Chapter 6 — Nicotine Addiction

Nicotine, a colourless, oily compound, is the drug contained in tobacco that addicts the smoker. It is the fastest addictive drug known, and it can take just one cigarette to become hooked. Every puff on a cigarette delivers, via the lungs to the brain, a small dose of nicotine that acts more rapidly than the dose of heroin the addict injects into a vein. If there are twenty puffs for you in a cigarette, you receive twenty doses of the drug with just one cigarette. Nicotine is a quick acting drug, and levels in the blood-stream fall quickly to about half within thirty minutes of smoking a cigarette and to a quarter within an hour of finishing a cigarette. This explains why most smokers average about twenty a day. As soon as the smoker extinguishes the cigarette, the nicotine rapidly starts to leave the body and the smoker begins to suffer withdrawal pangs. Smokers think that withdrawal pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when they try or are forced to stop smoking. These are, in fact, mainly mental; the smoker is feeling deprived of their pleasure or prop. The actual pangs of withdrawal from nicotine are so subtle that most smokers have lived and died without even realising they are drug addicts.