Sorry, only another anecdote to add. Apparently I’m one of the lucky few who can get away with it without becoming addicted. I tend to have a smoke when I’m around other people who are smoking, especially when we’re drinking. ie maybe 3 or 4 in a night, and then nothing for weeks. I’ve never once felt the need to smoke, its just something I enjoy doing socially. And I’ve been doing it for years with no problems except people complaining about me bumming cigarettes 
Gambling addicts
I’ve smoked once - an evening at uni when I drank a lot and smoked a packet of cigarillos as part of a group shtick I was into. I woke the next morning with a hangover and needing a drag, bad. Took about 3 days for the desire for another smoke to pass. I’ve never even risked another.
I suspect I have an addictive personality/physiology.
Si
Count me as another person who smokes strictly in a social setting. When I’m out at the bars and with my friends who smoke I may have one or two but then go for weeks without having even the slightest urge. I actually find them to be quite disgusting when I’m sober, which is good.
Apparently I’m the only one lucky enough to not get addicted amongst my friends, as a number of them started out as social smokers like I am, but then progressed to smoking a several a day while sober.
Ditto here. I went from about 20 a day over nearly 10 years, to cold turkey for a year. Then I decided to see if I could handle just a couple in social situations, and it turned out I could. I smoke perhaps a cigarette or two every couple of weeks. Sometimes I go months without a cigarette. However, given the information in this thread, it looks like I’m a statistical outlier, although there are several people from my dad’s side who are exactly like this. Perhaps it’s genetic.
Another strictly social smoker here. I can pretty much smoke or not smoke. If I do commit the folly of not discarding a leftover pack from a party/whatever, and finish it over the course of a few days, then it takes a bit of willpower not to go back and get another one. Some people will point at me and say “then you’re addicted after all”, but to me it’s just remembering that I like tobacco smoking, and then forgetting it before I get into it too much.
Personally I think that although tobacco is habit forming to some extent, the terror of tobacco addiction is in large part a manufactured phenomenon. After years of ignoring medical warnings, big tobacco finally woke up and realized that if doctors and the government are saying that tobacco is hopelessly addictive, it’s a goldmine of free advertising for customer retention. This is why you now see tobacco companies saying “Oh yeah, tobacco sure is addictive. You kids better not start, it’s only for grown-up adults, and if you adults are thinking of quitting, you may as well give it up because it’s harder than kicking heroin.” I could write tons more about that, but suffice it to say I’ve never found it difficult to control my consumption.
I remember reading in the Consumers Union’s Licit and Illicit Drugs, which was published in the early 70’s, that one survey found that 75% of people who smoked more than one cigarette in their life were still smoking daily 40 years later. (Now I have to go look it up to make sure 75% was the right figure.)
Suda:
This is me as well. I also got into the habit of having a pack around so I could smoke a cigarette occasionally when having a drink or taking a walk…I’d go through approximately one cigarette every week and a half that way.
Then I realized that cigarettes didn’t taste good anymore, so I stopped entirely.
I smoke a cig or two if available while smoking pot or drinking, but never smoke cigarettes without pot or drink, and could never smoke another cigarette, ever, with no problem. Pot on the other hand… 
By your own statement, you haven’t been addicted to nicotine. How can you reach this conclusion?
I finally kicked the addiction, after years of trying and wishing and hoping. Let me tell you, there is nothing “manufactured” about nicotine addiction. It’s a very powerful drug that’s tough to kick.
About 75% of the heroin addicts I’ve interviewed have said that smoking is harder to quit than heroin, just because the cravings are stronger.
By scrolling through this thread, it seems obvious that a number of people like myself can use nicotine and not get “addicted”. In fact the number of respondents suggests that this is not all that rare. If it were really that powerfully addictive, would so many people be able to pick it up and put it down at will? If it is really so powerfully addictive, why don’t we hear about people turning to armed robbery or prostitution to support their nicotine habit?
Persistent cravings, yes, I’ll give you that. But they are nothing like heroin withdrawal. I suspect a lot more people would be quitting if you didn’t have society constantly whispering in your ear “you’re trying to kick something stronger than heroin, quitting usually ends in failure, you can’t quit cold turkey, just 10 more Camel miles and you can get a hat.”
Because nicotine is cheap and available, and heroin isn’t. Also the physiological implications of heroin addiction are different to nicotine - heroin withdrawal can make people very sick, sometimes fatally so. That doesn’t change the experience of the cravings associated with withdrawal.
Quitting smoking is made harder by the easy and cheap availability (and continuing social acceptability) of cigarettes. You can walk into almost any store and get a pack, and no-one tries to arrest you for it.
Si
Another social/casual smoker here. If I average 1 a day over a month that’d be a lot.
Usually it’s more like 3 or 4 when I go out (sometimes I won’t light up all night, depends on the mood I’m in and who I’m out with) and then I might finish the pack over the course of a week - 10 days.
Then I’ll go about two weeks or a month before the next pack. Lately it’s been less, I haven’t had a square in about 5 weeks. Don’t miss em either. I only smoke for the buzz and I don’t really care for it unless I’m in a certain mood.
Even when I lived with two smokers I couldn’t pull off the morning smoke routine.
I also never liked smoking in cars where a lot of smokers seem to light up.
Sorry, must dispute that one. Opiate withdrawal is rarely health or life threatening, just very, very, very unpleasant.
On a side note, I’ve had addict patients who are now abstinent from heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine. Many of them say that giving up nicotine was the most difficult thing in the long run.
Me, I personally found nicotine more of a chronic bitch to give up than I did morphine.
Despite some unfounded assertions in this thread, nicotine is one of the dependence-inducing drugs out there, both physically and psychologically. There’s plenty of peer-reviewed literature to back that up.
Check out the thread’s title. It’s going to attract comment from those who are (or think they are) “Smoking but not addicted”.
“So many people” can’t pick it up and put it down at will. Check out the statistics mentioned in this thread.
Because smokes are readily available and not expensive. If it weren’t so addictive, do you think otherwise sane people would continue to spend money to use a known carcinogen that has other physical as well as social drawbacks?
Again, the percentage of people that can use and put down cigarettes is very tiny. Check out some valid sites before you generalize based on your own personal situation.
When cigarettes are extremely expensive and rare thanks to war, people DO resort to robbery and prostitution for their cigarettes. Fortunately for smokers everywhere, cigarettes are usually relatively cheap and easy to get, so people don’t have to.
You’ve confused “cravings” with “withdrawal.” Heroin withdrawal is more severe, but the cravings for nicotine last a lot longer.
The fact is, most people who have been addicted to both find nicotine more addictive, and most of the addiction experts I’ve spoken to have said that nicotine is pretty much the most addictive substance there is.
Damn - I don’t know how I came up with that - too many dodgy thrillers and films as a teenager, I expect.
Ignorance :smack: ed
Si
My quit date was March 12, and I’m clean since then. And I CAN BREATH NORMALLY AGAIN!!!
Are there simply individuals who do not display physical dependence on nicotine? I’m wondering because when I quit, I never experienced the sort of jitteriness, nervousness, and borderline insanity I was expecting, having seen other friends go (usually unsuccessfully) through the process of quitting. And, if so, is there a way of isolating that factor into some sort of stop-smoking drug?
I’m sure there are a number of factors that determine an individual’s response to nicotine withdrawal, including how long they’ve smoked, how much they smoked, their age, general health, etc.
As long as we’re sharing personal anecdotes, I started smoking when I was 17, and was up to about 2/3 of a pack a day within a short time. I had a boyfriend who didn’t smoke, but didn’t seem to care that I did. One day I opened my closet and what hit in the face by the horrifying stench of stale cigarette smoke that had permeated my clothing and I decided that if that was how I smelled to my boyfriend, then that was disgusting, and I quit right there and then on the spot.
At that point I had probably been smoking about 2+ year, maybe? I don’t recall having suffered any “symptoms” of withdrawal. The desire not to taste like a filthy ashtray outweighed the desire to light up a cigarette, and I just moved on with my life.
A year and a half later, we broke up, and a friend who had come over to comfort me, accidentally left behind a pack of cigarettes with 3 left in it. After he’d gone, and I’d found them laying there, I thought, “what the F***,” and lit one up. I honestly believed that I could have just one to take the edge off, and that would be the end of it, considering I’d been off the weed for such a long time. No go. Not only did I feel compelled to smoke all 3, but immediately began purchasing them again. This time the motivation not to smoke wasn’t stronger than the “so what?” factor, and at this point one might say I still wasn’t “addicted,” but rather made a choice to smoke. Fair enough.
However, over the next 2 decades, I tried (and failed!) all of the following methods to quit smoking: Alan Carr’s “Easy Way To Stop Smoking,” cold turkey, the patch, the gum, those weird plastic filter things, Welbutrin, making marks on my cigarettes and only smoking to those lines, eliminating places or situations I smoked in on a one-at-a-time basis, hypnosis, acupuncture, a 6-week stop smoking clinic run by a local hospital, and even The Great SDMB Smokeout where people “sponsored” every day I went without a cigarette.
Finally, at Midnight on July 4th, 2002, I gave it up for good, one last time, with the cold turkey method. It was a horrible, miserable experience, where I’d often find myself curled up in a ball and rocking back and forth, wailing and moaning in agony. The payoff this time is five years, one week, six days, 13 hours, 45 minutes and 51 seconds without having smoked 27,593 cigarettes, saving $4,828.88. Life saved: 13 weeks, 4 days, 19 hours, 25 minutes.
It was NOT easy, and there are still days when I think to myself, “Damn, a cigarette would feel awfully good right about now.”