When so many people want to quit, what keeps them smoking?
- Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addictive
- Nicotine is the drug in tobacco that causes addiction
How do people get addicted?
Nicotine occurs naturally in the tobacco plant. Nicotine causes changes in the brain. The effect of nicotine is less dramatic than that of many other drugs. Despite this, nicotine addiction is as strong or even stronger than heroin or cocaine addiction.
In large amounts nicotine is poisonous and first time smokers often feel sick and dizzy as a result. After a while the body gets used to nicotine, reducing its effect, so the smoker may smoke more.
New smokers start to associate situations or moods with smoking. They may become used to having a cigarette when they are at a party or feeling depressed. Before too long they organise their day around smoking and feel anxious if they can't smoke. Nicotine reinforces and strengthens the desire to smoke and causes users to keep on smoking.
What is nicotine addiction like?
Unlike other legal drugs, such as alcohol, most users of tobacco are addicted to nicotine.
Smokers are physically dependent on nicotine. Most smokers will only go an hour or two without smoking. A highly dependant smoker is one who smokes within half an hour of waking up, ranks the first cigarette as the most important of the day and smokes more than 25 a day.
Even after long periods of not smoking, most smokers who want to have an occasional cigarette quickly return to the previous levels of smoking.
It is used despite harmful effects. For example, only half of smokers who suffer a heart attack manage to quit, despite advice from their doctor. One in two of all regular smokers will die as a result of their habit.
References
- US Department of Health and Human Services. The Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction. A report of the Surgeon General. Rockville, Maryland: Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control, Center for Health Promotion and Education, Office in Smoking and Health, 1988.
- Lynch B, Bonnie R (Eds). Growing Up Tobacco Free; Preventing nicotine addiction in children and youth. Committee on Preventing Nicotine Addiction in Children and Youth, Division of Biobehavioural Sciences and Mental Disorders, Institute of Medicine, National Academy Press, Washington DC, 1994.
- Borland R. Population estimates of occasional smoking among self-described smokers and non-smokers in Victoria, Australia. Tobacco Control 1994;3:37-40.
- Gourlay SG, McNeil JJ. Anti-smoking products. Med J Aust 1990;153:699-707.
- Doll R, Peto R, Wheatley K, Gray R, Sutherland I. Mortality in relation to smoking: 40 years' observations on male British doctors. BMJ 1994;309:901-11.