The occasional cigarette might bring pleasure to people. But typical cigarette smoking has the opposite effect.
A tobacco addiction works by screwing with your brain's ability to perceive pleasure. The result is that most cigarette smokers do not get pleasure added to their lives by tobacco. It's just that they need to keep smoking just to keep getting themselves back up to feeling normal.
It's not chemical nicotine that people abhor. It's nicotine specifically in conjunction with a bunch of awful toxins that we collectively call "tobacco."
Similarly, people are much more against caffeine in the form of sugary energy drinks than caffeine in the form of tea, because energy drinks are bad for you while tea is moderately good for you on the whole.
Which raises the question of why so many of these people are vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes, which are essentially just a mechanism for delivering nicotine with some inert vapor.
> Which raises the question of why so many of these people are vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes
I'm a smoker myself (quit a few times, for periods up to a year, I will quit again, but damn that addiction is going to chase me for life).
I'm not "vehemently" opposed to e-cigs, but I don't like them either. When they first appeared, I saw a few friends switch to e-cigs, and considered perhaps getting one for myself. But after a week or two, every single one of them "cheated" and occasionally smoked a real cigarette, citing that it just wasn't really the same. By now, nearly all of them have switched back to smoking real cigarettes.
Then I realized, e-cigs just keep the cravings and addiction going. I knew I wanted to quit, and quit for real. For me personally, from experience, only the first week or so of quitting is the hardest, after that the craving subsides (for some people this takes longer). Then comes the period where you're really happy you're no longer a smoker, feel cleaner, smell more things (not always good, but very worth it, and sign of progress). Then comes the long stretch where you just need to never, ever smoke a cigarette again, for the rest of your life. Because even just smoking one, after half a year, weakens that resolve, and I should consider myself "on notice" for at least a couple of weeks, because the threshold for smoking another one becomes so much lower, and before you know I'm back at step 0. It's (for me) not particularly hard on the day-by-day basis, it's the part that you can't ever give in to it again, for the rest of your life, that makes it hard to keep up.
That's why I don't like e-cigs. For someone who is really addicted, it just keeps the door open to fall back to regular cigarettes any time, because you don't do anything about the habit and nicotine addiction, you just make it less unhealthy as long as you stick to e-cigs only.
The only positive thing I have gained from smoking, is learning what addiction really means, therefore understanding other people's addictions better, and decidedly staying away from other addictive substances.
One of the more interesting bits of trivia about nicotine and caffeine is it is the mode of delivery that makes nicotine so addictive. If you smoked caffeine it would be as addictive as nicotine. Given we now have vaping it should be possible to smoke caffeine - I haven’t looked, but I would not be surprised if someone out there is selling smokable caffeine.
Sure - the harm is is going to be greater when you add in all the other nasty compounds in tobacco smoke.
It in not only smoke that is harmful as people who chew tobacco suffer an increase in mouth cancer. While vaping should have a lower risk than smoking, it is not risk free. Since it is so new we won’t know for sometime how dangerous it is.
The problem with cigarettes is not just that they kill you a little bit sooner, but that they cause many years of life of reduced quality. There's a bunch of stuff like COPD or stroke that don't always kill smokers but do make their lives much less pleasant.
I'm not sure if you were making a distinction between vaping and smoking, but I checked and there is indeed vapeable caffeine (plus taurine and flavoring.) I feel weird dropping a link, but search "Energy Shisha" if you're interested.
Just a small counterpoint, I'm a huge cigarette hater and I love the fact that e-cigarettes are catching on. They still smell crappy and suck to be around, but they're nowhere near as unpleasant and vomit-inducing as cigarettes are. Addicts are going to be addicts; for my sake, I'd much rather have them vaping than smoking.
I have no issue with the nicotine. I have issues with the acetone, ammonia, arsenic, butane, cadmium, formaldehyde, lead, etc.
When caffeine contains the above and my act of consumption means others also inhale those chemicals (SHS) then I'll care about caffeine as much as I do tobacco smoke.
It's quite clear to me that I'm addicted to caffeine. If it had carcinogenic effects even beginning to approach those of cigarettes, I would quit immediately. I'm pretty sure a lot of people have a similar relationship with caffeine.
This statement makes no sense. Besides the fact that literally everything works by manipulating your brain, no one has ever measured a quantum of pleasure, so it can't be “added” to your brain like a unit of flour.
Actually, his explanation is basically how addiction ends up working on the brain. Smoking becomes the new normal, so not smoking makes you go to an extremely bad mood.
This is where the whole "cold turkey" thing comes from and why quitting is so difficult for so many people
I smoke about once every month or two. Sometimes a cigarette, sometimes a cigar and sometimes in the winter a pipe. If it is as addictive as they claim, it has yet to show. I have no feeling of "needing" to smoke. I do it because it is a very enjoyable experience.
I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug, just as some people are addicted to gambling or facebook or video games. Some people just get addicted to anything that once gave them a positive emotion.
Are you challenging the notion that cigarettes are addictive? I can't imagine this was your point. If you would like, I will provide evidence citing that cigarettes are, in fact, very addictive.
Edit: well you edited your comment twice since my reply, so I'll be right back with some information for you.
I vaped unflavored nicotine for about 2 years. Intermittent at first, heavy daily use during the second year, equivalent to a pack of cigarettes per day or more. I quit because enjoyment decreased to the point where it was no longer worth the hassle.
I experienced zero addiction for the first three months, and even after the full two years addiction was mild. I reduced my dose gradually over two weeks. There were no physical withdrawal symptoms, and only minor craving which went away after a few months abstinence. I'm no expert on heroin addiction, but I find it hard to believe it's equal to nicotine. Perhaps whole tobacco would be different.
No, the difference is, at least from what I've seen (am not sure if the research supports this, but it would be interesting if it did not), some people (like myself) seem to be more susceptible to smoking addiction than others. I know quite a few people who have no trouble smoking intermittently, with months in between, and then quitting with hardly any effort. Maybe they just have more resolve or willpower, but I've seen them smoke more than enough to "catch" the addiction like I did, then stop, never really getting stuck into a daily habit. Yes I'm jealous :) On the other hand, I don't want to smoke just "occasionally" either, I just want to quit.
> I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug
It springs from the interaction between the two; different drugs have different addictive qualities, different people have different susceptibilities to those addictive qualities. Individual extreme outliers -- in both the more easily addicted and less easily addicted directions -- for any particular drug are to be expected, and don't disprove the general feature.
> I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug
The only people who claim that are ones who haven't been addicted to cigarettes :-)
If you're only smoking once a month, the nicotine isn't building up enough to make withdrawal a problem. I'm not even sure there's enough nicotine in one cigarette that you would notice any withdrawal symptoms. And in a month, the nicotine from the previous cigarette is long gone.
Besides that, the hardest part of quitting is getting rid of the habits around it, and if you're only smoking once a month, you're not forming any habits. Try smoking a cigarette with your coffee first thing every morning for 6 months, and see if you still believe it's not addictive :-/
That said, I'm sure the strength of the effect can vary from person to person.
Smoke a pack of cigarettes over the course of a few weeks, and then pay close attention to your body the first week you stop. You WILL crave cigarettes during that week. That is the feeling of physiological dependence. The pack of cigarettes has affected your body in ways you can't control. It isn't a "personality" thing (like other addictions which are purely psychological). Although, obviously, people will react differently to this subsequent craving, and will have different levels of strength in resisting it, if they desire to do so.
I do agree with you that the occasional cigarette can be very pleasurable.
Well, you can control it by not smoking for a week or so. Admittedly I don't know of any proper studies, but I have always heard rules of thumb around 1 to 2 weeks. For myself it was about a week, and not really that bad of a week compared to what I expected.
A tobacco addiction works by screwing with your brain's ability to perceive pleasure. The result is that most cigarette smokers do not get pleasure added to their lives by tobacco. It's just that they need to keep smoking just to keep getting themselves back up to feeling normal.