<p>People start using cigarettes as a response to anything.
If they are angry, stressed, bored, hungry, tired, sad, excited…
Since Idad discounted the tobacco companies increasing the nicotine in cigarettes beyond what naturally was present in the tobacco, I took that to mean he did not consider the amount of the drug present to influence the rate of addiction.</p>
<p>But psychological addiction is very real, I expect some people are even addicted to marijuana.</p>
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<p>There are many who argue this is possible. My best friend, however, broke up with a long term boyfriend because she said he was addicted to marijuana and she finally just couldn’t tolerate it anymore.</p>
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<p>I suspect that the manipulation of nicotine levels is done more for manufacturing product consistency. Each nicotine junkie expects a specific dose from their brand. It is, actually, the specific dose that most differentiates one brand from another. </p>
<p>The tobacco companies were completely on-board with all the low tar/low nicotine cigarettes. They knew, just like the food companies, that offering a fake “health claim” would be effective marketing. They also knew that nicotine junkies would just cover the holes in the filter (that allowed the low measured tar/nicotine) when they actually injected… er, smoked… the nicotine.</p>
<p>All of the liquid nicotine the tobacco companies produce is made from tobacco leaves. It’s no different than processed food manufacturing. Think orange juice concentrate. They put the nicotine in their own products and they sell it to the pharma companies for manufacturing nicotine chewing gum. In fact, there is a tacit agreement that pharma won’t hammer smoking directly in their marketing of nicotine products. Instead, both industries market against the notion that QUITTING smoking is an impossible task that will turn you into a monster. Why fight each other? They are, after all, partners in exactly the same business. Drug addicts are very reliable customers! An ex-junkie is an ex-customer to both of them.</p>
<p>For example, Obama is no less of a nicotine industry customer today than when he switched products from cigarettes to gum eight years ago. Gum. Cigarettes, Patches. Cigars, Hookah. Snuff. Pouches. Chaw. E-cigs. It’s all the same product – nicotine. Take the nicotine out of it and nobody every buys a second pack.</p>
<p>One of my relatives was engaged to a social smoker. He tried several times to quit (she is VERY sensitive to tobacco scent and fumes). He was eventually successful, but it took a LONG time and a lot of nicotine replacement–I believe gum or lozenges before he was finally able to fully quit. It was tough socially until all his buddies quit with him, as it was what they did when “hanging out.” He said what really helped him was all the clean air legislation in our state, which made smoking more and more inconvenient–you had to go farther and farther from indoors to be permitted tobacco.</p>
<p>The technical term for what Idad described is conditioned tolerance and withdrawal. It is straight-up classical conditioning - think Pavlov’s dogs. The psychological/biological distinction is false here - once the salivation response is conditioned to the bell, you could say the food is all in the dog’s head but the biological salivation response is just as real. Smokers generally have more conditioned stimuli because they smoke in more places, although heroin addicts’ responses might be stronger. The absence of cues that elicit a conditioned tolerance response - for example, when a heroin addict uses in a new environment - can result in a drug overdose even when the addict takes the same usual amount of drug.</p>
<p>One of the perhaps surprising things is that the actual physical withdrawal from nicotine is fairly mild. It’s completely out of your system in three days and the brain receptors are resensitized in two to four weeks. It’s typically about like a few days of the flu. </p>
<p>After that, it’s just a matter of working through each of the learned triggers as they occur, something that usually takes a full calendar year for all the change of season and holiday triggers. The easy ones are wiped clean after just one time without smoking. The really ingrained ones take repeated times. Probably the worst for me was the trigger of cooking in the kitchen, stepping out the patio door for a cigarette – massively ingrained since I hadn’t smoke in the house for years.That took time after time after time after time. It really helps to be able to understand what is happening and why so that you can embrace it as a necessary step, rather than letting it freak you out.</p>