What is the Federation representative smoking?

Question

In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the Federation representative on Nimbus III, St. John Talbot, appears to be smoking something.

The Memory Alpha article I linked above seems to indicate that this character was intended to be portrayed sort of as a loser (in retrospect, I imagine him as what John Belushi would have looked like if he had made it past age 35), so it makes sense that he has some bad habits, but is it ever explained exactly what he is smoking in-universe? Is it tobacco? marijuana? Andorian gray weed? ethereal love flowers of Varlax 9? My original impression of watching this as a child was that he was simply smoking a regular tobacco cigarette, but that struck me as odd since smoking was just not something you saw in Star Trek media. I also note that tobacco is rarely mentioned anywhere else in Star Trek, and when it is mentioned in DS9's Little Green Men, it is treated as something thoroughly antiquated and possibly banned.

Yes, from an out-of-universe perspective, it is almost certain that the actor here is smoking a regular cigarette that was purchased from the shop around the corner to the studio. I'm asking whether there is an in-universe explanation for what he is smoking.

Answer 1

According to Memory Alpha, an early draft of the script has it as a

'self-lighting cigarette".

History does not record whether this so-called cigarette contains Earth tobacco, Denebian Pipeweed or whatever.

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As a fun bit of trivia, Shatner claims that having developed the cigarette prop to match the script they ended up using a real cigarette on the day, so the out-of-universe answer is that this is probably a Morley Marlboro.

William Shatner, in an interview on E! Entertainment Television, said that David Warner's character was going to have a prop that consisted of a self-lighting cigarette. According to Shatner, they simply forgot to use this in one of the scenes, even though the prop actually worked, and cost thousands of dollars.