Smoking: Psychology & Pharmacology

"It's easy to quit smoking, I've done it thousands of times." - Mark Twain In 1984, after a dozen failed efforts to end my ten-year addiction to Marlboro's I figured that there was something missing in my strategies. Cold Turkey, Stop Buying Them, Low Nicotine and Smoke The Other Stuff had not worked. I went to the library looking for real science, not fad or propaganda, and found Smoking: Psychology and Pharmacology. The book explains the neurochemistry involved in smoking in terms of axons and dendrites and catecholamines and such. High school chemistry or biology are probably enough to follow the science, but the scientific details are not needed to understand the conclusions. I learned there are three obstacles to quitting smoking. 1) Nicotine is physically addictive, 2) Smoking is a habit, and 3) The damn things work. They relieve anxiety and regulate emotions. The first two obstacles are easy to beat. The physical addiction is gone after 2 weeks. You can tough it out cold turkey. The nervous habit can be replaced with chewing gum or a Rubik's Cube or rolling steel balls in your hand. No problem. Number 3) is the only real tough one. Nicotine administered in cigarette form is an extremely effective drug for the relief of anxiety and is self-administered in precise doses. There is no effective alternative. Nicotine patches and gum work too slowly to provide the psychological effect and can only relieve the physical addiction. Tranquilizers have a psychological effect but also act slowly, cannot be self-regulated, and remain active for days. The effect of cigarettes wears off within a few minutes. Some people who are less vulnerable to the physical addiction can smoke a few cigarettes each day as needed to relieve anxiety. Better than Valium. Cigarettes are beneficial in other ways. Typists who smoke are faster than those who do not. Cigarettes work very fast. When you inhale the smoke into your lungs, the nicotine passes into your blood. The blood is pumped through your heart and into your head. The nicotine passes from the blood into your brain and affects nerve activity. This all happens in the time it took you to read this paragraph. Armed with my new knowledge of smoking I developed a 20-day plan to quit smoking. I smoked 20 cigarettes the first day, 19 cigarettes the next and so on. Each day was as hard as the one before. The urge to smoke was nearly constant and emotions came from surprising directions. One day, maybe the 5-cigarette day, I was driving on the freeway when some Mozart came on the radio. The music was so beautiful that I started to cry and had to stop in the emergency lane until the music stopped. To deal with the emotions I used another substance that the book said was effective. Food. I gained 15 pounds. Deep breathing helped as well. On May 24, 1984, I pulled a Marlboro from a pack labeled "1" and smoked my last cigarette. This book worked for me and maybe it will work for you. I

This is a wonderful book. I read it in 1982 when I quit smoking. It was the only book I found at the time that really laid it out there about cigarettes. It told you the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was particularly interested in the good. I wanted to find out why it was so hard to quit smoking. So many of the things people said about smokers and smoking were just so amazingly WRONG. Such as: "It's just a habit." JUST a habit? Like habits are EASY to break? Give ME a break. Such as: "It's an oral fixation--people who smoke just want something in their mouths." Really? Then why don't we take toothpick breaks or search through wastebaskets for half of a used toothpick? Such as: "Nicotine isn't addicting." Then, why can cigarettes be used all over the world as a universal currency for barter and trade? Such as: "It's something for to do, to keep our hands busy when we're out with other people." Then why don't people light up toothpicks or pea pods or ANYTHING ELSE after dinner with friends? Such as: "People smoke to look sophisticated." Then why do we still smoke through the hole in our throats after a laryngectomy? I had never read anywhere else that nicotine could be useful. It helps control emotions by dampening them down (not always a good thing). I had never read anywhere that nicotine is a stimulant--people think faster and stay awake when they smoke. I had never read anywhere that nicotine helps people do boring jobs longer and more accurately--an example is people who study radar screens on shipboard looking for underwater hazards, or in wartime, watching for submarines. All this made some of the difficulties of quitting smoking understandable, finally. This is a British book. In my experience, the British can write down- to-earth prose without talking down to the reader. Their prose is likely to be straightforward, without circumlocutions, without avoiding the more difficult aspects of a subject, without trying to manipulate the reader. They let the facts convince. Another curious thing--British authors seem to anticipate questions the ordinary reader might have as he reads. Then they address those questions. It's wonderful. It's like someone scratched an itch that you didn't really know you had. When you read American textbooks do you often come away bored and unsatisfied, as though you didn't get some kind of information you really needed? Do you sometimes feel that somehow the whole thing just didn't make sense, its raison d'etre was undiscernable. When we in America against the odds produce a really good textbook it's a wonderful thing. An example is the book "Between Pacific Tides" by Ed Ricketts, about the oceans' intertidal zones. Another is a textbook called "Biology" by Neil A. Campbell. They are classics. This book I'm reviewing is just a small book, a modest book. It doesn't reach the level of a classic. In 1982 I was looking for a book that didn't try to manipulate my opinion, tha