They call it addiction, I call it habit.

[Downtown]

Now, I'm not completely off smoking like I should be. By now I should be; I mean, I've gone days without smoking, but that's when I realized, I'm not so much addicted to tobacco, as I'm addicted to the habit.

Example 1: I get in the car. Sure I have my e-cig there, but I always reach over for a cigar and a match book. If I don't have that in the car, I become the crankiest driver in the world.

Example 2: I go to a buddies house, I sit down, I pull out my e-cig, and feel like "this...isn't doing it". This might be because my friends smoke, and I just feel like I then need to, it's just habit.

Example 3: I work on cars. I got heavy into smoking this last summer, so I was outside working on cars, and I would always have a cigar to keeps the bugs off, because I dislike anything with more than 4 legs and wings. But now, I find it so habitual that when I get under the hood, I can't puff on my e-cig, I have to find a cigar or cigarette.

Anyone still have these habits? It may just be me but I find the habit part harder to kick. There's times of the day where I vape where I smoked now, but it's almost like for certain things to feel..normal.. I need to smoke. Habit or addiction? I'm still classifying it as habit.

 

[gdaym8]

I think the habit part of our addiction is the reason ecigs work for many of us where other methods have failed. The rituals of smoking comfort me. Wrong or right, it is what it is. Junkies have the same feelings with their rigs. Addiction is when the body/brain is convinced it can not survive without something, it is physical withdrawals occur (the reason it is a medical condition). Habit is more a desire or want.

 

[cocopoco]

Six years back I quit smoking for 3 months and I started again. The reason was ...fishing. Going fishing, waiting for fish to bite didn't work not having a smoke. I think it's a habit more than a need.

 

[Downtown]

I never had the physical withdrawals, even when I first tried cold turkey. When I get nervous because of something my first instinct to this day is to grab the nearest tobacco anything, run outside and calm the h..l down. Guess my addiction turned into habit. Yay habit.

 

[Downtown]

Six years back I quit smoking for 3 months and I started again. The reason was ...fishing. Going fishing, waiting for fish to bite didn't work not having a smoke. I think it's a habit more than a need.

I feel the fishing thing. I can't fish without smoking either. When I sit and stare at the water I then notice bugs, which then leads to pulling the boat in and running to the nearest convenience store and grabbing a smoke.

 

[DancingHeretik]

If it were an addiction to nicotine, the patch would work. It's much more about the comfort of the habit than it is about the addiction to nicotine.

 

[vsummer1]

I think it is both. It is clear nicotine is an addiction, and it is clear that if that addiction were addressed with patches everyone would then be able quit using them if they wanted to. Except for that hand-to-mouth habit part...

 

[Downtown]

I took AP Psych in highschool, and apparently, Frued thought that people pick up smoking heavier than others due to not being appeased as a child with hand to mouth actions, like picking up the legos and chewing the ever living f... out of them. Maybe??

 

[crxess]

Addiction/Habit or whatever. For me it was a choice of do I want to keep killing adding to the things killing me. Maybe just stopping was easier because I had gone RYO for almost a year. Quite a difference from the Added poisons of manufactured cigs. I just know for me, 1 would be 1 to many and I'd be making excuses all over again.

 

[zoiDman]

Everyone defines words Slightly Different.

I define a Habit as some you can chose Not to do at Any Time for any Length. Whereas an Addiction is something I need to do.

If Most Vapers could go an Entire 24 Hour period Without Vaping and not Choking Someone, they wouldn’t be Vapers.

I say Most Vapers. Because there is an Exception to Every Rule.

 

[Thrasher]

whats being left out of all this is the many chemicals in cigs that we are/were addicted too that have nothing to do with nic cravings. this is the big reason patches fail. it will not replicate this multi chemical attraction, we can fight it off by raising the nic content for most people sometimes it works. after a year i find myself still looking for a cig once in a while after dinner, thats habit.

 

[Thucydides]

When I was growing up, we had "substance abuse" sections in 5th and 6th grade. They differentiated between habit-forming drugs and addictive drugs. We were taught that tobacco and pot were habit forming, while morphine and it's derivatives were addictive. Nowadays, everything is just called "addictive."

The introduction of the word "addiction" to cover behaviors that used to be considered "habit forming" has important political implications; i.e., it's about power relationships.

If someone has a habit, then there is a presumption that she has some modicum of control over its behavioral manifestation. If something is an addiction, than she's mostly at the mercy of the addiction. Thus, the supplanting of the term "habit" with "addiction" is a way of disempowering the individual and empowering something outside of the individual. Nietzsche would have a field day with this. Moreover, Marxist theorists are seriously remiss for not examining the economic factors related to (perhaps driving) the shift in the location of power outside the individual (because that's what Marxists do best: trace power to economic causal factors). Too bad all their best work nowadays is devoted to literary criticism.

One thing to consider about the power-shift that occurs when you disempower the individual by reclassifying her habit as an addiction: It's much less popular to regulate a common habit than it is to regulate a common substance to which you've imputed "addictive" properties. Also: The individual's experience of the activity is transformed by the change in discourse created by the replacement of the term "habit" with "addiction."

Funny thing: most people cannot change or quit habits. Eating habits are notoriously difficult for people to change; the vast majority of people who seek to change their diets fail even with clinical oversight. In fact, more people are able to quit smoking cold turkey than lose any appreciable amount of weight and keep it off. I've tried to stop biting my fingernails and cracking my knuckles for decades to no avail. Habits are damn hard to break. Harder than addictions? Evidently, sometimes they are.

Habit? Addiction? There are behaviors that are clearly habits, and there are behaviors that are clearly addictions, and there is a huge gray area in between that is probably larger than either. Within this gray area, which word one chooses has political import, whether the user of the word realizes it or not.

There's more that goes into the psychology of saying, "I'm an addict" than mere candor (or even self-abasement).

 

[JimmieLee]

I think it become your habit because you are addicted to it. I am an e-cig user too, I just kept on using it because I want to satisfy my craving for a real one. I am planning to quit bu, it's hard. I still enjoyed it!

 

[patkin]

There may be a mild addiction factor because whenever I've quit (4 times in 58 years) I've gotten that cotton feel in my throat for a few days but it passes very quickly so I'm not that physically addicted. That's the only physical (withdrawal) symptom I've had. But the habit is major and includes nicotine. For instance, I could do the bills or taxes without nicotine but I'm used to the more acute focus nicotine gives me so its a habit to have nicotine while doing that and some other activities. I've figured out that most of them do involve focus for me even if its just talking on the phone. I used to think the habit was just hand to mouth but its not. I want nicotine with certain things I do but I don't have to have it so no physical addiction.... other than those times, I can take it or leave it.

 

[Tanti]

It much more complicated than a "habit", tobacco has a MAOI(Monoamine oxidase inhibitor) that occures in it naturally, "MAOIs act by inhibiting the activity of monoamine oxidase, thus preventing the breakdown of monoamine neurotransmitters and thereby increasing their availability." These would be the chemicals in your brain that give you happyness, make you feel good, help you sleep and so on.
So your nicotine cause these chemicals to be released and the Maoi causes them to stick around longer. So you are not only getting addicted to the nicotine but you are getting addicted to the MAOI somewhat. The brain records what you were doing when you had the chemicals released, It records how you got the chemicals released, what action. People can get addicted to exercise, because you also trigger the chemicals in heavy exercise. That is the happy center of the brain. It starts to crave the happy good feeling the chemicals give when they are released. So when you take a drag off a cigarette, you are releasing chemicals, the Maoi is causing them to stick around longer than normal, and it becomes a cycle. Its visual, the cigarette causes this. So the brain becomes addicted to the "cigarette". By them using Chantix (Varenicline is a nicotinic receptor partial agonist - it stimulates nicotine receptors more weakly than nicotine itself does) it ment to take the place of nicotine. But its not the same, you are not getting the visual clue to the brain. So for the most part it doesnt work. Your brain gets addicted to "the cigarette".

With myself im no longer craving the "cigarette" now im addicted to the PV and crave the PV.

I havent found any studies out there to show how long it takes for the brain to not need "the cigarette" anymore. Ive talked to people that have been quit for 20 -30 years and they still crave a cig. Its not the nicotine that is being craved. Makes me wonder if our chemicals in the brain have been altered for the rest of our lives. This is far more than a habit, bitting the nails, sucking on a thumb, crossing your legs one way are habits.

 

[yzer]

It is an addiction, plain and simple. Burning tobacco will hit you up with a number of addicting substances beside nicotine. When I quit smoking for vaping nicotine I still went through withdrawal symptoms. Depending on how much you smoke that withdrawal period can be several days to two weeks even if you use a nicotine e-liquid.

Sorry, there is pain involved in the transition from smoking to vaping nicotine for many of us and some discipline and will power is still required.

 

[Thucydides]

It is an addiction, plain and simple. Burning tobacco will hit you up with a number of addicting substances beside nicotine. When I quit smoking for vaping nicotine I still went through withdrawal symptoms. Depending on how much you smoke that withdrawal period can be several days to two weeks even if you use a nicotine e-liquid.

Sorry, there is pain involved in the transition from smoking to vaping nicotine for many of us and some discipline and will power is still required.

I don't see it as plainly or as simply as you see it. I've been participating in these discussions for a long time, and when people are pushed to justify saying that cigarettes are an addiction, there are basically 4 responses.

1. They appeal to the conventional wisdom that has developed since the 1980s that smoking is more than habit forming and is actually an addiction; basically, "everyone says its an addiction, so you have to be a crackpot to believe otherwise." SInce this conventional wisdom was established by C. Everette Koop's (the Surgeon General during the 1980s) overt propaganda campaign against smoking, I have serious problems accepting it at face value. And when I call it an "overt propaganda campaign," I'm not positing a secret conspiracy. Koop spoke frequently and openly about his desire to use every resource at his disposal to transform smoking into a public health issue and the need to overcome the pro-choice attitude that people maintained about smoking in the decades preceding his tenure as Surgeon General. His initial attempts to drum up research on "passive smoking" (the original term for 2nd hand smoke) were met with scorn and derision from the scientific community.

2. They point to physical and psychological withdrawal symptoms as proof that nicotine is addictive. While we know that withdrawal symptoms are a necessary condition for addiction, is anyone willing to say that it is a sufficient condition? In other words, does the mere presence of physical or psychological withdrawal always indicate addiction? Or are there other factors? Does it matter that the jails are full of people who have committed violent crimes to satisfy addictions, but not for cigarettes? Does it matter that talk shows are packed with people who have destroyed their careers and their family and their financial well-being in the course of satisfying their addictions, but not for cigarettes? Is it relevant that in the 1950s, when more than half of Americans smoked, that there was no discernible economic impact on productivity or crime or divorce rates? Would this be true if, say, more than half of Americans were doing crack on a daily basis?

3. They point to neurological changes that occur by virtue of the behavior. Of course, every salient behavior leads to neurological changes. That's what makes it a salient behavior. Behavior influences brain which influences behavior; wash, rinse, repeat. That's why practice makes perfect, and that's the source of the old adage "Be careful what you practice, because you will get better at it."

4. They point out that it is very difficult to stop. As I've pointed out at length before, this is true of almost every habit as well. We've already talked about eating habits and other habits such as fingernail biting or knuckle cracking, all of which are at least as hard to change as smoking habits. Can there be pain involved in quitting a mere habit? Absolutely. When you become physically dependent on nasal spray or toothpaste for sensitive teeth, it will be painful to stop taking. In these instances, they call the withdrawal "rebound effect," but nobody (doctor or laymen) has ever been able to explain to me how this is different from "withdrawal."

I'm not saying that smoking is not addictive, I'm just saying that the knee-jerk insistence that it is addictive serves no purpose at all. In fact, I don't believe that the term "addiction" is especially useful in most circumstances unless the intention is merely to express intense disapproval or to make a statement that is disempowering to individuals who wish to engage in the putatively "addictive" behavior.