How does smoking cigarettes become an addiction?

It's not the taste of tobacco that makes you return to smoke one cigarette after another. Nicotine is a mood-altering drug, and very often people who smoke are looking for some type of respite from stress, social situations, or boredom. You may have started smoking because of the positive way it has been portrayed by, for example, family members, advertisements, the movie industry, or other smokers. However, smoking is more than a harmless social habit; nicotine impacts the chemical messengers of your brain responsible for appetite arousal or suppression, improved or decreased memory, and improved or decreased thought processes.

Whatever the initial impulse was that launched your smoking habit, chances are you had no idea it would soon become a chemical addiction as well as a social one. Whether you smoke after a meal, while having coffee, or taking a break from the world, or whether you are smoking simply to satisfy the urge to smoke, it's a combination of nicotine addiction and psychological need that keeps you smoking.

Smoking cigarettes, in fact, is as physiologically and psychologically addictive as smoking crack cocaine or injecting heroin. Some scientists think it's even more so. A recent report from the Surgeon General stated that nicotine was far more costly and deadly on a national scale than heroin, cocaine, or alcohol. And while it's a crime to buy, sell, or use cocaine or heroin, cigarettes are available at every corner market.

You may have heard that you can become addicted to crack after only a few puffs. What is less well known is that after smoking even a few cigarettes, you can become addicted to nicotine. Up to two thirds of the teenagers who smoke as few as two cigarettes become habitual smokers. The first cigarette-like the first puff of crack cocaine or the first injection of heroin usually makes you feel apprehensive, dizzy, and nauseous; you may even vomit. But when you ignore those warning signals and continue to smoke, then you quickly become addicted. When that happens, stopping smoking makes you feel bad.

It takes less time for the nicotine to reach your brain when you smoke than when you inject nicotine or other drugs intraveneously! When you inhale cigarette smoke, it reaches your brain within six seconds, twice as fast as if you injected heroin.

In a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Neal Benowitz wrote: "Many features of nicotine dependence resemble those seen in people dependent on other frequently abused drugs: heroin, alcohol, and cocaine. Cigarette smoking is a convenient and socially acceptable way to administer hundreds of doses of a psychoactive drug to oneself daily (four hundred puffs a day for a two-pack-per-day smoker)."