Cigarettes: The Crack of the '00s

If you, like tens of millions of Americans, have tried cigarettes but have never smoked them regularly, you may be surprised to learn that they're instantly addictive. That, at least, is the gloss the press is putting on a recent study of smoking by Canadian teenagers.

According to The Ottawa Citizen, the study, an analysis of survey data, found that "1 Cigarette Can Get You Hooked." The story begins, "The first puff on a cigarette could be enough to hook a young teenager into addiction, according to new Canadian research." The London Free Press likewise has the researchers discovering that "One Cigarette Can Lead to Addiction."

The Citizen reports:

The young smokers were categorized as triers, who had only smoked once or twice in their lifetime; sporadic smokers, who smoked more than three times in their lifetime, but not monthly, weekly or daily; those who smoked at least once a month; weekly smokers, who smoked more than once a week but not daily; and those who smoked daily.

Boldly contradicting its own headline and lead, the Citizen concedes that "none of the triers demonstrated signs of dependence."

And what, exactly, were these signs of dependence?

The youngsters were queried about their tobacco use and whether they smoked at all, how frequently, and what sorts of feelings and cravings it elicited in them. The questions attempt to draw out whether the smokers are experiencing any symptoms of nicotine dependence, while using language that acknowledges the different smoking behaviour of teenagers.

In other words, the researchers decided that teenagers could be addicted to nicotine even if they didn't smoke every day. Hence it's not surprising that they discovered addiction where less keen observers had seen only occasional smoking.

The fact remains, however, that most teenagers who try cigarettes never become regular smokers. For those who do, you could say the habit began with that first cigarette. But did we really need a taxpayer-funded study to tell us that?

Comments

[maizzy]

let me start by saying great post!!! now: i use to be a regular smoker in high school then i quit at 19 for 1yr, then at 22 quit, when my boyfriend asked me, but then i took it up 6mths later, behind his back, so the marry-go-round has been going on for 8yrs… dang, addictive it is, just one then bang your at it again! now i have quit for a few months… but i do have the occasional mj-stick which sometimes has a little tabacco. here in QC, we have the highest teen-smoker rate! aren’t we special! hopefully im off the tabacco-wagon. but you never know when it will show up again and i will say ‘k… im so weak!! bad girl ^.^

[Anonymous]

Thank god it was canadian tax dollars!

[fyodor]

I never believed the same bit about crack, either…

[Steve]

Honestly, it absolutely amazes me that people so utterly lack the ability to distinguish between correllation and causation. The true findings of the report are that “All regular smokers had a first cigarette once.” WOW!

As a slight sidenote, I had my first couple of cigarettes in the middle of high school. I hated them, didn’t touch them for three or four years, and then tried again and became a more regular smoker. I somehow don’t think it had anything to do with that first cigarette.

[Gene Berkman]

When I was a kid, the story was that using marijuana would get you hooked on heroin.
Even if you never used marijuana, using heroin once was enough to get you hooked.
In the 1980s they said if you smoked crack a single time you would be instantly addicted.
It is more likely that if you drink a single beer at a hair salon, you will never go back to a regular barber.

[Jason Ligon]

I have real trouble with the premise here. My impression is that the first cigarette tastes like monkey butt …

[Warren]

Drugs… Drugs are bad, mkay.
Alcohol… Alcohol is bad, mkay.
Tobacco… Tobacco is bad, mkay.
Fast food… food is bad, mkay.
No listen children, anything you put in your body that makes you feel good, is bad mkay.

any questions?

[Brian]

Add “addiction” to the list of words so misused that the definition has become so broad as to render the word utterly meaningless.

Once upon a time, “addiction” meant “a state of physical dependence on a substance characterized by intense cravings and withdrawal symptoms following discontinued use.” Later it meant “drug-taking behavior that persists despite adverse consequences” (which includes adverse “social” consequences).

Based on this study, I’d say the definition they’re using now is “using a drug more often than the authors of the study think you ought”.

How rigorous.

[Jeff Smith]

As a former subscriber (!) to the London,
Ontario Free Press, thanks for the quick
reminder of all the fine stuff I am missing.
Besides the antics of the local city council,
which made my junior high student government
look good, the Freeps (as it is called there)
never missed an opportunity to put attractive
women on the front page. I’ll never forget
the half page shock of Dick Morris’ prostitute
they featured one time. Now I ask you, just
how relevant is that to the fine Anglophile
citizens of London, Ontario (located on the
beautiful Thames river …)

Jeff

[Steven Crane]

One day, as a child, I had my first White Castle hamburger. A “Slider”, if you will.

Since then, I have consumed MANY White Castles, sometimes more than ten at a sitting. White Castle is truly the “Taste You Crave”.

This marketing campaign is a blatant invitation to become addicted to small, barely-nutritious hamburgers! We must stop White Castle from distributing their insidious product. For the children.

[Ray]

First cigarette my foot (or should it be my blackened lungs)!

It took a while to get used to cigarettes. Period.

[Kevin Carson]

fyodor,

A few years back, I read an article in National Review (of all places) that debunked the addictiveness myths of crack and other kinds of cocaine. It compared the number of people surveyed who used those drugs on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even less regular basis, with the numbers addicted to it, and found that casual use was unlikely to lead to addiction. My guess is that the hard-core addicts to ANY drug are likely to have addictive personalities, and that they gravitate to whatever is most convenient.

[Ray]

Kevin,

You’re right. I had originally included several paragraphs on the personality subject but edited it.

I’ve tried a great many drugs in my life on a casual basis and never became addicted. Except for cigarettes, none of it interested me enough to use on a regular basis.

[Jordan Brown]

Sorry, but in the aggregate tobacco does really seem to be _almost_ as bad as that. Addiction to it used to be dominant when early exposure to it was dominant and disapproval of it fragmentary and anecdotally-based. Everyone in my parents’ set smoked from an early age, most of them could never quit, and some of them couldn’t quit even as they knew it was damaging them. These are not dumb people, but (as inconvenient as the concept may be) addiction really does exist; it doesn’t usually completely rule you (for anyone smarter than Wm Bennett, this is a straw-man argument), but it stakes out territory in your mind and holds it very tenaciously.

I think tobacco has become a bit of a culture hero in these Austrian parts _because_ of the government-sponsored campaign against it. I’m not asking for a ban on the stuff, but why not denigrate smoking as Statist-supported anti-life anti-reason Wham!-worshipping that supports massive state-sponsored collectivist entities?

[dhex]

because they’re just cigarettes and not everything has to have hyphenated political categories attached to them? 🙂

seriously, quitting cigarettes is different for everyone, but what most people get stuck on is this myth of willpower alone being the only factor in any successful behavioral change. part of not eating shitty food is making sure good food is available. part of not smoking is replacing the smoking routine with another routine – drinking water, making origami, oral sex and so on.

[Mark A.]

‘Boldly contradicting its own headline and lead, the Citizen concedes that “none of the triers demonstrated signs of dependence.”‘

What contradiction?

If you read the previous paragraph, “The young smokers were categorized as triers, who had only smoked once or twice in their lifetime….”.

So by the researchers’ own definition, a trier would never show signs of dependence. The statement is pointless and redundant, but not contradictory.

Overall, the study doesn’t seem too helpful to me, but then I have only read the press’ coverage of the study.

I find that Reason discussions regarding smoking and addiction remind me a dialogue from “M.A.S.H.” that went something like this:

Col. Potter: “Cigar?”

Radar: “Uh, no thanks. I don’t want to get in the habit.”

Col. Potter: “I’ve been smoking them every day for forty years and I never got in the habit.”

[marc d]

Well to be honest I think that this whole “1 Cigarette Can Get You Hooked” theory what ever you’d like to call it is total non sense.

I myself used to smoke and now regularly smoke a cigarette or two every day. I’ve always been on and off though, sometimes smoking 3 a day after school, at school, 6 all day and I’m not hooked.