Posted by Ann Now here's the deal with smoking: One of the largest and most profitable industries in the world, Big Tobacco has gotten fabulously rich by creating an image of glamour, sophistication, fun and independence in order to mass-market nicotine addiction. This addiction is so compelling that some poor smokers in the Third World (which is the most rapidly expanding cigarette market there is) spend more than 25% of their meager incomes on cigarettes. The first cigarettes a person smokes are free or cost next to nothing. Before long the new smoker is looking forward to the next cigarette, and a habit which ends up costing the average smoker tens of thousands of dollars has been established. Once hooked, smokers who want to quit are notoriously unsuccessful in doing so: Fewer than one in ten who want to quit are successful in doing so each year. Most people who die of smoking-related illnesses (the average smoker lives 7-10 years less than the average non-smoker) have wanted to stop smoking but have been unable to do so. The tobacco companies' simple business strategy has been enormously effective: disguise smoking as an activity to improve a person's self-image; market this image to the people most likely to desire it (currently those most susceptible include youth, poor, ignorant, pseudo-rebels, and image-conscious ne'er-do-wells); and, set prices with make smoking affordable to all in the short run while filling the companies' coffers with billions over the long haul. If you are a former smoker or an intermittent smoker, simply remember that there is one cigarette you cannot have: The First One. Unlike drinking, there is absolutely no real benefit to smoking, even to occasional smoking. Although occasional smokers are not as uncommon as once believed, they do represent the exception and not the rule. Most smokers are daily smokers; most daily smokers started out as intermittent smokers; and, most intermittent smokers go on to become daily smokers. Virtually all smokers who die of smoking-related illnesses established and perpetuated their tobacco addiction by repeatedly deluding themselves into believing that "just one cigarette" or "just one more cigarette" is okay. "One more won't hurt me" is one of the most lethal and self-destructive rationalizations which human beings engage in. So if you've stopped and want to stay stopped, watch out for self-deceiving rationalizations which take years off your life and have turned the CEO's of tobacco companies into some of the richest (and most dangerous) human beings who have ever lived on this planet. www.drsteve.org/smoke.html
on 6/26/2001, 7:25 pm
THE DEAL WITH SMOKING
Our brain cells contain billions of receptors which get pleasantly tickled by the drug nicotine. In fact, the receptors are called "nicotine receptors", in recognition of the fact that nicotine fits them like a hand in a glove. Those of us who have never smoked have no need for nicotine, because neurotransmitters produced by our bodies do what they are supposed to do to these nicotinic receptors. But anyone who has smoked knows that once those receptors have gotten used to being stimulated by nicotine, they just love to repeat that experience over and over and over again (the average lifelong smoker has pulsed his or her central nervous system with nicotine approximately 2 million times!). And whenever those receptors start to miss the nicotine, like when a smoker has been sleeping, or flying on an airplane for several hours, or is trying to stop smoking for the thousandth time, they cry out for nicotine with a passion and urgency that are very difficult to resist.
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