• Physical addiction to nicotine
• Behavior addiction of handling and lighting cigarettes

There is absolutely no disagreement that nicotine is addictive.

The Physical Nicotine Addiction

Everybody agrees that it is, in fact, an addictive substance…and it is poison, too. Nicotine is the tobacco plant’s natural protection against insects. In the same volume, nicotine is a poison that is more deadly than strychnine and rattlesnake venom.

Nicotine is three times more lethal than arsenic.

Within eight seconds of inhaling cigarette smoke, dopamine is released into the blood stream.

Dopamine is a kind of chemical messenger that is similar to adrenaline. Dopamine affects the way that the brain processes emotional responses, pain and pleasure.

Nicotine, therefore, affects the mood of the person who is inhaling the tobacco smoke.

Nicotine in cigarette smoke actually alters transmitters and receptors in the brain. This alteration causes addiction.

When any attempt is made to stop supplying nicotine to the body is made there will be extreme anxiety and strong mood swings.

The Behavioral Addiction of Nicotine

Consider this: Smoking is a whole body habit. The removing a cigarette from a package; the handling of a cigarette; the lighting of a cigarette; inhaling smoke; exhaling smoke; tapping ashes off the cigarette as it burns; even extinguishing the cigarette after it has been smoked are all part of the total smoking addiction.

So what’s the answer?

For a person to successfully stop smoking, the entire habit must be addressed. Just withholding nicotine for a period of time long enough to undo the physical changes made to the brain is not sufficient.

Often one habit is replaced by another habit…and sometimes the replacement is as deadly as or even more deadly than the first habit.

Using a program that addresses nicotine and smoking addictions simultaneously is the only way to successfully break them.

For a long time, those who were “for” smoking….tobacco growers, tobacco product manufacturers, tobacco companies, and tobacco users were winning the war of public opinion as well as the legislation wars.

Ashtrays were provided. Spittoons were visible and handily placed in all public buildings. Smoking was “cool”.

Public figures were smokers…so were movie stars. The famous and the infamous were smokers. Cigarettes and cigars were smoked on stage and on screen. Most men smoked and it didn’t take women more than a decade to catch up.

Then along about 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States issued the first “warning” about the dangers of smoking…and all bets were off.

It seemed that people were willing to accept the dangers of atomic warfare but the dangers of cigarette smoke in public places was a danger that the anti-smoking contingent weren’t willing to take any longer. The Anti-Smoking Movement has grown and thrived.

Amazingly enough in only a little more than 20 years the public has done an about-face on the popular opinion concerning smoking.

Smoking was a perfectly acceptable social behavior in 1964 but today it is a social no-no and maybe even considered an unacceptable character flaw.

According to the reported numbers of sales of tobacco products, smoking has declined but not by as much as most people think. Apparently there are now a large number of ‘closet’ smokers.

Smoking is public buildings is illegal almost everywhere now. Legislation has been enacted that has made it so.

Taxes have been levied that make smoking a habit that a lot of people just simply cannot afford and yet, the number of tobacco sales does not reflect the degree of changed behavior that is touted by the anti-smoking lobby.

We’re getting there…but there’s a way to go yet!

In all of the various versions of the exploding cigar story Ulysses S. Grant gives an exploding cigar to somebody (depending upon which version is being told). The recipient of the cigar saves it as a memento of meeting the President. Eventually somebody (again depending upon which version is being told) many years later lights the cigar (usually at the worst possible moment) and Grant’s practical joke finally bears fruit.

Urban legends are, if nothing else, interesting. Most of the various versions of the exploding cigar story are variations of the Associated Press news article that was published December 20, 1932.

One of the versions goes like this:

Former President Grant is invited to speak at a graduation ceremony and, per tradition, he is given an honorary degree. He gives the dean, an old war buddy, a cigar in return as a token of his appreciation.

A few weeks later Grant wires and asks how he liked the cigar. The Dean replies that he will keep it and treasure it, unsmoked.

The Cigar is passed down through the Dean’s family and many decades pass.

A houseguest of a distant descendent of the dean sees the cigar and unaware of its significance lights up. It performs normally for a moment, and then explodes. Grant’s practical joke finally gets played out after a 100 years.

There are lots of variations but all of them begin with Grant giving the cigar to somebody and then the cigar finally exploding quite by accident more than a 100 years later. The story is a bit far-fetched. The powder in the cigar would have had to been kept completely dry for all of those 100 years…but it does make a pretty funny tale.

It simply doesn’t make any sense. Tobacco smoke…whether is comes from tobacco wrapped in nice white paper with a filter on one end or from a tobacco that is wrapped in a dark tobacco leaf…is still harmful. Many television shows depict the heroes as cigar smokers….cigarette smokers are always the villains.

Okay…I’ll get off my soap box now and just tell you about cigars. The first depiction we have of cigar smoking comes from the Mediterranean region in the 10th century on pieces of pottery that have been uncovered.

Christopher Columbus is credited (blamed) for introducing tobacco to Europe. (Tobacco plants are not native to any countries other than the Americas.)
There’s a story

The story goes that two of Chris’s crew members, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, got off the boat in Cuba and took a few puffs off of maize-wrapped tobacco, were totally entranced by it and that thus became the first two European cigar smokers in history.

Cuban tobacco seeds found their way to the Philippines in 1592 via the Spanish Galleon, San Clemente, where they were distributed to the Roman Catholic missions. The tobacco seeds loved their new home and flourished. The rest, as they say, is history.

During the 1800’s cigar smoking was wide spread while cigarette smoking was not. The cigar business flourished. Cigars were all rolled by hand in the early days.

Today, as a symbol of prestige and even though cigar rolling has become mechanized, many cigars are still rolled by hand. The boxes of hand rolled cigars cost much more than machine rolled cigars and they are labeled totalmente a mano which means “totally by hand”.

But smoking….whether you smoke bad cigarettes or cool cigars… is still smoking. Don’t!

This post is not intended to encourage the smoking of cigarettes but rather to simply inform the reader about cigarettes.

The earliest use of cigarettes that we have evidence of was in Central America during the 9th century AD. Priests and deities are depicted smoking using reeds and smoking tubes on pottery found from that period. Tobacco was only one of the ingredients used in these early cigarettes. There were other psychoactive drugs used as well.

Actually the spread of cigarette smoking was rather slow as compared to many other changes in the world. It wasn’t until the mid 1800’s when the Crimean Wars were fought that British soldiers adopted the habit of their Ottoman comrades who rolled tobacco in newsprint and smoked it.

The cigarette wasn’t called a “cigarette” until later when beggars in Seville started collecting the ends of cigars left on the ground by the rich young men, wrapping them in paper and smoking them.

The cigarette like most things has evolved over the centuries. For example: if you examine a cigarette closely you will see that there are thin bands of paper used that form circles along the length of the cigarette. These alternating sections of thin and thick paper cause faster burning when the cigarette is drawn on and slower burning between draws on the cigarette.

Eventually smoking became even more popular to people of all social classes. Smoking was more popular than drinking coffee!

But trouble was brewing (pardon the pun) for smokers!

Ancient Turkey covered a lot of territory all through the Mediterranean area. There were a great many people and different cultures so, as you might imagine, there were a lot of different opinions about tobacco, smoking and its use.

Guess what? The anti-tobacco protests began almost immediately. Of course, if there are protests, you can be certain that laws aren’t going to be far behind.

Laws were enacted to restrict tobacco smoking in certain areas like in the markets, coffeehouses and other public places.

There’s more…..

The people in the North African region were particularly opposed to smoking and they were very aggressive toward people who were found smoking in public areas. They didn’t hesitate to use the most extreme methods to get their point across that “smoking tobacco would not be tolerated”.

It got ugly. The anti-smoking contingent was particularly upset over the addictive power of tobacco and there were those who considered smoking tobacco an immoral act.

The pro-tobacco group was just as out-spoken about their “right” to smoke. They proclaimed that tobacco was “God’s creation”. They said that it came from the earth and there was nothing wrong with using whatever the earth provided.

That dispute has apparently never been settled. It seems that the same two sides are still at war and both are still making the same claims.

That’s a neat story but it still doesn’t explain who the first person was who rolled up a dry tobacco leaf, set fire to one end and inhaled the smoke through the other end.

There is a little evidence of the presence of nicotine in a few Old World plants like belladonna and Nicotiana Africana and some remnants of nicotine have been found in human remains and in pipes in the near East and in Africa. However, there is absolutely no evidence of any kind of habitual use of nicotine in the ancient world anywhere except in the Americas.

Experts believe that the tobacco plant as we know it first appeared about 6000 years BC and by about a 1000 years BC ancient Indian tribes had begun to find ways to use the tobacco plant…including smoking it and chewing it and by 1000 AD tobacco use was wide spread in the Americas.

Some of Columbus’ sailors found Arawak and Taino Indians smoking tobacco, took up the habit and began to spread it around the world. Beans, corn and tobacco were actually the first products that were exported from the New World to the Old World. In his journals, Christopher Columbus goes into great detail concerning tobacco and its uses.