The following is from the
Nicotine Addiction 101 link listed above. I wanted to put it here as part of a discussion in July 14.
Nicotine Dependency a Mental Illness and Permanent DiseaseI'm sorry but there's simply no nice way to say this. Nicotine dependency, like alcoholism, is a real mental illness and disease. While able to fully and comfortably arrest our chemical addiction, there is no cure. It's permanent. Like alcoholism there's just one rule. Once we're free, just one, using just once and we have to go back. You see, it isn't a matter of how much willpower we have, but how the brain's priorities teacher teaches, how nerve and memory cell highways that recorded years of nicotine feedings have left each of us wired for relapse.
So why are some people social smokers able to take it or leave it, while the rest of us got hooked? Referred to as "chippers," they probably account for less than 10% of all smokers. Jealous? If so and still using don't worry, it's normal. That's what enslaved brains tend to dream about, to want to become like them, to control what for us is uncontrollable.
Being immune to addiction is believed to at least in part be related to genetics. But with up to 90% of daily users hooked solid under DSM standards, spending millions studying nicotine dependency genetics seems almost laughable. Before feeling too sorry for yourself, imagine what it's like to be an alcoholic and forced to watch roughly 90% of drinkers do something that you yourself cannot, to turn and walk away. We only have to watch the 10% who are chippers.
Then again, we were each once chippers too, at least for our first couple of cigarettes or oral tobacco uses. There was no urge, desire, crave, hunger or wanting for those first couple of smokes. Nicotine stimulated our nervous system without our brain begging us to come back and do it again. There was no dopamine "aaah" relief sensation, as nothing was missing and nothing in need of replenishment. But that was about to change.
Most of us became hooked while children or teens. What none of us knew prior to that first hit of nicotine was how extremely addictive smoking it was. Roughly 26% of us started losing control over continued smoking after just 3 to 4 cigarettes, rising to 44% after smoking 5 to 9.
What we didn't then know was that within ten seconds of that very first puff, that up to 50% of our brain's dopamine pathway acetylcholine receptors would become occupied by nicotine, or that prior to finishing that first cigarette that nicotine would saturate almost all of them.
No one told us that once saturated, that continued smoking would cause our receptors to become de-sensitized, which would somehow cause our brain to grow or activate millions of extra receptors, a process known as up-regulation.
Every two hours the amount of nicotine remaining in our bloodstream declined by half (known as nicotine's elimination half-life). At some point in the process, continued stimulation, de-sensitization and up-regulation left our brain wanting and begging for more. An addiction was born as our brain was now wired to function with gradually increasing amounts of nicotine.
Not only does nicotine stimulate the release of dopamine within ten seconds of a puff, smoking it suppresses MAO, a dopamine clean-up enzyme. Suppressing MAO allows wanting's satisfaction to linger far longer than a natural release, such as the short lived sensations felt when eating food or quenching thirst.
One cigarette per day, then two, then three, the longer we smoked nicotine, the more receptors that became saturated and desensitized, the more grown, and the more nicotine needed to satisfy resulting "want" for replenishment.
As America's leading drug addiction expert puts it, the NIDA's Dr. Nora Volkow, drug addiction is a disease where brain changes translate into an inability to control drug intake. These drug induced brain modifications then signal the brain with a message that's equivalent to "when you are starving," the signal to "seek food and eat it," that the drug is "necessary to survival," that dopamine pathways ensure "long-lasting memory of salient events."
Our priorities hijacked, our mental disorder having left us totally convinced that that next nicotine fix is as important as life itself, where do we turn once we awaken and realize that we've been fooled?
