What is it we've been addicted to for all these years?

[mojofilter]

I apologize in advance; this is going to be long.

I smoked 20-35 cigarettes a day for 42 years, but never knew as much about tobacco for that period of time as I've learned about it reading here for the last five months. I've been trying to analyze my usage and apply what I've learned to how it's been since I quit, and I'm confused; not only by my experience, but how different it's been from those of the other people on this board. Now I have questions about it that I hope some people can answer. I've asked once before, but got absolutely no responses.

I can clearly remember the buzz I used to get when I first started smoking factory cigarettes at 14. I would get that every time for a few weeks, and then I never got it again, but I needed to have another smoke. Well, if I hadn't been able to have a smoke for some hours, the first one gave me a bit of that feeling. This led me to believe that cigarettes were narcotic, and the media did nothing to dispel the notion that nicotine was to blame. Perhaps it wasn't even known then. About ten years into it, circumstances drove me to quit cold turkey. It was about the most miserable experience of my life. I have never been so sick before or since. What I didn't know then was that I came down with the flu at the same time I was kicking, and was suffering the worst of both at the same time. Well, I relapsed not a month after going through all of that. "Oh, just one will be OK." Yeah, right.

Around the same time I saw a TV documentary that said RYO tobacco wasn't as unhealthy as factory cigarettes; it had no additives, and no fibers in the filters to lodge themselves in the back of your throat every time you took a drag. I switched exclusively to RYO tobacco, and smoked that until February 2nd of this year.

What I've learned since I came to ECF is that Big Tobacco has deliberately put MAOI drugs in cigarettes to get and keep you addicted to them (they make you feel better when you smoke), plus other deadly poisons, and lied about it to the government. They got away with it, and have continued to get away with it. I've learned that nicotine is not a narcotic, it is a stimulant with properties similar to caffeine. It apparently has no evil tendency to suck you in and keep you hooked. Please correct me if I've stated anything that isn't true. I really want to understand what's been happening here.

The day my vaporizer arrived, I started using it and never had another cigarette. The withdrawal symptoms were not even in the same universe with the agony I went through quitting the first time. I did not get sick. I didn't cough up black crud. I didn't have any unmanageable cravings to smoke, and still haven't. All of a sudden, I was a non-smoker. It was all over by the second week. About a month into vaping, my throat began to lock up when I tried to inhale it, so I stopped inhaling vapor. I would just take some into my mouth and blow it out, just for the taste. I experienced no discomfort from my nicotine intake dropping to zero. I have never used more than 1.5 ml of liquid in a day. I started at 24 mg, and then went to 18, tried one in 12, and then 6 in a complementary flavor to dilute my 24 mg to lessen its strength (and harshness). I could have stopped vaping completely in March, but I have continued to vape without inhaling because I bought way too much liquid in the beginning. It will run out later today. Then I put the vaporizer away.

So, I quit smoking and then I quit vaping, and it hasn't been anywhere as difficult as I had been led to believe it would be. There are not likely more than trace amounts of nicotine in my system now. I am doing fine. Contrast this with the multitude of threads on this board about the difficulty people are having lowering their nicotine strength. Some of them are finding it so hard that they have to use WTA in their liquid before they can feel that they are getting any benefit from vaping - to make it feel more like smoking. This is where my questions come in.

• If not nicotine, and with the apparent absence of MAOI drugs in RYO tobacco, then what have I been addicted to?
• With the lack of severity of my withdrawal, was I even addicted?
  
• Is it MAOI drugs and additives that other factory cigarette smokers have been addicted to?
• Are they mistaking the addiction to cigarette additives with the properties of nicotine? Have they convinced themselves that it is the nicotine that they crave, when it may be the additives instead?
• Does any of their difficulty stem from fear of discontinuation of the rituals of smoking?

Something else I want to mention is tar. When I smoked factory cigarettes, using the same ashtray for years, an accumulation of tar would build up on the place where the cigarette sat, and every so often I'd have to scrape it off. Oddly, when I switched to RYO tobacco, this was never an issue. I used the same ashtray here at my desk for 17 years. Never had to scrape it once. I don't know how much science is behind it, but my anecdotal experience suggests that there is far less tar in RYO than the other kind of smokes. Any idea why this would be?

I don't think I have any more willpower than the next person. If this was ungodly difficult, I would be the first person to know about it. Please understand that I am trying my hardest not to be smug or condescending toward anyone, especially those who are suffering. I have tremendous sympathy for all of you who are having a hard time getting all the way off of your smoking habit. I seek to understand why. I want to understand what we are all experiencing. My angle on this is excluding the people who vape and plan to continue to vape because they like it. I am really curious to know why the overwhelming majority of posters on this board have had a much harder time getting off cigarettes than I did, and why they feel that they can't stop vaping.

Virtually none of the posts say "I quit smoking, then I quit vaping. It wasn't too hard." You're more likely to see "I quit months/years ago and have been vaping ever since, trying to reduce my nic to 0, but I can't do it." You also see a lot of "If vaping is banned, I'll go back to smoking. I can't live without smoking (or words to that effect). If I couldn't vape or smoke I'd lose my mind." There is an amount of "I tried vaping, but it isn't working for me. I went back to smoking." It's not like benzodiazepenes, where you have to taper the strength down to nothing over a period of not weeks or months, but years, or the withdrawal symptoms can kill you (gawd, I hope I never have to take any of those!). My approach now, and for the rest of my days, is "no, just one will NOT be OK."

Well, if you made it this far, thank you for reading. I would appreciate your input and your thoughts on this complicated subject.

 

[roxynoodle]

Complicated is what it is, lol!

We know the nic has to be combined with 8 other chemicals in tobacco smoke to create the addiction cocktail.

Some people become more addicted than others.

We've known for some time that smoking is more addictive to women.

I'm glad its been this easy for you. Its definitely been more of a struggle for me.

 

[chopdoc]

You have to remember one huge point here mojofilter, none of us are the same. Some need the WTA's, some dont. The main thing is they are off the stinkies. Nicotine like caffeine is a stimulant and is addictive. I quit drinking coffee once. Within ten days I was feeling miserable. At the two week mark I was sure I had the flu. My joints ached and I felt horrible. I drank a coke and within minutes all the symptoms went away. I was going thru caffeine withdrawals and didnt even know it. Some of us ween ourselves down because we can, others dont feel a need for it. Myself, I started at 18mg, went down to 3 and now am at 4 and staying steady there. I have no plans of going to zero anytime soon.
I don't know why your throat wouldn't allow you to inhale but what works for you is good news. I am no longer addictive to cigarettes and within a few weeks will be at the one year mark but I have no intentions of quitting vaping. I enjoy it too much.
In my opinion the reasons why Ecigs/vaping works so well is that you still have the hand to mouth motion you had with cigarettes so your not sitting there and not knowing what to do with your hands. Also your still getting nicotine and still seeing "smoke" but in the form of vapor. Your body thinks your still smoking while in reality your breaking the smoking habit. It works plain and simple and it has a better success rate than any other quit smoking item on the market.

 

[Cullin Kin]

Hi! Yeah... I had the same experience as you, I was able to quit smoking the second I picked up vaping. I even smoked the big tobacco cig's (Marlboro Lights..), not RYO. I've also been able to taper down to 0mg with no issue at all. I just love vaping...

I really couldn't tell ya. I guess none of us are the same.

 

[pdib]

OK, I'm going to go out on a limb here, and proffer a pet theory of mine (or hypothesis, rather) about addiction (and how it relates to cigarettes, but not so much to vaping). Also, I'm going to extend your question regarding why some people have a harder time than others w/ cigarettes to apply to my hypothesis in general. In fact, why don't we start there. There's an amazing amount of variation between people's psychology and the biological/chemical system that contributes to it. For example: some people don't make enough dopamine, others can't "uptake" it worth a damn. Some people react really well to artificial dopamine releasing, mimicking, or reuptake inhibiting, substances; others, although affected, aren't shot over the moon by it. We're all highly complex and never-perfect bio-chemical systems that process substances (both "normal" and "unnatural" substances) with great variation. What happens when, and how efficiently one person's body disarms (chemically alters) and later ejects a foreign chemical substance, is as big a factor as the initial biochemical and psychological response. You can also take into account other heavily influential secondary factors, such as general health, diet (all of our biochemistry has to be built from what we eat), and exercise/metabolism . . . . oh, and life circumstances, emotional state in general . . . yada.

Now then: my hypothesis. . . . .

I believe (through sheer observation, w/ no education or true knowledge of these matters) that any addiction worth it's salt is based (primarily) on three factors:

-the initial feeling caused by the foreign substance (in this case, the "cigarette"; i.e. the specially designed admixture of chemicals aimed at generating "nicotine addiction" and sold as BT commercial cigarettes)

-the fact that the initial sensations (the "good" sensations) are followed by feeling like crap. (this could be due to withdrawal and/or the sensations caused by the 4,000 other chemicals involved in sucking a burning "cigarette". . . . after the "stimulant" nicotine is no longer in effect)

-the fact that the one (readily available) thing that makes the addicted person feel better (stop feeling like crap . .. . caused by the substance to begin with . .. . ) is ingesting more of the substance (the actual nicotine part of the "cigarette" equation).


. . . you really don't have a good and proper addiction unless you have all three of these factors at play (preferably, in rapid succession)


So, 2 addenda:

We know that "cigarettes" are scientifically designed to be the equivalent of freebasing nicotine. So, it turns a mildly addictive substance into a mega-dosing rush (so to speak . .. rather, if our cells could only speak).

Vaping doesn't seem to have the accompanying "bad feeling" (for obvious reasons, we're not ingesting a bunch of intensely harmful chemicals in vaping . .. . like with "cigarettes". Nor are we spiking/freebasing it with ammonia and such.), and I would hazard a guess that even people who feel like they would have a hard time vaping zero nic don't feel the same intensely trapped sense of addiction that they used to feel with cigarettes. I have no intention of quitting nic-vaping any time in the foreseeable future; however, I never feel like I "have to have a vape right now!!!". In fact, most of the time, I feel like I take a vape for pleasure, and could wait an indefinite period of time before I ever got to really needing one. I do think, however, that nicotine is a mildly addictive substance; and that takes us back to my first paragraph. Mildly addictive substances affect different people to widely varying degrees.

3rd addendum (I did say 3, right?) . . .. I distinctly noticed, when transitioning from cigarettes to vaping, that the cigarettes did, in fact make me feel like crap as much as they made me feel "good". I think not very many people noticed that when they were smoking. Think back on it a little .. . . .


Ok, so there's some thoughts.

 

[WharfRat1976]

Well the FIVE BILLION DOLLAR Nicotine dependence market says it's the nicotine. Most want to make it more complicated when in the end, it is just the nicotine.

 

[Reaper263]

When you smoke or dip or do both you have an oral fixation and it may partly be "addiction" but you just enjoy smoking whether it be a Marlboro red 100 or a smoktech magneto with an RDA.. I personally smoked {Other stuff} for 7 years, smoked tobacco for 6 years.. Dipped and smoked for the last 2 then smoked, dipped and vaped for the last year.. Then I quit smoking .. Then dipping and just stuck with vaping.. I developed a fixation for smoking and having a cigarette or a dip in my mouth and smoking or spitting.. I just enjoyed it and the flavor.. It kept my mind busy when I'm bored and gave me something to focus on that relaxed me.. I still chew on toothpicks and those floss things constantly because I have a bad oral fixation.. And biting my nails since I was a young child hasn't helped either... nicotine stimulates your brain and gives you that buzz and after a while you crave it... I haven't smoked regularly since.. I'm not going to lie I am a social smoker and when I drink I smoke but I only smoke cigars and the next day I dont even think about them.. The only thing I think of is how glad I am I dont smell like that all the time! Addiction isn't a physical or mental dependence.. Its just something a person thinks they want and its all willpower...

 

[Racehorse]

Virtually none of the posts say "I quit smoking, then I quit vaping.

Totally untrue. If you follow the classifieds, people often quit vaping.

but also, keep in mind, most people who quit vaping just don't hang out on vaping forums anymore once they quit. And THAT is the reason you don't see a lot of those posts, have you thought of that?


There are still some people who are still here who quit vaping, and just like the community, by the way

Seen tons of people come and go on this forum in 3 years....many of them had idea to quit and probably did.

 

[Jman8]

This is where my questions come in.

• If not nicotine, and with the apparent absence of MAOI drugs in RYO tobacco, then what have I been addicted to?
• With the lack of severity of my withdrawal, was I even addicted?
  
• Is it MAOI drugs and additives that other factory cigarette smokers have been addicted to?
• Are they mistaking the addiction to cigarette additives with the properties of nicotine? Have they convinced themselves that it is the nicotine that they crave, when it may be the additives instead?
• Does any of their difficulty stem from fear of discontinuation of the rituals of smoking?

I honestly believe part of the addiction (or desire) is the breathing aspect that comes with vaping / smoking. It is a way to psychologically connect with the rhythm of your breathing and can be, in a very real sense, a sacred activity. Combine this with the nicotine (reinforcement) and flavoring (added appeal) and I think the addiction makes more sense as to why it occurs. It seems to me that vapers sometimes forget that they were very much attracted to the flavor of their smokes.

Without severe withdrawal, I would say by the time you moved to cessation, you were no longer addicted. I've stopped cold turkey a number of times (never less than 1 year) and at least one time found it super easy to stop. When you have a replacement therapy in place, which for many this is what vaping is, your mindset does change. Your are primed to cut back significantly or even move toward cessation. I'm currently a dual user who is no longer addicted to smoking. And as I have experience of being liberated via cessation, I think I fully get what it means to be or not be addicted to smoking.

With smoking, I do think the other additives are designed to make it more compelling to reinforce the habit. But as there are moderate smokers around, then it isn't exactly a given.

I think it is a combination of many things that create the addiction / desire to continue using. Nicotine is obvious factor, but I would say it is false conception to attribute it only to nicotine. Some are IMO to lazy to understand it any other way.

I would say the ritual aspect of smoking is more compelling than the physical properties. I realized this more when I went cold turkey. I had acute awareness around this and it hasn't left me. Yet, it isn't only the ritual or only the physical properties, and the combination is very important consideration. When you cease for a long time, you go through various phases where you realize different things about what made it so compelling. After about 30 days of stopping, the nicotine aspect is near the bottom of what really was compelling the continuous desire.

 

[Nermal]

Interesting post, pdib. I like your hypothesis, and appreciate you knowing the difference between what you know as fact and what you're pretty sure of.

 

[gpjoe]

Why are only some people alcoholics?...drug addicts?...food addicts?...sex addicts?

I think the short answer is the correct answer: Psychologically we are all put together differently, with a possible genetic predisposition towards addiction in many cases.

 

[Steamix]

Why are only some people alcoholics?...drug addicts?...food addicts?...sex addicts?

I think the short answer is the correct answer: Psychologically we are all put together differently, with a possible genetic predisposition towards addiction in many cases.

Fairly recent research shows that certain genes might be linked with increased proneness to depresseions, alcoholism, drug addiction.
Surroundings play a major role too ( upbringing, peers, etc)..

But the odd you running across your doppelgaenger is 1 in a few dozen million. As much as we have in common and in difference on the physical apperance, we have on the 'inner workings' as well.

You all know the types: People who can put away three square meals a day without any effects on their weight. he opposite is folks who gain a pound just by looking at a slice of cake...

Haven't got the link anymore... but there was a highly unwelcome study about various diets. Result were that for two people who lost weight, there was one person with no weight change and one individual who actually put on weight instead of shedding it. Sure, basic rules appy. Eat less, move more gets results. But a diet custom-tailored to your individual metabolism might work miracles...

Don't see why vaping and the chemicals introduced into the body should be any different. Some reduce nic levels at lighning speed. Some , like me are vaping away at 18mg/ml and considering upping it to tone down on the perma-puffing ...

We're all individuals. If something works for me, there is no guarantee that it works for thee

Doesn't make it always easy in this world, but it sure makes it interesting

 

[caramel]

Well the FIVE BILLION DOLLAR Nicotine dependence market says it's the nicotine. Most want to make it more complicated when in the end, it is just the nicotine.

Except the one in patches doesn't seem to work.

 

[mcclintock]

The MAOIs are not added to the tobacco, they are part of whole tobacco. WTAs are extracted from pure tobacco. There are additives that increase the speed of the nic, to flavor, and to allow cheapness. However, the modern tendency to point at the companies and say they messed it up isn't exactly accurate here. It would be accurate, however, to note that they are bad also, they make the product even worse. The eye-opening moment for me was realizing the higher-ups in the large companies don't believe in smoking and forbid anyone in their family from smoking. I'd at least want to buy from someone who loves their product.

I don't know who told you RYO tobacco doesn't have any additives, or of course someone may claim that. According to what I have read, tobacco itself has very little flavor, so all of it for smoking has some flavors at least (I've wondered how they came up with what the standard tobacco flavoring is, then). Most RYOs also contain some expanded or reconstituted tobacco as well.

 

[mojofilter]

Thanks for all the feedback.

mcclintock, I can't point you to where I read that MAOI drugs are added to cigarettes. It was either in an article hosted here, or an article linked to from here (not a post by a member, or their conjecture), but I've read a mountain of information since I first came to this site. It hadn't occurred to me that I was going to write someday about subjects that would have benefited from cites. I don't dispute what you say, as I have no definitive knowledge either way. I would like to know.

I can't really have a position on this yet, because I don't know enough factual information to have an informed opinion about the science of addiction, or exactly what is being done to tobacco between when it leaves the field and when it gets to the store. That's why I'm here, asking questions. I'm trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, as they say.

It was a TV documentary on tobacco produced by the CBC in Canada in the early 1980s where I heard the narrator say that loose tobacco was less likely to have additives, and therefore was somewhat less unhealthy for you. It may have been a fact at the time; it may have been specific to the time of the report or the fact that it was in Canada and not the US or elsewhere. It may have changed since then. I just remember learning about it, and figuring that if it was going to be less bad for me, I ought to switch, so I did.

Racehorse, you said "if you follow the classifieds..." I didn't know there were classified ads here. There are thousands of pages on this website that I haven't seen yet. I came here to learn about vaping from people who related their experiences without propagandizing, and I stay because I like the company. I don't know how long I'll stay, the further away I get from smoking and vaping, but I learn something every day that I come here. I'd rather do that than go somewhere for mindless entertainment.

 

[Robino1]

You won't see the Classifieds unless you become Verified.

As to the rest of the questions. Tobacco contains MAOIs. Tobacco companies found that different types of tobacco flavors change depending on the growing season. Too much rain= a different 'taste'. Not enough rain = a different flavor. In order to deliver constant flavor, they started messing around with adding flavoring to (in a sense) mask those changes. While doing this, they discovered that adding ammonia increased the efficiency of how the nic got into the body. Freebasing.

We don't know for absolute certain that these additives are or are not more addictive than tobacco in its purest form. Anecdotal evidence kind of proves this out by the fact that many of us are able to lower our nic significantly over time once we take the actual tobacco from out of the equation. Liquid nicotine has only nic in it, no MAOIs.

As to why some need WTA... It could be either their bodies are more sensitive and have become more dependent on those particular chemicals or, in some cases, it may just be a phsycological symptom. That we will probably never know for certain. It is very real for those that use WTA.

I know of many that have stopped vaping. They hang around here for a while then real life happens and their posts get fewer until they stop coming back. (I really miss GT ) Some quit vaping and then sometime down the road, we see an old familiar face that says they're back! They picked up smoking after being away from everything and the cigs snuck back in and they are going to vape rather than go back to that smoking monkey. I've even seen a couple that after quitting everything, the urge to smoke started up and they are going to revive the vaping so they DON'T start smoking again.

We are all so very different. There is no, and never can be, a one rule fits all.

 

[IgnorantCig]

Everybody is different obviously, but for me, it was real easy to quit smoking analogs after 30 years of doing so (2 pad).

Perhaps some other people are addicted to some of those other ingredients or chemicals in analogs, but for me, I think that it was simply the nicotine, and vaping allows me to continue to get my fix.

 

[JimDrock]

This is a very interesting question that Mojofilter has put forth, what were we addicted too?

With My experince of going from smoking to vaping, I did notice that I didn't have anywhere near the need to vape as I did to have a cigarette.

Thus leading me to believe (IMO) that nicotine is not even close to being as addictive as I had believed. I, personally don't crave a vape (@ 3-6 mg/ml), but man there many-many times I craved a cigarette.

So, in my mind, there are many things going on inside of the cigarette, and as a whole the cigarette itself is very addictive.

However, for some reason, nicotine has been taking the brunt of the blame, IMHO undeserving so.

 

[skoony]

my experience has been when i smoked two packs of cigarettes
a day at the cost of $7.50 a pack everything was A-OK.
now that i am vaping about $0.40 or less of juice per day
nicotine has become the deadliest addictive child attracting
substance known to mankind.
regards
mike

 

[rgerber]

Can't speak for anyone except me. Got addicted to nicotine in 1955. Still addicted in 2015. Just get it in what I believe to be a safer delivery system than pipes and cigars.