From Dartmouth University: The benefits of smoking

No, this is not a commercial for smoking. But it may help those who have never smoked understand the very real physiological and mental effects that the person quitting is facing. Nothing "feels" right when you first quit, as the limbic system is being deprived of a drug that it craves.

Yes, it stinks, yes I know you're allergic, but perhaps you can understand what the quitting smoker is up against neurologically, from an Ivy League source. If you are a smoker who is quitting or contemplating quitting, here it is: the reason we did/do it. You are not alone, and you are not crazy for thinking that nothing will ever "be the same". But quit you can.

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What's the Appeal?

The following article can help you understand the desire to smoke and the difficulty smokers face in quitting. . .

How Smoking Improves Attention and Performance
Nicotine also serves as an "attention thermostat" --it helps determine our response to environmental stimuli. It promotes "selective attention" and thus aids in certain kinds of learning and improves certain kinds of memory. Nicotine seems to help smokers feel less overwhelmed by disruptive or distracting stimulation in their environment and makes it easier for them to concentrate on the task at hand.

The "attention thermostat" effect is mediated through the limbic system of the brain. The principal transmitters in the limbic system are adrenaline and dopamine. Both are influenced by nicotine.

When the thermostat is turned to the "nonselective response" end of the attention thermostat, a person becomes jumpy. Every little environmental stimulus is much more likely to be experienced as distracting. When it is turned to the "selective response" end, the person is capable of focusing on the task at hand and ignoring a wide variety of distracting environmental stimuli.

For any task, there is probably an optimal point on the attention thermostat. By selecting the desired nicotine dose, smokers can choose the state of mind most suited to an activity. Smoking thus provides smokers with the ability to improve concentration and increase their powers of vigilance and attention.

Smoking Helps Maintain Alertness for Boring Tasks
Some of the most striking benefits of smoking are observed when a smoker is faced with a boring, repetitive task. In a British study subjects were asked to watch for pauses in the movement of the hand of a clock. Subjects were paid for each pause they noticed. The performance of the smokers allowed to smoke continued at a high level throughout the sixty-minute test period. The performance of both deprived smokers and nonsmokers deteriorated with time. Similar studies have yielded similar results.

Smoking Improves Certain Types of Learning
There is substantial evidence that smoking affects learning and memory. Smoking apparently helps consolidate learned material into long-term memory, although smokers remember less "incidental" material--apparently because of their increased powers of concentration. Smoking helps them narrow their attention to the most important aspects of the task at hand.8

In one experiment, subjects were asked to name the ink color in which a number of color names were written. This is a potentially confusing task, since the ink color chosen was always different from the color named: The work "red" might be written in yellow ink, the word "blue" might be written in green ink, and so on. Nicotine helped smokers sort out the information more quickly. Even more surprising, nicotine injections also resulted in improved performance in nonsmokers.9

Smoking Helps Smokers Control Anger and Anxiety
Smoking can also help smokers control angry or anxious feelings. One study speculated that smoking may be used to attenuate these emotional responses through the depressant effects of nicotine on limbic arousal and punishment.

Smoking can help the smoker deal with frustrations without actually becoming angry. As one smoker we interviewed put it, "When I get to the point where my job is driving me crazy and I just want to explode, I light up a cigarette. Cigarettes are my 'cork'--they help me keep the anger in."

This "corking" effect was beautifully demonstrated in one insightful study in which three groups (smokers allowed to smoke, nonsmokers, and deprived smokers) played a mechanical game on a machine that had been programmed to "cheat." The players found themselves in a situation much like that of "the hapless victim of the machine age whose coin fails to win him a drink in an automatic dispensing machine."

At the researcher's urging, all three groups continued to play. The smokers allowed to smoke simply shrugged off this unpleasant event. Their scores did not deteriorate. The net effect of smoking was to moderate their emotional reactions and to enhance their ability to concentrate on a task.11 But both the nonsmokers and the deprived smokers became so angry that their scores fell. The researchers concluded that smoking provided smoking subjects with an increased ability to deal with the conditions that might ordinarily disrupt their concentration.

Smoking Helps Smokers Cope With Stress
Nicotine can help both humans and animals deal more effectively with stress. In test animals, nicotine injections reduce the disruption of behavior produced by such unpleasant stimuli as a shock or--for rats--the presence of a nicotine injection also improves test animals' ability to perform a learned behavior under stressful conditions. In addition, both aggressive feelings and jaw-clenching behavior in humans have been shown to be reduced by nicotine.

Smoking Helps Smokers Deal With Pain
In a 1984 study, the effects of nicotine on the pain awareness of smokers were measured. The subjects were asked to immerse one hand in a container of ice water. They were asked to indicate the time when they first became aware of the pain (pain awareness threshold) and the time when they could no longer endure the pain (pain tolerance threshold). during some of the trials, the smokers smoked their usual brand of cigarettes. During other trials, they smoked zero-nicotine cigarettes. The researchers found that smoking the nicotine-containing cigarette dulled the smokers' awareness of pain. This and other studies suggest that nicotine can produce significant pain relief.

Smoking Gives Smokers a Sense of Control
Strange as it may seem to nonsmokers, many of the smokers we spoke with said that cigarettes gave them a strong sense of control. This effect results from the extraordinary efficiency and speed with which smoking delivers a dose of the active substance to the brain. As stated earlier, each "hit" reaches the brain within seven seconds, providing instant gratification. The average smoker self-administers approximately 200 to 300 nicotine "hits" per day.

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The smoker is in total control of the timing and the dose. Thus smoking gives smokers a great deal of control over their own nervous systems. As Christen and Cooper write, "The person who has never smoked cannot possibly understand the depth of affective satisfaction derived from this habit."

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In reviewing the existing studies, one can only conclude that in addition to its many well-known harmful physical effects--which will be described in detail in chapter 3--smoking provides smokers with an impressive range of desirable psychological effects. Smokers are obtaining these short-term psychological benefits at the cost of long-term physical hazards. This is an important key to the smoker's dilemma.

Smokers do not smoke just to avoid withdrawal. They smoke because of the very real benefits that smoking provides. Thus one strategy available to health-concerned smokers who wish to reduce their smoking risks would be to find other ways to achieve the same or similar benefits... It is also clear that virtually all psychological benefits, as well as virtually all of the unpleasant withdrawal symptoms, can be attributed to the presence or absence of nicotine. But nicotine itself, in the doses to which smokers are exposed, is, at the very least, considerably less harmful than the tars and carbon monoxide found in tobacco smoke.18 Thus the health-concerned smoker may wish to explore the possibility of temporarily obtaining nicotine from nicotine gum or other non-tobacco sources.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nobacco/LFSF/new_page_8.htm

And I can see a lot of the points they make. I know if I have to go more than about three hours without a cig, my ability to focus really falters. I'm far more easily distracted.

I have to work 8 PM to 4 AM tomorrow and half of that will be inside the building after it closes--which means I'll have to go the whole time between 12 and 4 without one. The last hour is going to be very challenging. I'm not looking forward to it at all.

I know I can handle it, but I'll be shaky and there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm not a smoker, and I haven't tried the nicotine gum, so I don't know if it doesn't deliver nicotine in the same way or what, but it seems like those who have an addiction and aren't able to smoke could avoid the shakes by going that route. No?

Can't afford it at the moment, though.

But it's a good suggestion.

You can get a nicotine overdose. That's not pleasant. It's also pretty dangerous.

says smoking for me is a self medication for ADD allowing me to not be on meds.Interesting article.

children, including babies, who live with smokers -- even if the smoker smokes outside of the house -- have measurable levels of nicotine in their systems. So they may be developing an addiction before they even smoke their first cigarette.

The trouble is, it also zaps your lungs, wastes your skin, makes you hair and
clothes stink, and gives you bad breath that rivals the stench of a toxic waste dump.

On second thought, I'll pass, thanks all the same.

Odds that the majority of posters will say something like, "Yes, I can understand that, and smokers who are trying to quit certainly have my sympathy and support."

— Roughly equivalent to those of being struck on the foot by a comet named "Marvin" wearing a Spongebob Squarepants jousting costume and matching clip-on tie.

Odds that the majority of posters will say something like, "Too fucking bad."

— Roughly equivalent to those of turkey being eaten tomorrow somewhere in the United States.

evidently thinks I am "advertising for big tobacco". :/

Tobacco companies trying to get children addicted to cigarettes with slick advertising campaigns.

Anyone who IS addicted, and wants not to be, should get as much support (and help) as anyone else
with an affliction they wish to be cured of, in other words: as much as they want and need.

It was being explored in the 90s as a potential preventative for Alzheimer's (or at least might delay onset) because it has the property of preventing the formation of plaques in the brain; however, unfortunately, recent research shows that while nicotine prevents the formation of plaques, it proliferates the production of the Tau protein tangles that are just as dangerous to Alzeimer's patients.

It also may prevent or delay the onset of some other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinsons (coffee may as well).

But some books on nicotine suggest that the "alertness" is temporary and may not be as beneficial to learning in the long-term.

It is an exciting area of study. There definitely may be uses for pure nicotine, but these can be obtained by mechanism more safet than cigarettes, which contain hundreds of poorly understood compounds that lead to unwanted health dangers.
ON EDIT:

The antismoking drug Zyban, which is the antidepressant Welbutrin, operates directly on dopamine (and norepinepheran?) systems and seems to decrease the craving to smoke by exciting the neurotransmitters that are ordinarily excited by nicotine. I am using Welbutrin now to try to break the nicotine gum habit,and it definitely has cut my desire for the gum.

I quit for nearly two years. Unfortunately, it didn't work quite so well on my wife, who started up again after six months. I held off for a year and a half but couldn't handle it any longer. I started again in self-defense. It was either that or leave my wife.

Wow, but your wife made it six months. That's pretty darn good. Most ex-smokers say it took them at least five attempts, and usually those attempts only last a short period of time. I recall my grandparents trying to quit, and their attempts in some cases lasted mere days, a week. It sounds like both of you have what it takes to quit, if that is your choice. I'd be proud to be either one of you.

I know how hard it is to quit,but I really don't KNOW it. I know how lucky I am that I did not take up the habit.

I think that the correct name of the educational institution that issued this report is Dartmouth College.

smoking helps me deal and anyone who can't deal with that I'm sorry. I don't do any narcotic drugs for the pain and smoking is my coping mechanism.

Almost makes up for the "dying a painful, lingering death from lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease" aspect of it all.

Written in 1999 (apparently), but golly, it reads just like a press release from the Center for Tobacco Research in the early 1960s or a Tobacco Institute "article" from the 1970s. It's like a blast from the past, so refreshing, you'd think it was a Salem cigarette!

I wonder why they didn't mention how it clears up acne, too?

You really think this was meant as an advertisement for smoking?

You know wading through hundreds of thousands of pages of tobacco industry documents, and reading these exact same words penned by industry doctors and researchers, but kept hushed up because it wasn't in Big Tobacco's interest to disclose them to the general public. So the research was conducted with attorney oversight so it was all subject to attorney-client privilege, or overseas at institutes like INBIFO in West Germany so it was beyond the subpoena reach of American courts.

Or maybe it was interviewing a couple of hundred smokers in various stages of dying (or their survivors) in the screening search for another plaintiff to try to financially hurt Big Tobacco and its murderous product and secure some medical care for their victims. Because once the djinn was out of the bottle (so to speak), articles like this seemed to crop up in tobacco industry apologies for its product. Tobacco companies knew full well how to manipulate not only nicotine levels and research, but they very carefully studied smokers, and one of the incontrovertible proofs they found was that people addicted to nicotine would grasp at any straw to justify continued smoking, rather than face the fact that they were killing themselves.

And since it came from Dartmouth in 1999, yes, I'm going to go way out on a limb and think that it was indeed meant to keep smokers smoking because it looks, as I said, exactly like the sort of work product put out by the CTR in the 60s and the TI in the 70s and the 80s.

As noted right on the page. Here is page one of the work, but whatever:

HOW SERIOUS A PROBLEM IS TOBACCO USE?


Smoking is the No. 1 preventable cause of death and disease in the United States today. The use of tobacco is responsible for an estimated 434,000 deaths per year in our nation. Smoking kills more Americans than auto accidents, homicides, suicides, AIDS, cocaine, heroine, alcohol, and fires combined!


In New Hampshire in 1991, total costs attributed to smoking were $261 million, including direct medical costs and indirect mortality and disability costs. Direct medical costs include hospitalizations, nursing home care, physician fees, and medications. Mortality costs are based on forfeited future earnings due to premature death, and disability costs are based on lost earnings and productivity for persons disabled by smoking-related diseases.

TEENAGE SMOKING AN EARLY START


Nationally, 82% of adult smokers who ever smoked had their first cigarette before age 18. The highest rate of initiation into daily smoking is among children ages 11 to 14 (grades 6 to 9). If students stay tobacco-free in school, they will probably remain tobacco-free throughout their lives!


Between 1991 and 1994, the prevalence of smoking by 8th graders rose 30% in the United States.


A nationwide survey conducted in 1992 found that approximately 66% of adolescents who smoked said they wanted to quit and 70% said they would not start smoking if they could make the decision again.


Recent studies done in NH indicate 69.8% of the students surveyed report that they have tried cigarette smoking, and 3 1.4% reported they smoke every day. Perhaps most noteworthy, 10% said they started smoking every day before they were 13 years old.

NICOTINE ADDICTION A POWERFUL HOLD ON YOUTH


The 1988 Surgeon General’s Report found that the nicotine in tobacco is as addictive as heroin or cocaine.


Nationally, 85% of young people who smoke two or more cigarettes completely and overcome the initial discomfort of smoking will become regular smokers.


Results of a nationwide survey show that two out of three teenage smokers would like to quit. Young people become dependent on nicotine as quickly as adults and find it just as hard to quit.

WHAT’S IN CIGARETTE SMOKE ANYWAY?


Over 4000 chemicals, including carbon monoxide, tar, asbestos, radon, acetone, methanol, arsenic, cyanide, formaldehyde and nicotine


43 known cancer-causing substances (carcinogens)


Nicotine, a deadly poison which at one time was used as an insecticide.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nobacco/LFSF/teen_smoking.htm

Although there do seem to be some physiological benefits, under specific circumstances, to substances like nicotine, the delivery system (which releases large numbers of other chemicals and causes "collateral damage" to the smoker and others) has a LOT of drawbacks! I think we can all agree on that part.

Apparent inverse link between smoking and the risk of Parkinson's:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070709/smoking_parkinson_070709?s_name=&no_ads=
"Dr. Beate Ritz of the UCLA School of Public Health and colleagues decided to pool data from 11,809 individuals (2,816 individuals with Parkinson's disease and 8,993 controls of the same age and sex but without Parkinson's disease) from 11 studies, conducted between 1960 and 2004.
They found that current smokers exhibited the lowest risk of developing Parkinson's disease, as did those who had continued to smoke to within five years of disease diagnosis."

Although this has been questioned (it won't reverse things if the disease is already underway)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=15372603&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
"The lack of influence on disease progression may indicate that cigarette smoking does not have a major neuroprotective effect in patients with already diagnosed PD."

The epidemiology guy down the hall from me notes that there does seem to be some evidence that smoking can help counteract the effects of schizophrenia. Apparently the proportion of schizophrenics who smoke heavily is significantly higher than the general population. And he says there some studies have suggested a kind of "protective" effect, going the other way, that results in them being less prone to certain cancers. (This part is very controversial, though -- might be due to other causative factors, or because the cancer often doesn't show up until later in life, and schizophrenics have shorter lifespans so they might not make it that long.)

http://www.mentalhealthcare.org.uk/research/expanded/index.php?id=21
"Just over one quarter of the UK population are smokers. In people with schizophrenia the rate of smoking is thought to be between two and four times higher. In addition, smokers with schizophrenia smoke more cigarettes per day and smoke stronger brands than other smokers.
Various theories have been put forward as to why so many people with schizophrenia smoke. It is thought that nicotine acts as a form of ‘self-medication’ for people with schizophrenia, producing a number of beneficial effects despite the negative impact of smoking on long term health."


http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/25/1069522588792.html
"Smoking may protect young people from developing schizophrenia, according to a study published in an international psychiatry journal.
The study also found the more cigarettes smoked, the better the protection against schizophrenia.
However it stressed that while the findings could shed light on the causes of schizophrenia, the hazards of smoking vastly outweighed any benefits."


http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/187/4/334
"For nearly a century there has been interest in the possibility that people with schizophrenia have a lower risk of cancer than the general population, with speculation that lower susceptibility to cancer might provide clues about the biological basis of schizophrenia. Recently, several biological hypotheses have been proposed to explain why people with schizophrenia might be protected against cancer, including a protective effect of excess dopamine (Basu & Dasgupta, 2000), enhanced natural killer cell activity (Yovel et al, 2000), an increase in the rate of apoptosis (Catts & Catts, 2000) and modulation by antipsychotic drugs of the human cytochrome enzymes involved in mutagen activation and elimination (Carrillo & Benitez, 1999). However, the epidemiological evidence for protection is not convincing."

As you know, the point of the article is "why is it so damn hard for some people to quit this"?

My recovery from smoking took many years and I will always consider myself in recovery. It is worthwhile to know that one is not "weak" or a "loser" if they have a hard time getting off the stuff, as there are real psychoneurological holds that this addiction plays on.

Good going, Bluebear. I think your "in recovery" explanation is very helpful, because I have a number of friends who are currently beating themselves up because they assume it's "only a cigarette" and therefore not a "serious" addiction like alcohol or hard drugs. And as you point out, that's not true.

Any substance that was able to spread from the Columbian contact to places as far away as Japan and Indonesia by 1600, must have some powerful hold on people. (We actually have documentation that some of the sailors on Columbus's voyage observed people smoking tobacco in the Caribbean, a couple of days after they made landfall ... and by the time they left for Europe, they had become smokers too. Apparently one of them was later questioned by the Spanish Inquisition after he was seen smoking a roll-up after his return. He's lucky they didn't light HIM up.)