I am a smoker. I know that tobacco is habit forming. But I believe that’s all it is. As I sit at the computer I smoke cig after cig. But if I sit down to watch a 2-3 hour movie I may not smoke a cig at all. Were I physically addicted would that be possible?
I used to be sure it was, now I believe it is not. I quit cold turkey one day after smoking for 20 years and suffered no measurable physical side effects.
consistent and observable symptoms proves that it is physically addictive.
novelty speeds up the passage of time…
sometimes i’ll smoke 5 cigarettes an hour, other times i’ll smoke none.
The nicotine molecule binds to specific receptor sites in the brain, bowel, and other tissue in the body. By binding, it changes the physiology of the cells it binds to.
With chronic use, nearly all receptors are bound most of the time, and the body actually reduces the total number of binding sites to compensate. This reduces the overall effect of a dose of nicotine. This phenomenon is known as downregulation. It is also how tolerance of the drug effect is achieved.
With prolonged nicotine cessation, the body actually produces more binding sites to compensate for the lack, and try to bond any stray unbound nicotine molecules. This effect is known as upregulation, and is caused by the withdrawal of the nicotine from the system.
These molecular changes, in association with measurable physiologic effects, are the hallmark of physical addiction: Tolerance and withdrawal. Cravings are common, but not universal in the setting of addiction.
I had quit smoking previously for as long as five years and returned to smoking under great stress.
I quit last July for seven months and never got completely past wanting a cigarette, so I began again in February. I stopped a month ago and it is still an hour to hour choice.
It is harder to stop thinking about smoking now than it was twenty years ago.
I started dipping snuff when I was a teenager to be more like the Old Man. Did it for years, there was nothing like a dip after a good meal. In 1996, I met a man that had a large portion of his jaw removed and it made me think. Quitting was the hardest thing I ever did, eight years later when I sit back to relax, sometimes I think, “If I had a can of Copehagen, I’d eat it with a spoon!!!”
consistent with the strictures against personal remarks, are you crazy?
I had a three pack a day habit three years after my first cigarette. I loved every one of those 60 cigarettes, and would have smoked more but that was all I could fit in the time available.
Like anyone who is not brain damaged, I began trying to quit about a month after that first cigarette, with the attendant results.
I was fortunate enough to find myself in the equivalent of betty ford for smokers, and I still cheated for four months, and walked two and a half miles each way to buy cigarettes at british tax sized prices.
I haven’t voluntarily smoked a cigarette for decades, and I still dream of them occasionally.
(think of the guy in Ghost who breaks the cigarette machine glass in the subway, but he can’t really smoke the cigarettes…)
Nicotine is a fabulous drug for populations with a life expectancy of about 50, ie, the way things were in 1900. It does great things for your brain. Hard on the rest of you.