Smoking is so addictive that I decided to quit overnight two and a half years ago, and did. (I've had flirts with other forms of addiction that were much harder to overcome - is not an attempt to sound cool.) What's called addiction with nicotine is mostly social reinforcement.
maybe initially. it's different for people (my mother, for example) who have already been smoking for 30+ years.
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Yeah, well, at that point you can call reading the newspaper an addiction. If you do something most of your adult life, or, say, from a very young age, it's extremely difficult to shake that behavior. A lot of the issues defining addiction come from the disease model, IMO.
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I had a friend back in Prague who'd been smoking since he was 11. Doubt he'll ever quit, even if he gets lung cancer. Doesn't mean it isn't mostly social reinforcement for most people. But the younger you start, obviously, the more you have invested in it...
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my point is that things that initially being as socially reinforced often stop being reinforced, even become socially penalized at some point, so the mechanisms of habituation change over time. my mother sincerely wishes she could quit. there is a real physical aspect to it.
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Yeah, I was gonna add that the withdrawal symptoms for long-term smokers are obviously rather heavy. For someone like me, smoking a joint or drinking two beers without chasing with vitamins and water would produce a worse hangover than quitting smoking (which gave almost none).
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Again, it's a question of how you model addiction. The disease model is held to by many. I know some addicts consider it humanizing. I personally think it's both dehumanizing and deeply flawed, but YMMV. I also think "addiction" holds at least two or three different phenomena.
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My dad won’t quit after a quadruple bypass, surgery to remove femoral artery blockage, a debilitating stroke, and no human being he interacts with for weeks at a time except my mom. Nicotine is definitely not merely social for some cases.
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Ya mon. My tweet was definitely not entirely nuanced. There's a much wider discussion that needs to be had about addiction, here. But the physiological stuff and serious psychological attachment take a long time and/or early exposure to develop, for pretty much everyone.
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Contrast this with friends who have become addicted to MDMA because the first high was so great, and then the first withdrawal hit like a truck. That's a pretty fucking strong reinforcement mechanism. For smokers, you feel like puking and get severely dizzy, with no real high.
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