Smoking - The anatomy of dependence

You first lit in your adolescence. You were invincible and knew you could stop any time. That first puff tasted vile, but there was a kick to it. Your pulse raced and you catapulted into the elite group who dared to live on the edge. Soon, smoking has become to feel as natural as breathing.

Now decades later, you're much older and wiser and desperate to quit smoking. And worry about your own children. What happened during those exciting first encounters with tobacco?

Justset, a combination of peer pressure and advertising appealing attracted you to take your first puff. Then, nicotine took over.

Nicotine is a psychoactive drug. In other words, it affects brain chemistry. In fact, when waves in the brain, less than ten seconds after you draw tobacco smoke into your lungs, it defines the neurotransmitters in your brain dance. A press more than 200 chemicals, including dopamine, serotonin and beta-endorphin contributes to the impulse of mood you're feelingwhen you get your fix. But that's not all.

Nicotine also increases the absorption of glucose by the brain. The result? This sense of clarity and increased concentration that makes smoking so attractive and creates what ah! factor behind the features of tobacco addicts.

Combine these with a release of adrenaline - the flight or fight hormone and suppression of insulin leading to increased blood sugar and you get a very powerful stimulant which gives a snapshothigh.

So how do you get addicted?

Scientists have determined that substance abuse is usually a four-part process.

The first part is the attraction - it's advertising and peer pressure mentioned above. There is also desire to imitate the hard beautiful or seductive vamps in the old films that always seem to have a cigarette in hand.

Seduction is followed by experimentation when you take your first tentative puffs and join the group that dares to ignore itsindependence.

Soon, for many, smoking becomes a regular activity but still limited. After smoking rituals in the school forge links between budding addicts who mock their peers timid fear to join the club.

The problem is that you need increasing amounts of nicotine for their height. Thus, the few puffs a day behind the school running in a pack or two a day. Every day.

So finally you're hooked. You smoke openly. It is part of your life.

Scientistsused to think that getting addicted to nicotine is a lengthy process, taking up to a year or more. But recent findings of the Mayo Clinic suggest that children who had smoked a few cigarettes were also addicted than adult smokers hardened. Nicotine is that powerful.

It is estimated that adolescent smokers who manage to quit later in life smoke for 20 years on average before detoxification. Some do not. Half of all teenagers who smoke today will die from tobacco-related diseasesunless they manage to quit in time.

Clearly it is better never to begin to understand the process and dependence can alert you to dangerous steps involved in Getting Hooked on cigarettes.

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