolves to belong to it.

The Semiotic Economy of Danger

From nicotine to nitrate, from pesticide to particulate, from lozenge to laser-guided bomb—the continuum is clear. Governance operates through selective visibility: what can be moralized is punished; what must be monetized is excused.

In such semiotic hierarchies of care and control, even danger has a class position—the cigarette packet moralizes, the pesticide bottle excuses, the AQI index rationalizes, and the lozenge redeems.

IX. Conclusion: Mint-Flavored Obedience

Nixit crystallizes the contradictions of India’s late-capitalist modernity. It reveals how corporate care and state discipline converge in the intimate space of the mouth—where desire is sweetened, addiction rebranded, and the psyche pacified.

Freud’s (1929/1961) Civilization and Its Discontents foresaw this paradox: civilization demands repression yet compensates with permitted pleasures. Nixit is that compensation—sweet, dissolvable, and disciplined. It performs the same psychic labor as Kashyap’s No Smoking: teaching the subject that even freedom must be administered, branded, and ingested.

To quit smoking is no longer to escape control but to enter its most refined form. The cigarette once symbolized transgression; the lozenge now perfects captivity. Between the two lies the story of modernity itself—the transformation of rebellion into ritual, of desire into dosage, of freedom into mint-flavored obedience.

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“SmoKING Kills”: The Paradoxes of Contemporaneity VIEW HERE ⤡

Appendix

Spectres of Nicotine: Confessions of a DHFL Victim

Somewhere between Cigarettes after Sex and speed capitalism, I learnt to breathe exhaustion as eroticism.
The smoke became my medium of intimacy with despair.
This, I suppose, is what Byung-Chul Han calls the burnout society—a civilization high on its own fatigue, inhaling productivity as narcotic relief.
Each drag feels less like rebellion and more like respiration itself—the body’s slow collaboration with collapse.

I write these words in the faint blue haze of another cigarette—not to breathe, but to remind myself that I still possess lungs to lose.
The packet lies open beside a blister strip of lozenges, each sealed like a sacrament.
On its foil glitters the logo of the Conglomerate—a name that once promised safety, progress, even redemption.
It was their subsidiary, a financial phoenix rising from the ashes of a collapsed lender, that took the remainder of my life’s savings.
It is their pharmaceutical wing that now offers me a mint-flavoured path to salvation.
The same hand that swallowed my future now extends a lozenge for my lungs.

Each packet carries its own obituary—a memento mori we ritualistically ignore.
The grotesque lung on its cover has become our contemporary fleur du mal—a beauty of decay repackaged for consumption.
Baudelaire would have smiled; the commodity form perfects what the poet only dreamt of—turning death into design.

I tell myself that this is only coincidence—a trick of late capitalism’s circular economy.
Capitalism, I realise, is an ouroboros: it consumes its crisis, digests it into care, and sells the excreta as wellness.
Money circulates like nicotine in the bloodstream—burning, soothing, killing slowly.
When the markets crashed, I watched the digits vanish from my account screen, as though the numbers themselves had evaporated into smoke.
It was not merely insolvency; it was an initiation.
From that day, I became a different species of debtor—not to the bank, but to the system itself.
Every puff became a ledger entry; every lozenge, a dividend.
I inhale debts; I exhale compliance.

I had placed my faith in AAA-rated DHFL—a sanctuary, I thought, for small dreams and modest certainties. But the sanctuary became a slaughterhouse of savings. When the smoke cleared, Mr. Piramal’s empire stood upon the ashes of our deposits—an act of corporate consecration disguised as acquisition. They called it a resolution; we called it erasure. I watched the headlines celebrate the takeover as reform, while thousands like me disappeared into the footnotes of financial hygiene. My life’s earnings were not merely stolen; they were laundered into legitimacy. The expropriation was absolute—of money, of meaning, of breath. Anxiety became my daily dividend; insomnia, my only interest accrued. Therapy was a luxury for the solvent. We, the extinguished investors, could only turn to cheaper sedatives—nicotine, alcohol, the thin ecstasy of combustion. And now, in the cruel recursion of care, I find myself begging from the same hand that robbed me—writing to Mr. Piramal for samples of his lozenge, volunteering to be cured by the author of my ruin.

The irony was too exquisite to resist.
The company that inherited the ruins of my financial trust also manufactured the cure for my addiction.
They called it a “wellness revolution.”
I called it poetic recursion.
Nixit—the lozenge that promises freedom—sat in my palm like a coin of absolution.
Its packaging spoke of health, responsibility, the fresh air of self-discipline.
I placed it on my tongue, and it dissolved into a sweetness so pure it felt obscene.
There, in the chemical aftertaste, I could hear the hum of a machinery far larger than my own decay.
The same empire that swallowed my future now offers me salvation in mint.

Addiction, I realised, is the most refined form of governance.
It requires no police, no overseer, no decree.
It whispers: Choose your chain.
When I smoked, I was a criminal of pleasure; when I sucked the lozenge, I became a citizen of compliance.
Both acts fed the same economy of guilt and relief.
The only difference was visibility: the cigarette left a stain; the lozenge left only virtue.

In this risk society, ruin is productive.
The state taxes every puff, advertises every withdrawal, and profits from both relapse and repair.
Addiction is no longer a vice; it is infrastructure.
I am both sinner and statistic, patient and polluter, citizen and subject.
Our welfare state, in collusion with its corporate kin, perfects what I call the Paradox of Security: it sells us the risk it pretends to mitigate.
It taxes every puff, sponsors every cure, and calls the arrangement care.
The lozenge melts, dissolving not only nicotine but the boundaries between harm and governance.
Its chemical purity sanitises the violence of extraction, the theft of trust, the quiet erasure of futures.
To ingest it is to internalise power—to participate in one’s own regulation, to convert suffering into data points for quarterly reports.

I once wrote to the patriarch of the conglomerate—an appeal couched in politeness, half confession, half experiment.
“Dear Mr. Piramal,” I began, “please send me samples of Nixit. Test it on me. I am willing to become your data point.”
It was not hope but performance—a staged negotiation between corporate sin and spiritual detox.
They never replied.
Yet the lozenges arrived anyway, as if bureaucratic grace had materialised in mint.
Each one a contract: my obedience purchased with sweetness, my consent extracted without force.
The cure mirrored the crime.
The hand that consumed my life now disciplined my lungs.

At night, when the city softened into the amber light of advertisements, I thought of Keynes and his buried bottles.
How elegant his parable now seemed—an economy sustained by the ritual of unearthing empty promises.
Our modern Treasury does not bury bottles; it buries souls in the vaults of wellness and recovery.
Men like me dig them up, mistaking motion for meaning.
We call it employment, investment, therapy.
The wages of this labour are not measured in currency but in compliance.
Every lozenge purchased, every breath deferred, is another shovel of earth in Keynes’s metaphorical pit.

Some nights, the screen flashes with the Conglomerate’s new campaign:
“Healing India, One Habit at a Time.”
Their factories exhale like meditating giants, their shareholders toast to sustainability, and the nation’s newspapers print their philanthropy in bold relief.
Yet beneath these hymns of progress lies a necropolis of unacknowledged losses: financial ruin, ecological degradation, industrial toxicity, the quiet annihilation of agency.
The conglomerate is a pharmaco-state in miniature—it governs through care, profits through cure.
Every lozenge purchased reinforces the apparatus; every withdrawal deferred is a metric of success.
Wellness is a ledger; health, a KPI.
And perhaps they are merely following Lawrence Summers’ dictum: Let them eat pollution.
Create the crisis, then sell the cure.
Capitalism never quits—it only rebrands its carcinogens.

At the ports of Adani’s Mundra, heroin moves like capital—refined, concealed, and sanctified by logistics.
Addiction is no longer individual; it’s infrastructural.
The entire planet smokes now: burning forests, melting poles, cities exhaling in data and dust.
The welfare of the few is the nicotine of the many.

I have tried, I confess, to believe in redemption.
I have counted my inhalations like prayers, watched the nicotine patches bloom like bureaucratic stamps on my skin.
But the more I complied, the more spectral I became.
My body, once rebellious, learned to mimic the statistics of wellness.
The ghost of smoke still lingers in my lungs, refusing to leave.
Derrida would call this hauntology: the persistence of what should have vanished.
In my case, the spectre is not merely nicotine but the memory of defiance itself—the faint echo of the man who once believed that to inhale was to affirm existence against the smothering order of progress.
I sometimes imagine myself as K from No Smoking, trapped in the Prayogshala of self-regulation—punished not for smoking, but for imagining freedom from control.

Now Nietzsche’s terrible insight resonates: the internalisation of violence gives birth to the soul.
My rage, once externalised through fire and smoke, has turned inward, refining itself into guilt, into thought, into ghost.
The cigarette was my exorcism; the lozenge is my haunting.
Each time I place it on my tongue, I taste the transparency of my own submission.
Sweetness is the flavour of captivity perfected.

The doctors call it harm reduction.
I call it the pharmacology of forgiveness.
To reduce harm is not to remove it, but to domesticate it—to let it live politely within the boundaries of acceptability.
My dependency has become civilised.
No one glares at me on the street; no one coughs in protest.
I can die quietly now, under the banner of health.
Each lozenge is a ceremonial surrender; each inhalation, a whispered confession.
Knowledge, like nicotine, sharpens despair.
The conglomerate profits first from credit, then from cure, then from cremation.
Perhaps one day they will market an eco-friendly urn—biodegradable and mint-scented—promising to neutralise even the odour of death.

…

I am perceiving dhūmajyotiḥ in my cigarette—when I ignite it with a lighter and hold the enkindled flame between my “victory” fingers. The fire’s trace carried by the smoke creates a butterfly effect: thus, as I write this letter to Paramavaiṣṇava Piramal through the medium of cloud computing, I recall the immortal lines of Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta:

धूम-ज्योतिः सलिल-मरुतां सन्निपातः क्व मेघः
संदेशार्थाः क्व पटु-करणैः प्राणिभिः प्रापणीयाः॥ (५)

“Where is the cloud, a mere conflagration of smoke, fire, water, and wind—and where are meaningful messages that must be borne by sentient beings?” (5)

Today, the “cloud” is indeed a conflagration of these same elements—smoke, fire, water, and wind—but all are now poisoned. The atmosphere of our digital, pharmacological, financial, and ecological worlds is saturated with toxins. Thus, the sandeśa I send through this cloud to the crony Piramal carries not purity but contamination—an effluent of ecocidal capitalism. My message, therefore, is not the supplication of a Yakṣa to a pristine, superior, pañcabhūtātmaka cloud, but a refutation of that very act of begging. Kālidāsa foresaw this inversion when he wrote: याञ्च्चा मोघा वरमधिगुणे नाधमे लब्धकामा —“Cease what is futile; the ignoble never attains fulfillment.”

Thus, begging to a superrich tycoon like Piramal seems to be a futile effort… [The moron market-fundamentalist Hindutvavadins do not know the ethics of “sanatana” poetry!]

…

Sometimes I imagine an alternate experiment, a Keynesian inversion:
Let the Conglomerate fill old bottles with ashes instead of banknotes, bury them in the desert, and pay men like me to dig them up.
We would work tirelessly, not for wages, but for meaning—sifting through sand for the remains of our own lungs.
The act would stimulate demand, create employment, perhaps even GDP growth.
And when the ashes ran out, the economists would declare victory: the nation had finally quit smoking.
But the ashes never run out.
They regenerate, as if the earth itself were addicted to our combustion.
Climate reports speak of thresholds crossed, of irreversible heat, of oceans rising like debts unpaid.
I read them with the same fatal calm with which I light another cigarette.
If the planet is burning, why shouldn’t I?
To smoke now is to participate in a universal rite of self-immolation.
The match is my miniature apocalypse; the exhale, my rebellion against the fiction of recovery.

In dreams, he appears as a bull—Keynes’s animal spirit incarnate—charging through cremation grounds of failed investors, trampling our savings into dust.
I run, but the smoke keeps pace.
The bull’s breath is hot with philanthropy; his horns glisten with liquidity.
This is how capital dreams—through the delirium of its victims.

No lozenge can rescue me from this lucidity.
The more I know, the deeper I inhale.
The conglomerate will continue to profit—from our credit, our cures, and our cremations.
Perhaps someday, even our smoke will be taxed as carbon offset.

When I die, I want the smoke to rise unfiltered, to mingle with the city’s dust and data.
Let the Conglomerate’s satellites record it as a minor emission, a statistic within acceptable limits.
Some analyst will note that the curve of addiction has flattened, that public health has improved.
And somewhere in their quarterly report, amid the graphs and ratios, my absence will appear as progress.

I am not bitter.
I am haunted—by the ghost of my own compliance, by the sweetness that replaced defiance, by the spectral promise that freedom could be chewed, swallowed, and dissolved.
The soul, Nietzsche said, is born from the internalisation of cruelty.
Mine was born from its monetisation.

If you are reading this, consider it an appeal—not to the state, nor to the Conglomerate, but to you.
Every ghost demands an audience.
I crush the final lozenge between my teeth.
Its flavour is cool, antiseptic, indistinguishable from forgetting.
The smoke curls upward, carrying with it the only honesty left in my body.
What remains settles on the tongue of history—a faint, mint-flavoured obedience.

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