Smoking Addiction

Nicotine substance is found in tobacco that causes addiction. It is the drug in tobacco that causes addiction. It is absorbed and enters the bloodstream, through the lungs when smoke is inhaled, and through the lining of the mouth when tobacco is chewed or used as oral snuff or for non-inhaled pipe and cigar smoking. It is also absorbed through the nose from nasal snuff, which was popular in the 18th century.

Nicotine is a psychoactive drug with stimulant effects on the electrical activity of the brain. It also has calming effects, especially at times of stress, as well as effects on hormonal and other systems throughout the body. Although its subjective effects are less dramatic and obvious than those of some other addictive drugs, smoking doses of nicotine causes activation of “pleasure centers” in the brain, which may explain the pleasure, and addictiveness of smoking.

Smokers develop tolerance to nicotine and can take higher doses without feeling sick than when they first started smoking without any of the unpleasant effects of cigarette withdrawal symptoms that occur after stopping a drug. Smoking withdrawal may include anxiety, irritability, and insomnia, and dizziness, difficulty in concentrating, fatigue, depression, and constipation. These are due to lack of nicotine and are reversed or alleviated by nicotine replacement (for example, nicotine chewing gum or the nicotine patch).

As with other addictions, it is difficult to give up smoking, and without help most smokers fail despite trying many times. Even after stopping successfully for a while, most relapse within 2 to 3 months. More alarming perhaps than the strength of the addiction is the ease with which it develops. Although teenagers often start smoking for psychosocial reasons, the effects of nicotine soon gain control.

Studies show that tobacco use usually begins in early adolescence and those who begin smoking at an early age are more likely to develop severe nicotine addiction than those who start later. Each day, more than 4,800 adolescents smoke their first cigarette, and 42 percent of them go on to become regular smokers.

Smoking is a physical addiction that produces a “chain reaction” in the body:

• Nicotine acts on receptors normally used by one of the main neurotransmitters Chemicals in the brain that carry information between nerve cells in the brain and nervous system. Neurotransmitters are the “chemical messengers” released by nerve cells to communicate with other cells by altering their electrical activity.
• The body responds to nicotine at these receptors as if it was the natural transmitter and the activity and physiological functions of many brain systems are altered.
• With repeated nicotine dosage the body adapts to what it regards as extra acetylcholine a neurotransmitter, or chemical in the brain that carries information between nerve cells. In an attempt to restore normal function. One way it does this is to grow more acetylcholine receptors.

Thus nicotine induces structural as well as functional changes in the brain of smokers. When nicotine is suddenly withdrawn, physiological functions in the brain and other parts of the body are disturbed. This is known as withdrawal syndrome. It takes time for the body to readjust to functioning normally without nicotine.

In all drug addictions, psychosocial factors determine the initial exposures. Addiction may subsequently develop if the drug has pharmacological effects that people like or find rewarding. Have you tried to cut down your smoking but not been able to or are you worried about addiction, look no further, we are a counseling service, based in the UK ready to help you free.

It is essentially a learning process:

• Learning when, where, and how to take the drug to get the most rewarding effects. The taste, smell, visual stimuli, handling, and other movements that are closely associated with the rewarding pharmacological effects gradually become rewarding themselves. This is known as conditioning.
• The situations and activities associated with smoking, together with the smoker’s mood and psychological state at the time, also become linked with its rewards and with the relief of withdrawal. They come to serve as signals or triggers for the urge or craving for nicotine’s effects (for example, after meals, with coffee or alcohol, when meeting people, working, talking on the phone, and when anxious, angry, celebrating, or having a well-earned break, and so on).
• Triggers that bring on the urge to smoke are numerous because smoking can take place in so many situations.

Most smokers absorb sufficient nicotine to obtain pharmacological effects. The modern cigarette is a highly effective device for getting nicotine to the brain.

• The smoke is mild enough to be inhaled deeply into the lungs. Due to the large surface area of the lungs, nicotine is absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream and reaches the brain within 7 seconds – more rapidly than after an intravenous injection.
• In this way the smoker gets a small intravenous-like shot of nicotine after each inhaled puff: 20 cigarettes a day, each puffed 10 times, comes to more than 70,000 “shots” per year.

On average, smokers take about 1 milligram nicotine this is the substance found in tobacco that causes addiction from each cigarette. Although some take 2 milligrams or more while others are satisfied with 0.5 milligrams or less. By altering puff-rate, puff-size and amount of inhalation, smokers unconsciously regulate their nicotine intake to their individually preferred levels, which are kept fairly constant from one day to the next.

The nicotine yields of the cigarettes make little difference. By puffing harder, inhaling more deeply, and smoking down to the tip, smokers can get 2 milligrams of nicotine or more from a low-yield cigarette with an official machine-smoked yield of only 0.6 milligrams. Cigarette smokers literally do have fingertip control over the delivery of nicotine to their brain.

• Smoking-related illnesses cause about 440,000 deaths each year.
• Smoking is responsible for 87 percent of lung cancers and also causes most cases of emphysema an enlargement and destruction of the tiny air sacs in the lungs known as alveoli. And chronic bronchitis is an inflammation of airways in the lungs known as bronchi, usually caused by an infection or by smoking.
• Tobacco use, especially smoking, is the number one cause of preventable disease and death.
• Cigarettes contain at least 43 distinct cancer-causing chemicals.
• Nicotine is as highly addictive as heroin and cocaine.
• Approximately 80 percent of adult smokers started smoking before age 18.
• Most people try to quit smoking several times before they’re successful. Only 2.5 percent of smokers successfully quit each year.
• The benefits of quitting smoking begin to occur within 20 minutes of the last cigarette smoked.
• A person who stops smoking will have the same risk of heart disease and death 15 years after quitting as someone who has never smoked.
• Secondhand smoke is known to cause cancer and is responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths in nonsmokers each year.