320 Nicotine
psychological buffer to users, allowing continual brief respites in interactions
with other persons (such as breaking eye contact during a puff). Nicotine itself
is a mild stimulant able to release adrenaline and increase pulse rate and blood
pressure, with the physiological arousal produced by the drug masking phys-
ical arousal provoked by life’s tensions, thereby making smokers feel less ner-
vous despite the stimulant effects. Smokers tend to have lower levels of body
chemicals that are supplemented by antianxiety and antidepressant drugs.
Such pharmaceuticals, unfortunately, seemingly have little ability to help
smokers quit their tobacco addiction.
As with any addiction, the power of nicotine and tobacco depends upon
needs met by those substances. People do not smoke simply to avoid tem-
porary withdrawal symptoms. If a person’s life is filled with situations that
smoking eases like nothing else can, breaking the addiction is hard. If a person
finds other ways of dealing adequately with those situations, desire for ciga-
rettes can go away and never be bothersome again. Contrary to expectations
of researchers, a laboratory test found nicotine to be no more appealing to ex-
smokers than to persons who have never smoked—a finding implying that
life circumstances, and not just chemistry, determine this drug’s appeal.
Alcoholand illicit drug abusers reliably tend to be tobacco cigarette smok-
ers, so reliably that the amount of tobacco use can be used to estimate the
amount of cocaine and opiate usage by persons in drug abuse treatment pro-
grams. An experiment found that persons smoked less tobacco when they had
access tomarijuana, suggesting that those persons used the two substances
for similar purposes. Nonsmokers tend to avoid drug abuse, implying that
smokers and nonsmokers use different strategies to cope with life’s challenges.
Cigarette smoking is more prevalent among schizophrenics, seriously de-
pressed persons, and persons with low-grade psychiatric disturbance that may
lack outward symptoms. Almost two thirds of smokers in one research project
turned out to have a history of present or past psychiatric abnormality.
Among such individuals smoking may be a strategy of self-medication. One
study found that withdrawal symptoms can depend on the extent to which
the drug is used for self-medication.
Improvement has been measured in alertness, energy, and happiness as
cigarette smokers start their day’s consumption in the morning. Conversely,
cutting off a smoker’s supply of cigarettes produces measurable increases in
fatigue, irritation, sadness, stress, and disorientation. New users do not get
favorable effects sought by experienced users but instead have measurable
nausea and general uneasiness. Among new users nicotine reduces job per-
formance skills such as physical coordination and accuracy in memory tasks—
the opposite of what happens with experienced users.
Although pharmaceutical nicotine has various medical applications, its
main use is for treatment of addiction to tobacco smoking. One authority aptly
described nicotine chewing gum as themethadoneof cigarettes, meaning that
such a treatment strategy is intended to switch addicts from tobacco to phar-
maceutical nicotine, just as treatment personnel seek to switchheroinaddicts
to methadone. Although such programs may have an official goal of elimi-
nating a person’s addiction, in practice simply switching a person from a more
harmful drug to a less harmful drug is often considered a success.