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.
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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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Then you have years and years of constant tobacco use before you get any serious withdrawal symptoms. I had barely any, and I must have smoked around 10000 cigarettes in just a couple of years.
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So much as we may find a lot of long-term smokers who have much steeper costs for quitting, most people my age who say they're that addicted? They just don't want to quit (I didn't, for a long while), and/or they are caught in social circles that encourage smoking (as I was).
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IMO (from having read quite a bit about it), most addictions are more or less a matter of choice. It's the notion that choices are "free" that creates problems with accepting that model, and stigma attached to operating under it.
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