Nicotine Addiction Quotes

Hey, I stopped smoking cigarettes. Isn't that something? I'm on to cigars now. I'm on to a five-year plan. I eliminated cigarettes, then I go to cigars, then I go to pipes, then I go to chewing tobacco, then I'm on to that nicotine gum

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

It has always been more about a relapse than it is about quitting. I have met hundreds of people who quit cigarettes every day. But do they succeed at it? No, they just quit every day.

Nicotine addicted, persecuted, her day is a maddening circle of tea and biscuits, baking, smoking, the necessary fiction of the housewife.

Phones are this generation's cigarettes. It's an addiction, dude, but it's not about communication, just like it's not about nicotine. It's about holding something in your hand that makes you feel important. It's about props. Drama. I'm just saying.

His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.

it's hard to find people who actually like smoking. Some are hooked; others try forcefully until they are hooked as well.

Smoking is an outward signal of inner turmoil or conflict and most smoking has less to do with nicotine addiction and more to do with the need for reassurance.

Nicotine, in fact, is an unusual drug because it does very little except trigger compulsive use. According to researcher Roland R. Griffiths, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “When you give people nicotine for the first time, most people don’t like it. It’s different from many other addictive drugs, for which most people say they enjoy the first experience and would try it again.” Nicotine doesn’t make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. It’s the perfect circle. The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.

The need for nicotine is stronger than the rules of a men.

Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the “reward center”—technically, the nucleus accumbens—as do nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Addiction

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid fifties and I was given Ritalin and Dexedrine. These are stimulant medications. They elevate the level of a chemical called dopamine in the brain. And dopamine is the motivation chemical, so when you are more motivated you pay attention. Your mind won't be all over the place. So we elevate dopamine levels with stimulant drugs like Ritalin, Aderall, Dexedrine and so on. But what else elevates Dopamine levels? Well, all other stimulants do. What other stimulants? Cocaine, crystal meth, caffeine, nicotine, which is to say that a significant minority of people that use stimulants, illicit stimulants, you know what they are actually doing? They're self-medicating their ADHD or their depression or their anxiety. So on one level (and we have to go deeper that that), but on one level addictions are about self-medications. If you look at alcoholics in one study, 40% of male adult alcoholics met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD? Why? Because alcohol soothes the hyperactive brain. Cannabis does the same thing. And in studies of stimulant addicts, about 30% had ADHD prior to their drug use. What else do people self-medicate? Someone mentioned depression. So, if you have been treated for depression, as I have been, and you were given a SSRI medication, these medications elevate the level of another brain chemical called serotonin, which is implicated in mood regulation. What else elevates serotonin levels temporarily in the brain? Cocaine does. People use cocaine to self-medicate depression. People use alcohol, cannabis and opiates to self-medicate anxiety. Incidentally people also use gambling or shopping to self-medicate because these activities also elevate dopamine levels in the brain. There is no difference between one addiction and the other. They're just different targets, but the brain systems that are involved and the target chemicals are the same, no matter what the addiction. So people self-medicate anxiety, depression. People self-medicate bipolar disorder with alcohol. People self-medicate Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. So, one way to understand addictions is that they're self-medicating. And that's important to understand because if you are working with people who are addicted it is really important to know what's going on in their lives and why are they doing this. So apart from the level of comfort and pain relief, there's usually something diagnosible that's there at the same time. And you have to pay attention to that. At least you have to talk about it.

My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured... We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine...because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for this structuring might be "self medication"; another might be "coping".

when you eat sugar, according to research by Bartley Hoebel of Princeton University, it triggers a response in the same part of the brain—known as the “reward center”—that is targeted by cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive substances.

Nicotine gum, for example, releases only 2–4 mg over the course of twenty to thirty minutes, so you don’t get an addictive, euphoric rush from it, but you still get nicotine’s benefits. The nicotine spray I prefer delivers a 1 mg dose—about 5 percent of the amount in a cigarette.

I was just a little buckaroo when they first invited me to Marlboro Country. I loved being a cowboy; and smoking seemed to fit right in with riding, roping and wrangling. But once I got to where the Flavor was, it would take me four decades to find a trail out of Nicotine Canyon. I finally ran out of reasons to smoke...when I ran out of air...

Under conditions of extreme deprivation people will continue to grow crops that promise economic relief, and they will continue to trade in those crops and their products. The ultimate beneficiaries are neither the impoverished Afghan or Columbian peasant nor the street-corner pusher in the U.S. ghetto or on Vancouver’s skid row. The illegality of mind-altering substances enriches drug cartels, crime syndicates, and their corrupt enablers among politicians, government officials, judges, lawyers, and police officers around the world. If one set out deliberately to fashion a legal system designed to maximize and sustain the wealth of international drug criminals and their abettors, one could never dream up anything to improve upon the present one—except, perhaps, to add tobacco to the list of contraband substances. That way the traffickers and their allies could profit even more, although it’s unimaginable that their legally respectable counterparts—tax-hungry governments and the nicotine pushers in tobacco company boardrooms—would ever allow that to happen.

As University of California professor Stanton Glantz and his colleagues have shown in their exhaustive reading of tobacco industry documents, by the early 1960s the industry’s own scientists had concluded not only that smoking caused cancer, but also that nicotine was addictive (a conclusion that mainstream scientists came to only in the 1980s, and the industry would continue to deny well into the 1990s).58

My vocation in life is to wonder about at the nature of the universe. This leads me into philosophy, psychology, religion, and mysticism, not only as subjects to be discussed but also as things to be experienced, and thus I make an at least tacit claim to be a philosopher and a mystic. Some people, therefore, expect me to be their guru or messiah or exemplar, and are extremely disconcerted when they discover my “wayward spirit” or element of irreducible rascality, and say to their friends, “How could he possibly be a genuine mystic and be so addicted to nicotine and alcohol?” Or have occasional shudders of anxiety? Or be sexually interested in women? Or lack enthusiasm for physical exercise? Or have any need for money? Such people have in mind an idealized vision of the mystic as a person wholly free from fear and attachment, who sees within and without, and on all sides, only the translucent forms of a single divine energy which is everlasting love and delight, as which and from which he effortlessly radiates peace, charity, and joy. What an enviable situation! We, too, would like to be one of those, but as we start to meditate and look into ourselves we find mostly a quaking and palpitating mess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention, and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery. So we despise that mess, and look for ways of controlling it and putting “how the true mystic feels” in its place, not realizing that this ambition is simply one of the lusts of the quaking mess, and that this, in turn, is a natural form of the universe like rain and frost, slugs and snails, flies and disease. When the “true mystic” sees flies and disease as translucent forms of the divine, that does not abolish them. I—making no hard-and-fast distinction between inner and outer experience—see my quaking mess as a form of the divine, and that doesn’t abolish it either. But at least I can live with it.

To add to the built-in paradox of the for-profit healthcare system, money made from treating cancer aligns a little too comfortably with the profits made from causing cancer. In the FDA’s first attempt to bring cigarettes under their regulatory purview as a drug (nicotine) delivery device, the Supreme Court in 2000 weighed economic and physical health and, in the final opinion, explicitly noted that the tobacco industry played too important a role in the U.S. economy to be regulated by the FDA—even as it recognized that nicotine was an addictive drug whose dose tobacco companies intentionally manipulated.

My mother smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Before she smoked her first cigarette, she was free to choose whether or not she would smoke. After awhile, her freedom reverted to Satan—so it would seem. The choice was no longer hers—so it would seem. Her mind and body were attacked with nicotine cravings that got so bad she would sometimes sacavage through garbage cans for butts when she’d run short on full cigarettes. I watched, baffled at how something so small and so disgusting to me could have such power over my mother. That’s the thing about addiction—it binds us one choice at a time. That’s also the good news about addition—you can unravel the hold it has on you—one choice at a time.

Here's why I'm afraid of life after death: What if there is no nicotine gum? I must have access to my nicotine gum at all times. I kiss with the gum. I sleep with the gum. Anything you can do without the gum I must do with the gum. I am chewing the gum right now. I chew the gum, because I don’t trust the universe to fill me up on its own. I can’t count on the universe to sate my many holes: physical, emotional, spiritual. So I take matters into my own hands. I give myself little “doggy treats” for being alive. Each time I unwrap a new piece of nicotine gum and put it in my mouth (roughly every thirty minutes), I generate a sense of synthetic hope and potentiality. I am self-soothing. I am “being my own mommy.” I am saying, Here you go, my darling. I know life hurts. I know reality is itchy. But open your mouth. A fresh chance at happiness has arrived! I’ve been chewing nicotine gum for twelve years. I haven’t had a cigarette in ten years. So you might say the gum works, except now I have a gum problem. I am so addicted to the gum that I have to order it from special “dealers” in bulk on eBay. I get gum on all the bedding. There are many reasons why I don’t think I will have children, but the necessity of getting off the gum during pregnancy is one of them. When it comes down to anything vs. the gum, I always choose the gum. Now let me just say, before we go any further, that if you’re thinking of using nicotine gum to quit smoking you should not let my experience scare you. I am the addict’s addict. Everything I touch turns to dopamine. I can even turn people into dopamine (ask me how!).

Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS. We recognize that people will continue to have sex for nonreproductive reasons despite the laws and mores. Therefore, we try to make sexual practices as safe as possible in order to minimize the spread of the AIDS viruses. In a similar way, we continually try to make our drinking water, foods, and even our pharmaceutical medicines safer. The ubiquity of chemical intoxicants in our lives is undeniable evidence of the continuing universal need for safer medicines with such applications. While use may not always be for an approved medical purpose, or prudent, or even legal, it is fulfilling the relentless drive we all have to change the way we feel, to alter our behavior and consciousness, and, yes, to intoxicate ourselves. We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition. Then we must make them as safe and risk free and as healthy as possible. Dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death. Imagine an alcohol-type substance that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, impaired driving, or workplace problems. Would you care to inhale a perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air? How would you like a pain-killer as effective as morphine but safer than aspirin, a mood enhancer that dissolves on your tongue and is more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine, a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more relaxing than a martini, or a safe sleeping pill that allows you to choose to dream or not? Perhaps you would like to munch on a user friendly hallucinogen that is as brief and benign as a good movie? This is not science fiction. As described in the following pages, there are such intoxicants available right now that are far safer than the ones we currently use. If smokers can switch from tobacco cigarettes to nicotine gum, why can’t crack users chew a cocaine gum that has already been tested on animals and found to be relatively safe? Even safer substances may be just around the corner. But we must begin by recognizing that there is a legitimate place in our society for intoxication. Then we must join together in building new, perfectly safe intoxicants for a world that will be ready to discard the old ones like the junk they really are. This book is your guide to that future. It is a field guide to that silent spring of intoxicants and all the animals and peoples who have sipped its waters. We can no more stop the flow than we can prevent ourselves from drinking. But, by cleaning up the waters we can leave the morass that has been the endless war on drugs and step onto the shores of a healthy tomorrow. Use this book to find the way.

What, then, is addiction? In the words of a consensus statement by addiction experts in 2001, addiction is a “chronic neurobiological disease… characterized by behaviors that include one or more of the following: impaired control over drug use, compulsive use, continued use despite harm, and craving.” The key features of substance addiction are the use of drugs or alcohol despite negative consequences, and relapse. I’ve heard some people shrug off their addictive tendencies by saying, for example, “I can’t be an alcoholic. I don’t drink that much…” or “I only drink at certain times.” The issue is not the quantity or even the frequency, but the impact. “An addict continues to use a drug when evidence strongly demonstrates the drug is doing significant harm…. If users show the pattern of preoccupation and compulsive use repeatedly over time with relapse, addiction can be identified.” Helpful as such definitions are, we have to take a broader view to understand addiction fully. There is a fundamental addiction process that can express itself in many ways, through many different habits. The use of substances like heroin, cocaine, nicotine and alcohol are only the most obvious examples, the most laden with the risk of physiological and medical consequences. Many behavioural, nonsubstance addictions can also be highly destructive to physical health, psychological balance, and personal and social relationships. Addiction is any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves: 1. compulsive engagement with the behaviour, a preoccupation with it; 2. impaired control over the behaviour; 3. persistence or relapse, despite evidence of harm; and 4. dissatisfaction, irritability or intense craving when the object — be it a drug, activity or other goal — is not immediately available. Compulsion, impaired control, persistence, irritability, relapse and craving — these are the hallmarks of addiction — any addiction. Not all harmful compulsions are addictions, though: an obsessive-compulsive, for example, also has impaired control and persists in a ritualized and psychologically debilitating behaviour such as, say, repeated hand washing. The difference is that he has no craving for it and, unlike the addict, he gets no kick out of his compulsion. How does the addict know she has impaired control? Because she doesn’t stop the behaviour in spite of its ill effects. She makes promises to herself or others to quit, but despite pain, peril and promises, she keeps relapsing. There are exceptions, of course. Some addicts never recognize the harm their behaviours cause and never form resolutions to end them. They stay in denial and rationalization. Others openly accept the risk, resolving to live and die “my way.

When I quit smoking, they told me it takes three days to be able to breathe normally again, five days until I’m no longer physically addicted, seven days until there’s no more nicotine in my blood, six months to be entirely clean and fifteen years until the chance of a sudden death due to the consequences of smoking is minimized to 50%. I wish somebody could tell me how long it would take to be over you, too.

The true situation is this: when you are addicted to nicotine and are not smoking, there is something missing.

Shit, I'm being played like a fucking violin!" Rainie blinked. "Since when did you take up swearing?" "Yesterday. I'm finding it highly addictive. Like nicotine." "You're smoking, too?" "No, but I haven't lost my deep and abiding love for metaphors.

Gottlieb told the meeting he was convinced that “successful brainwashing” was rooted in the use of drugs: LSD, mescaline, cocaine, or even nicotine. He did not yet know which one — “but it had to be something like that.” He reminded them that all over the United States in research centers — Boston Psychiatric; the University of Illinois Medical School, Mount Sinai and Columbia University in New York, the University of Oklahoma, the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, among others — researchers were running projects funded by the CIA to try to prove his theory.

Drugs do not always have the function of freeing people from dependency and maternal constraints. Sometimes legal drugs (alcohol, nicotine, prescribed medications) are used in an attempt to fill the void left by the mother. The child was not given the nourishment needed from her and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response. Probably the foundations for addiction are laid at the very beginning of life, as is the case with bulimia and other eating disorders. The body makes it clear that in the past it urgently needed something, something withheld from it when it was a tiny baby. But this message is misunderstood as long as the emotions are ignored. Accordingly, the distress of the small child is erroneously registered as present distress, and all attempts to combat that distress in the present are doomed to failure. As adults we have different needs, and we can satisfy them only if they are no longer coupled with the old needs in our unconscious minds.

It is way less foolish to throw your money away than it is to use it to buy and then consume things such as cigarettes.

Carbohydrates are as powerfully psychoactive as nicotine, alcohol and opioids, and are as rapidly addictive. Unless you are a performance athlete, most Type 2 diabetics are simply people who over time have transitioned away from eating for the nutritional value of food toward eating primarily for the endorphin release and emotional management effect of a powerful psychoactive drug called sugar.

psychedelics should in no way be confused with highly addictive, often toxic drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines (and yes, let’s say it openly, alcohol and nicotine).

This year had taught me that, just like anything toxic—alcohol, nicotine—we need as a society to start handling sugar (fructose) with care, as potentially addictive, potentially dangerous. I wondered, Can we even do that? Do we have the self-possession to realize that “moderation” does not mean “whatever the amount I eat is”?

Addiction is a human problem that resides in people, not in the drug or in the drug’s capacity to produce physical effects,” writes Lance Dodes, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions. It is true that some people will become hooked on substances after only a few times of using, with potentially tragic consequences, but to understand why, we have to know what about those individuals makes them vulnerable to addiction. Mere exposure to a stimulant or narcotic or to any other mood-altering chemical does not make a person susceptible. If she becomes an addict, it’s because she’s already at risk. Heroin is considered to be a highly addictive drug — and it is, but only for a small minority of people, as the following example illustrates. It’s well known that many American soldiers serving in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s were regular users. Along with heroin, most of these soldier addicts also used barbiturates or amphetamines or both. According to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1975, 20 per cent of the returning enlisted men met the criteria for the diagnosis of addiction while they were in Southeast Asia, whereas before they were shipped overseas fewer than 1 per cent had been opiate addicts. The researchers were astonished to find that “after Vietnam, use of particular drugs and combinations of drugs decreased to near or even below preservice levels.” The remission rate was 95 per cent, “unheard of among narcotics addicts treated in the U.S.” “The high rates of narcotic use and addiction there were truly unlike anything prior in the American experience,” the researchers concluded. “Equally dramatic was the surprisingly high remission rate after return to the United States.” These results suggested that the addiction did not arise from the heroin itself but from the needs of the men who used the drug. Otherwise, most of them would have remained addicts. As with opiates so, too, with the other commonly abused drugs. Most people who try them, even repeatedly, will not become addicted. According to a U.S. national survey, the highest rate of dependence after any use is for tobacco: 32 per cent of people who used nicotine even once went on to long-term habitual use. For alcohol, marijuana and cocaine the rate is about 15 per cent and for heroin the rate is 23 per cent. Taken together, American and Canadian population surveys indicate that merely having used cocaine a number of times is associated with an addiction risk of less than 10 per cent. This doesn’t prove, of course, that nicotine is “more” addictive than, say, cocaine. We cannot know, since tobacco — unlike cocaine — is legally available, commercially promoted and remains, more or less, a socially tolerated object of addiction. What such statistics do show is that whatever a drug’s physical effects and powers, they cannot be the sole cause of addiction.

Some people, a relatively small minority, are at grave risk for addiction if exposed to certain substances. For this minority, exposure to drugs really will trigger addiction, and the trajectory of drug dependence, once begun, is extremely difficult to stop. In the United States opiate relapse rates of 80 per cent to more than 90 per cent have been recorded among addicts who try to quit their habit. Even after hospital treatment the re-addiction rates are over 70 per cent. Such dismal results have led to the impression that opiates themselves hold the power of addiction over human beings. Similarly, cocaine has been described in the media as “the most addictive drug on earth,” causing “instant addiction.” More recently, crystal methamphetamine (crystal meth) has gained a reputation as the most instantly powerful addiction-inducing drug — a well-deserved notoriety, so long as we keep in mind that the vast majority of people who use it do not become addicted. Statistics Canada reported in 2005, for example, that 4.6 per cent of Canadians have tried crystal meth, but only 0.5 per cent had used it in the past year. If the drug by itself induced addiction, the two figures would have been nearly identical. In one sense certain substances, like narcotics and stimulants, alcohol, nicotine and marijuana, can be said to be addictive, and it’s in that sense that I use the term. These are the drugs for which animals and humans will develop craving and which they will seek compulsively. But this is far from saying that the addiction is caused directly by access to the drug. The reasons are deeply rooted in the neurobiology and psychology of emotions.

SUMMARY • Nicotine is the addictive poison which hooks you. It’s the No.1 killer. • Smokers go on smoking despite all the obvious disadvantages because they’re in a trap. • Nicotine addiction is what keeps smokers smoking. It’s a disease. • You are not in control of your smoking. The cigarette controls you. CHAPTER 2

Amid all this, I read Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, a fascinating book by Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, who argues that habits change when they’re harder to practice. Addiction isn’t about rational decisions, she wrote. If it were, Americans would have quit smoking soon after 1964, when the US Surgeon General issued his first report on its risks. American nicotine addicts kept smoking, knowing they were killing themselves, because nicotine had changed their brain chemistry, and cigarettes were everywhere. We stopped smoking, Wood argues, by making it harder to do—adding “friction” to the activity. In other words, we limited access to supply. We removed cigarette vending machines, banned smoking in airports, planes, parks, beaches, bars, restaurants, and offices. By adding friction to smoking, we also removed the brain cues that prompted us to smoke: bars where booze, friends, and cigarettes went together, for example.

That was the day I became addicted to nicotine, too. Until then, I’d always veered away from the substance. That day, I figured it didn’t matter if it made me smell like hell itself, caused cancer, or killed me more quickly. It gave me a buzz, and that was what I needed.

Nicotine, like a sneaky puppeteer, knows how to keep its puppets on a string when you believe in its supposed bene- fits that only manifest themselves to those who are still addicted.

Nicotine, like a sneaky puppeteer, knows how to keep its puppets on a string when you believe in its supposed benefits that only manifest themselves to those who are still addicted.

As the nicotine addiction seizes control, your definition of a “sh*tty day” begins to broaden.

There are those who claim they only smoke a few cigarettes here and there, or only smoke cigars or only vape, insisting they don’t have a problem with nicotine. They seem to enjoy saying it, even when nobody asks, as if their “lack of a problem” requires justification.

Nicotine doesn’t make you high like marijuana or intoxicated like alcohol or wired up like speed. Some people say it makes them feel more relaxed or more alert, but really, the main thing it does is relieve cravings for itself. It’s the perfect circle. The only point of smoking cigarettes is to get addicted so one can experience the pleasure of relieving the unpleasant feeling of craving, like a man who carries around a rock all day because it feels so good when he puts it down.

A man who lies about his tobacco addiction is not only deceiving others, but also himself. For in the depths of his denial, he neglects to confront the grip of nicotine on his life, and the harmful consequences that come with it. Truth and honesty are the first steps towards freedom from the chains of addiction.

Generally speaking, an addiction requires some physiological dependence for diagnosis. Problems with sexual activity tend to be labeled as a process addiction, which means there is no involvement of a substance that creates a literal physical dependency (like alcohol, nicotine, and other drugs), but the behavior itself has addictive qualities. When the brain lights up in the process of doing something like shoe shopping or gambling, it’s easy to see the reward circuit being activated in a way it doesn’t for someone who doesn’t share that process addiction.

It amuses him that the Thais, even amid starvation, have found the time and energy to resurrect nicotine addiction. He wonders if human nature ever really changes.

Sweets, again, are a special case, which probably won’t be a surprise to anyone with a sweet tooth (or anyone who’s ever raised a child). First, the unique metabolic effects of fructose in the liver, combined with the insulin-stimulating effect of glucose, might be enough to induce cravings in those predisposed to fatten. But then there’s the effect in the brain: when you eat sugar, according to research by Bartley Hoebel of Princeton University, it triggers a response in the same part of the brain—known as the “reward center”—that is targeted by cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive substances. All food does this to some extent, because that’s what the reward system apparently evolved to do: reinforce behaviors (eating and sex) that benefit the species. But sugar seems to hijack the signal to an unnatural degree, just as cocaine and nicotine do. If we believe the animal research, then sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are addictive in the same way that drugs are and for much the same biochemical reasons.* Now, how’s that for a vicious cycle? The foods that make us fat also make us crave precisely the foods that make us fat. (This,

When you are staring at the face of such a formidable adversary as tobacco cigarette addiction, it can help significantly to have some powerful weapons in your arsenal. Knowledge is a remarkably powerful weapon against cigarette addiction.

In his nicotine addiction articles, he mentions one example—that Orthodox Jews who are addicted to cigarettes quit smoking “without a qualm” on the Sabbath.

Such anti-tobacco animus helps explain a glaring paradox within public-health circles: Many public-health experts avidly embrace harm reduction for other conditions—needle exchange and methadone for heroin addicts, “wet” public housing for people who continue to drink, condom distribution and HPV vaccination for sexually active adolescents—but, for nicotine addiction, they urge abstinence and downplay the importance of a less risky alternative.

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Chlorophyll in particular has a cleansing effect, helping the body extract toxins from the liver. As toxins are removed, withdrawal symptoms will be intensified, but overall withdrawl will be shorter. Eating chlorophyll-rich foods have been shown to help people break the addiction to nicotine and stop smoking.

Owls, meanwhile, display some darker tendencies. They’re more open and extroverted than larks. But they’re also more neurotic—and are often impulsive, sensation-seeking, live-for-the-moment hedonists.35 They’re more likely than larks to use nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine—not to mention marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine.36 They’re also more prone to addiction, eating disorders, diabetes, depression, and infidelity.37 No wonder they don’t show their faces during the day.

The only drug I have ever been addicted to was nicotine, which I have quit five times in the last 20 years. Speaking from experience, I must say that Crowley has great understanding of the addict mentality and the way the biological need for the drug can generate “reasons” that almost seem rational at the time. Writing down the reasons for taking another cigarette, Crowley fashion, I have found is a real help in recognizing their self-deceiving quality and really quitting.

Marijuana, meanwhile, produces a chemical called THC that attaches to the second class of receptors (discovered in 1988). These receptors were then deemed “cannabinoid receptors,” and the brain chemicals that attach to them were called endocannabinoids (for endogenous cannabinoids). Because molecules in these plants attach to these receptors in our brain and elsewhere, they can, in small amounts, enhance our lives. Marijuana can calm the nausea in chemotherapy patients and improve the appetite of AIDS patients. Morphine and other opioids, of course, numb pain and allow for surgery to take place. In the bowels, opioids can control diarrhea—as Paul Janssen knew when he invented loperamide. But in larger quantities, far beyond what the brain can produce, these molecules prod our brain receptors to excess. THC in marijuana overwhelms the cannabinoid receptors and produces ravenous hunger and faulty memory. The morphine molecule locks with the opioid receptors to produce euphoria and numb pain. Opioid receptors in our lungs govern breathing; too much morphine molecule shuts down breathing, which is how overdose victims die. The morphine molecule also produces constipation in addicts. In withdrawals, without the drug, addicts suffer diarrhea. (Naloxone, the overdose antidote, is occasionally used to treat constipation.) (Interestingly, the natural substances that make humans high actually evolved in their plants as pesticides, to keep predator insects from feasting on their leaves. Nicotine is a pesticide that tobacco naturally produces. So is caffeine in coffee, cocaine in the coca leaf, morphine in the opium poppy, and perhaps THC in marijuana as well.) In

Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco, asserts that sugar is addictive but on the same level as nicotine, not drugs like heroin.

Many scientists and researchers themselves now advocate these methods, most prominently the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. There is no longer any rational basis, they tell us, for the Draize test, dripping chemicals and personal-care products into the eyes of immobilized rabbits. We can now test for eye irritancy by use of human tissue systems mimicking characteristics of the eye. We can stop pouring commercial and industrial chemicals into animals. Acute toxicity is determined more accurately by in vitro methods using human cell cultures obtained from cadavers. Damage to DNA can be studied in bacteria, as in the Ames assay developed thirty years ago, adopted slowly by the EPA and yet now internationally accepted. Further experiments on animals for diseases of the heart, nicotine addiction, obesity, and many other disorders are unwarranted because we have already identified their primary causes by studying human populations.

Dopamine is also highly, highly addictive. As helpful as it is, we can also form neural connections that do not help us survive—in fact, they may do the complete opposite. The behaviors we reinforce can actually do us harm. Cocaine, nicotine, alcohol and gambling all release dopamine. And the feeling can be intoxicating. The chemical effects notwithstanding, the addictions we have to these things (and lots of other things that feel good) are all basically dopamine addictions

Someone's excessive eating habits are causing a financial burden on their family, leading to increased expenses for food and healthcare. This is causing unwanted stress and strain on the family's resources.

I was well aware this wasn’t a word most lethal operatives like myself would use, but I had always marched to the beat of my own drummer. “You paint quite the scary picture, Professor,” I continued, raising my eyebrows. “Why do I have the feeling this isn’t the first time you’ve thought about this?” Singh smiled. “Not quite the first time, no,” she replied. “I guess I have gone into lecture mode. And it’s a lot to absorb. So let me wind this down. The bottom line is that the rates of substance and behavioral addictions have skyrocketed. Our levels of stress and neurosis have too. The furious pace of our advancements, and the toxicities and manipulations I just described, are outstripping our psyches, which were evolved for a simpler existence.” “Do you have statistics on the extent of the problem?” asked Ashley. “It’s impossible to really get your arms around,” replied Singh, “but I’ll try. In 1980, fewer than three thousand Americans died of a drug overdose. By 2021 that number had grown to over a hundred thousand. More than thirty-fold! And it’s only grown since then. “And these are just the mortality stats. Many times this number are addicts. Estimates vary pretty widely, but I can give you numbers that I believe to be accurate. Fifteen to twenty million Americans are addicted to alcohol. Over twenty-five million suffer from nicotine dependence. Many millions more are addicted to cocaine, or heroin, or meth, or fentanyl—which is a hundred times stronger than morphine—or an ever-growing number of other substances. Millions more are addicted to gambling. Or online shopping. Or porn.” Singh frowned deeply. “When it comes to the internet, cell phones, and other behavioral addictions, the numbers are truly immense. Probably half the population. The average smart phone user now spends over three hours a day on this device. And when it comes to our kids, the rate of phone addiction is even higher. Much higher. In some ways, it’s nearly universal. “Meanwhile, many parents insist their children keep this addiction device with them at all times. They’re thrilled to be able to reach their kids every single second of their lives, and track their every movement.” There was a long, stunned silence in the room. “I could go on for days,” said Singh finally. “But I think that gives you some sense of what we’re currently facing as a society.” I tried to think of something humorous to say. Something to lighten the somber mood, which was my instinctive reaction when things got depressing.  But in this case, I had nothing. Singh had called the current situation a crisis. But even this loaded term couldn’t begin to do it justice.

I'm a bartender. How can I stop when surrounded by smoke and smokers at every turn?" I recall attempts where I hoped smoking friends would be supportive in not smoking around me, and not leave their packs lying around to tempt me. While most tried, it usually wasn't long before they forgot. I recall thinking them insensitive and uncaring. I recall grinding disappointment and intense brain chatter, that more than once seized upon frustrated support expectations as this addict's excuse for relapse. Instead of expecting them to change their world for me, the smart move would have been for me to want to extinguish my brain's subconscious feeding cues related to being around them and their addiction. The smart move would have been to take back my world, or as much of it as I wanted. As I sit here typing in this room, around me are a number of packs of cigarettes: Camel, Salem, Marlboro Lights and Virginia Slims. I use them during presentations and have had cigarettes within arms reach for years. Don't misconstrue this. It is not a smart move for someone struggling in early recovery to keep cigarettes on hand. But if a family member or best friend smokes or uses tobacco, or our place of employment sells tobacco or allows smoking around us, we have no choice but to work toward extinguishing tobacco product, smoke and smoker cues almost immediately. And we can do it! Millions of comfortable ex-users handle and sell tobacco products as part of their job. You may find this difficult to believe, but I've never craved or wanted to smoke any of the cigarettes that surround me, even when holding packs or handling individual cigarettes during presentations. Worldwide, millions of ex-smokers successfully navigated recovery while working in smoke filled nightclubs, restaurants, bowling alleys, casinos, convenience stores and other businesses historically linked to smoking. And millions broke free while their spouse, partner or best friend smoked like a chimney. Instead of fighting or hiding from the world, take it back. Why allow our circumstances to wear us down? Small steps, just one moment at a time, embrace challenge. Extinguish use cues and claim your prize once you do, another slice of a nicotine-free life. Recovery is about taking back life. Why fear it? Instead, savor and relish reclaiming it. Maybe I'll have a crave tomorrow. But it's been so many years (since 2001) that I'm not sure I'd recognize it. Why fear our circumstances when we can embrace them? They cannot

Extremely Vivid Dreams of Smoking/Using Stay prepared for dynamic dreams of smoking or using tobacco products. They may be so vivid and so real that you'll awaken totally convinced that you've relapsed to using. Such dreams are normal, expected and are often a sign of physical healing. And it isn't unusual to experience more than one. Picture a horizontal body in which mouth, throat and lung tissues suddenly begin healing and re-sensitizing after years of being marinated in toxin rich tobacco tars. Picture the sweeper brooms lining the smoker's lung bronchial tubes (their cilia) quickly regenerating and beginning to sweep mucus and tars up to the back of their throat. Now throw in a rapidly healing sense taste and smell, a horizontal sleeping body and dreaming. Presto! The tobacco smells and tastes you'll experience are probably real. What better proof could we possibly feel and sense of the amazing healing happening within? The dream that seems to cause the most concern is the one that happens later in recovery, weeks or even months after full acceptance that this time is for keeps. Although nearly always described as a "nightmare," they are sometimes mistaken by the ex-user as a sign that they want to start using again. It's here that we point out the obvious conflict. If a nightmare and not real, then why would any rational person want to invite their nightmare to become a real and destructive part of daily life? As Joel notes, seeing smoking as a nightmare is a healthy sign. And as for having smoking dreams long after ending use, such dreams are normal, yet not nearly as vivid as during the first week or so. We can no more erase from our mind our thousands of old nicotine use memories than we can our name. They reflect who we once were. What's amazing is that they happen so infrequently. Bad Days Ex-users should expect to experience bad days. Why? Because everyone has them, including never-users. But when a bad day occurs early in recovery it can become ammunition inside the challenged addict's mind as it searches for any excuse to use. Blaming a bad day on recovery would never have crossed our mind if it had occurred the week before ending nicotine use. But now, nicotine's absence becomes a magnet for blame. Would it ever occur to a never-user to reach for nicotine if having a bad day? It's a thought process peculiar to us nicotine addicts. As Joel teaches, if the bad day happens during the first week after ending nicotine use then feel free to blame recovery as "it is probably the reason." "But as time marches on you need to be a little more discriminating." Acknowledge bad days but allow your healing to live. "Sure there are some tough times," writes Joel, "but they pass and at the end of the day, you can still be free." Staying free means that, "in the greater scheme of things, it was a good day." If you want to hear about a horrible day, talk to someone

Prime is a way to change consumer shopping patterns, to turn the occasional online shopper into a person locked into the Amazon ecosystem who interacts with the company on a frequent basis. The idea is to make Prime so attractive and so easy to use that customers can’t imagine living without it. It’s the online equivalent of nicotine—a metaphor that Amazon would never use. It is addictive

Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home to assuage the letdowns of love at home - it's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date.

The Redish model also predicted that drugs would not show Kamin blocking. Kamin blocking is a phenomenon where animals don't learn that a second cue predicts reward if a first clue already predicts it. This phenomenon is well-described by value-prediction error (VPE) - once the animal learns that the first cue predicts the reward, there is no more VPE (because it's predicted!) and the animal does not learn about the second cue. Redish noted that because drugs provided dopamine, and dopamine was hypothesized to be that VPE delta signal, that when drugs were the 'reward', there was always VPE. Thus, drug outcomes should not show Kamin blocking. The first tests of this did not conform to the prediction - animals showed Kamin blocking, even with drug outcomes. However, Jaffe et al. (2014) wondered whether this was related to the subset problem - that only some animals were actually overvaluing the drug. Jaffe et al. tested rats in Kamin blocking for food and nicotine. All rats showed normal Kamin blocking for food. Most rats showed normal Kamin blocking for nicotine. But the subset of rats that were high responders to nicotine did not show Kamin blocking to nicotine, even though they did to food, exactly as predicted by the Redish model.

There’s nothing at all pleasant about smoking, and we naïve and immature wannabes were deluded by its social cachet, while simultaneously compelled by physical addiction. According to Carr, given the rapidity with which nicotine is absorbed by the human body, the smoker is almost constantly in a state of withdrawal — and thus mistakes the relief of these symptoms for the semblance of pleasure.

You do not need to be desperate...you just have to read and be in fellowship with the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. When life is not making sense for you, just get hold of this healing blog book and read through and it will uplift your spirit....and comfort your soul with divine healing. Blog 9: Blogging of a Healing Blogger In The Name of Jesus Christ This blog 9 healing blogging book comprises of cleansing and healing blogs that were posted on internet Social Media by Stellah Mupanduki for the benefit of the healing of the people of this world. These living and active healing blogs remove desperation and hopelessness from people. This blog book has unpredicted, random unparalleled expressions of healing and visual depiction of the prevailing love, mercy and protecting power and the healing presence of God in and on anything on this earth; be it a society, a system, an entity, a people, a soul, a country, a continent and the whole creation of God. If you feel lost, when your spirit is low, when you need the comfort and presence of God, just open this blog book and read randomly and the Lord will speak to your heart and soul and ease your troubles and concerns of your life. These are healing blogs that bring salvation to people and to this world. Many were healed through them as they were posted on Facebook. For years, these blogs were there to help people in times of hopelessness. The author moved according to the command of the Holy Spirit in fulfilling her vows that she made to God when she was facing times of trouble, when she said everything about her work belongs to God Almighty and he does what he wants with it. So the Holy Spirit did what he wanted by allowing these healing blogs to be given freely at that time through social media. Good and wonderful testimony from those healed came out of these healing blogs. Now they are powerful books and they are living and active because of the presence of the Holy Spirit who heals, liberates and anoints the reader at any point of life as he/she reads in truth and in spirit. You do not need to be desperate...you just have to read and be in fellowship with the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. When life is not making sense for you, just get hold of this healing blog book and read through and it will uplift your spirit....and comfort your soul with divine healing. (less)

Nicotine patches are somewhere in between gum and cigarettes. They contain more nicotine than the gum, but since you absorb it slowly through your skin throughout the day, you get sustained focus and energy. When I tried nicotine patches, I’d take the smallest-dose patch I could find and cut it in half (even though it says not to on the label). I’d leave it on for one to two hours, so I would get 1–4 mg of nicotine during that time. Nicotine inhalers are relatively hard to find, but Nicorette makes them, and they have no chemicals at all. It’s just a sponge with nicotine and a little plastic straw that you suck through to get nicotine-scented air. I like these because they’re free of nasty chemicals, but the downside is that the act of sucking on something appears to be addictive. I found myself wanting to take a puff from one when I was sitting at my desk, even when I didn’t need or want the energy from it—so I quit! Nicotine lozenges, like nicotine gum, are full of crappy chemicals and sweeteners such as aspartame, acesulfame potassium (ace-K), and sucralose. The safest one I’ve found is the Nicorette mini lozenge, which is very small and contains no aspartame. You do get a small dose of unsafe sweetener, but it’s so tiny that it’s unlikely to matter much. When I take half of the smallest, 2 mg lozenge, I feel a cognitive shift in about fifteen minutes. These lozenges are easy to find in the United States. And make sure to get the mini lozenges, as the large Nicorette lozenges are full of chemicals you don’t want to put in your body. Nicotine spray is a more recent invention. Each spray of 1 mg of nicotine contains vanishingly small amounts of sucralose. You spray it under your tongue and feel it quickly, making it an excellent option when you want a burst of sustained energy. I’ve done more than one interview while on this, and I find it’s great for jet lag or when you have a heavy day ahead of you and want to maintain focus. If you do decide to try nicotine, treat it carefully. A safe

The first step is the same for all of us: put down the cigarette, or your preferred nicotine-based weapon of choice. The next step, and the one after, and the one after that, for as long as it takes for the veil of illusion to lift – and lift it will, I promise you, if you give time time – is a walk in the park, compared to your life as a smoker. Just keep on walking. Trust yourself. Trust the process. Trust anything, but the lies your nicotine addiction is telling you.

1 The line separating habits and addictions is often difficult to measure. For instance, the American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry….Addiction is characterized by impairment in behavioral control, craving, inability to consistently abstain, and diminished relationships.” By that definition, some researchers note, it is difficult to determine why spending fifty dollars a week on cocaine is bad, but fifty dollars a week on coffee is okay. Someone who craves a latte every afternoon may seem clinically addicted to an observer who thinks five dollars for coffee demonstrates an “impairment in behavioral control.” Is someone who would prefer running to having breakfast with his kids addicted to exercise? In general, say many researchers, while addiction is complicated and still poorly understood, many of the behaviors that we associate with it are often driven by habit. Some substances, such as drugs, cigarettes, or alcohol, can create physical dependencies. But these physical cravings often fade quickly after use is discontinued. A physical addiction to nicotine, for instance, lasts only as long as the chemical is in a smoker’s bloodstream—about one hundred hours after the last cigarette. Many of the lingering urges that we think of as nicotine’s addictive twinges are really behavioral habits asserting themselves—we crave a cigarette at breakfast a month later not because we physically need it, but because we remember so fondly the rush it once provided each morning. Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions by modifying the habits surrounding them has been shown, in clinical studies, to be one of the most effective modes of treatment. (Though it is worth noting that some chemicals, such as opiates, can cause prolonged physical addictions, and some studies indicate that a small group of people seem predisposed to seek out addictive chemicals, regardless of behavioral interventions. The number of chemicals that cause long-term physical addictions, however, is relatively small, and the number of predisposed addicts is estimated to be much less than the number of alcoholics and addicts seeking help.) *

Addiction isn’t limited to the use of chemicals such as nicotine, alcohol, and heroin. Continued use despite adverse consequences goes way beyond cocaine or cigarettes or any of the really bad things I had avoided.

I despise alcohol, nicotine and drugs. Music is my stimulant.

Rachel released her grip on the handle of her suitcase (trolley-style, thank God, given the weight of the thing) and fished around her pockets for her cigarettes and a lighter. Lighting up, she inhaled deeply, and allowed the hit of the nicotine to calm her down. Four hours on crowded trains with no chance to smoke had left her frazzled. For a few moments she savoured the smoke, banishing the freezing cold to the back of her mind. This may very well be her last chance to have a cigarette for two days: Her mother had no idea that Rachel had become addicted to what she called the 'foul weed' during her years at university and, for both their sakes, Rachel intended to keep it that way. As a result, trips home to visit the folks quickly became fraught affairs, as withdrawal made Rachel snappy and edgy. She'd often considered the various ways she might be able to slip away for a crafty smoke, but in the end had never tried.

An American monkey, an Ateles, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men.

an occasional payoff serves as a stronger reinforcement of a given behavior than does an entirely predictable payoff.

Therefore, smokable or injectable forms of drugs have a greater danger of producing abuse or addiction. The way the brain functions and has evolved

Drugs literally dominate the brain because the brain doesn’t have an adequate defense against drugs.

Do you consider yourself valuable? Do you value yourself less than or more than other people? Describe your self-esteem and how you exhibit self-love. Are you vulnerable—either too much or not enough? Do you have issues protecting yourself, and do you become resentful at others’ behaviors? Have you been known for being “bad” or rebellious, or have you been committed to becoming perfect, the good girl or boy in your family or life? How are these behaviors related to and reflected in your spirituality? Does your faith correspond or conflict with them? Are you too dependent on other people or are you too independent? Do you fear you are dependent on other things—substances like food, alcohol, drugs, or nicotine? Do you use shopping/spending or relationships to shape your identity? Do you consider yourself mature or have you struggled with the idea that you are immature? Do you self-punish over loss of control, believing that by managing your life you prove your maturity? Do you have issues with moderation or intimacy—unsure of how to create whole and healthy boundaries in your life? After you have finished this self-concept, set it aside. Much later, you will be revisiting it, seeing the ways in which you have changed, and the new behaviors and messages you will be incorporating in your life to honor that new self.

sugar appears to be addictive in the brain in the same way in which cocaine, nicotine, and heroin are.

More and more number of youths and adults get addicted to nicotine on daily basis.

Did you know rats in big cities are getting aggressive from eating too many cigarette butts? They're addicted to nicotine and they want more." - Karen Lockwood, nearly screaming, while eating an omelet at a breakfast restaurant in the year of our Lord 2013