Submitted by Dr.Kattlove’s Cancer Blog

Smoking! He gave it up over a year ago.

I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. I noticed that he stayed in during the party. Usually, he would disappear for a smoke. Not this time. I asked him why and he told me he gave it up.

Jake has every reason not to smoke. He is happily married, retired with lots of money and a big house on the ocean, loves to play golf, and as far as I know and he looked, in good health. So I always puzzled about why he continued this health-robbing habit.

Actually I knew. He was addicted to nicotine. Cigarettes are drug delivery devices and the drug is nicotine. Nicotine is one of the most powerfully addicting substances we know.

When a smoker inhales, the nicotine in the cigarette reaches the brain in 10 seconds. There, it activates chemicals that produce pleasure. So a smoker feels rewarded whenever he or she inhales. This is the same reaction seen with other addicting drugs.

This feeling goes away in a few minutes, so a smoker needs to continue dosing. If not, after a while without cigarettes, the smoker gets irritable, has trouble sleeping and thinking, and dread of all dreads, especially for women, starts to eat too much.

So stopping isn’t easy and I’m sure it was particularly tough on Jake who has been smoking for a long time, probably since he was a teenager.

Why did Jake and most other smokers start so young? First, there is marketing. The cigarette companies use symbols that appeal to teenagers, like Joe Camel and the Marlboro Men (two of whom died of lung cancer, one at age 51). When I was in college the cigarette companies gave us free cigarettes. This helped put one of my good friends through college. You could also get them on airlines at that time – free packs of four.

And the young brain is a wondrous thing. Not only is it endlessly curious, it is also especially susceptible to the addicting effects of nicotine. Over 90% of smokers start before they are 18. Right now, around 20% of European teens and 15% of American teens smoke. European guy smokers lead the girls, but here, the girls have the edge.

It is hard to believe that we allow such a dangerous and addicting drug to be freely sold. Not only is nicotine unhealthy, it is packaged in a killer tube of tobacco. Kind of like selling brownies laced with arsenic. Just takes longer to kill. Think of all the diseases related to tobacco. There is heart disease, lung disease, stroke, many types of cancer – well over a dozens that most people don’t know about in addition to lung cancer – even osteoporosis.

But there it is. Any kid can get cigarettes. And, in our free enterprise system, it is unlikely they will go away. But, I’ve heard that preventing their use in public places does discourage young people from starting and getting them out of movies may also help.

Still, best that cigarettes go away, or at least, get taxed into oblivion.
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