Symptoms of Addiction: What Frequency of Cigarette Use Will Result in Addiction vs Nonaddiction?
Question by Give me Hotdogs or give me death: What frequency of cigarette use will result in addiction vs nonaddiction?
If a person were to have one or two cigarettes, usually on weekends while out partying with friends, but not smoke at all for the rest of the week, wil that create an addiction?
Is regular daily smoking required? 2 cigarettes a day, 2 a week? 3 or 4 a week? What’s the threshold for addiction.
Obvoiusly everyone will be affected somewhat differently, but there has to be some kind of general baseline.
Best answer:
Answer by Fundamenta- list Militant Atheist
Nicotine has a half-life in the body of about 2 hours, and the average cigarette provides about 1 mg of Nicotine. [1]
Apparently, the minimum amount of nicotine needed to manifest effects on one’s body isn’t readily known. I’ve looked for articles on JSTOR, Google scholar, and my university’s library database, and I haven’t found anything on that.
If that information were available, it would be fairly simple to figure out; alas, it is not.
What I have found is an article which allegedly examines “symptoms of addiction” in 12-13 year-olds who are known to smoke.[2] Unfortunately, based on what I can see of the study, it appears to have several flaws in it’s methodology. I certainly agree with the sentiment and the conclusion; however, given the journal it was published in, the publication histories of the researchers (which I also examined), the subjectivity of their “measurements”, and the sort of conclusion they reached, I am inclined to call bias on this one.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to find anything else. Regardless of its addictiveness, smoking certainly isn’t good for you, and can have adverse effects (irritability, tirelessness… bad breath, if you think it should count…) even hours later.
My *EXTREMELY INEXPERT HUNCH* is that smoking simply occasionally (1-2 a month) on outings is probably fine, but I wouldn’t have 2 per week, particularly not very close together.
EDIT:
I cannot believe that someone had the nerve to recommend pot over cigarettes.
[A] It is illegal. Regardless of whether you think this is appropriate (I don’t.), I can’t imagine giving advice for a person to do something illegal as opposed to something legal, regardless of your ideas of which is safer.
[B] Marijuana IS addictive,[3] it DOES have a correlation with cancers[4][5], it IS significant to studies done on reckless driving by various measures,[7] and there is NO way you can seriously say that it has fewer risks than tobacco cigarettes.
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
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