Day 9
So, I wrote something the other day about this whole "quitting smoking" bid'nezz (PS: y'all are awesome, and I appreciate your love and support more than I can begin to tell you), and a few people mentioned the generally accepted knowledge about how nicotine is more addictive than herion.
I'm not entirely sure I believe that, as such, though I will readily accept that it is harder to quit smoking than it is to drop other narcotics. Obviously, I am not a scientist, and I don't care enough to look into all the super-geeky bits about nicotine and dopamine and bonding and whateer else there are in he way of Actual Meritorious Things To Back It Up, so it's totally possible that yes, it is actually more addictive when one breaks it down.
I don't really care.
Mostly, 'cos I am going to pose an argument that I touched on the other day: the integration of smoking into daily life.
Because I think that's what makes it so much harder than other drugs to quit - as evidenced by a number of friends and anecdotal evidence that smoking is so much more difficult than heroin to get out of the system. This is how I put it yesterday:
And yet, because we're not descending into massively destructive behaviours to fix, it it hard to wrap the mind around. I mean, people aren't typically breaking into houses to buy smokes, or driving into trees from smoking, or beating their wives 'cos they killed a pack in a few hours, or wasting away in a flophouse, smoking incessantly.
Along those same lines, we don't take a booze break every hour, or step outside at dinner to spike a vein, or do a line every time we get into a car, or have a shot of whiskey with our morning coffee (well. Most of us don't). All of these are pretty commonly accepted habits of smokers. Sure, there are those that will give smokers ugly looks, but by and large, while it's become kinda de riguer to think smoking's kinda gross, it's still pretty socially okie dokie as a vice to have. As a smoker, you will get teased for needing to have that hit after dinner, but it's not looked on with a sense of being hideously aghast that, you know, cooking down some smack might.
But it's a drug, and the science that I do know shows that nicotine hits the same reward receptors that your major narcotics do, and that's part of what makes it even more difficult to quit than Ennis DelMar ever hoped to be. And most smokers are used to getting that fix, if you will indulge me, anywhere from 10-30 times a day, depending on how heavy their habit was. For me, pretty much anywhere I was, I was going to be getting through about a pack a day.
Now, going back to the well of that analogy I am drawing:
Imagine that I was shooting heroin twenty times a day.
Ahhhh.
There we go. Now we see why it's so much more difficult to quit smoking than it is anything else. Even if it is less addictive by its nature than the big-time narcotics, you're getting a helluva lot more reinforcement on that behaviour than most do on their drugs of choice. Which, in turn, makes it infinitely more difficult to get over than hump.
Whatever the reason, it's hard as hell to stop it. Those are pretty massive receptors that ping up when a single drag is taken - in the past, I think I thought it was like... I dunno. Like, giving up Chocolate, or something. Like, LA LA, NO BIG DEAL. And I felt kinda like a dick that I couldn't just.. Get the hell over it. It's almost a cultural joke that "oh, sure, it's a DRUG, ha ha" - but it lacks the same weight of perception that most addictions do, despite evidence to the contrary. I've been guilty of it myself - when friends have quit smoking, I've never seen it as a Huge Hairy Deal. I've been like "oh, ok. Right on. Sucks for you." I know I'm not alone in that, either - it's not a Crisis!Situation! like someone getting clean from anything else is. So it's harder from that perspective, too.
It's been a long time since I got clean. It's been a long time since I've spent any real time thinking about the nature of addiction like this. It'll simmer back down shortly, but for now, these are really interesting thoughts. And, in all honesty, I kinda needed 'em - I'd lost a lot of sympathy for those still suffering in their addictions.
I promise I'll stop counting days at some point. It's been a long time since I did that, too.
I'm not entirely sure I believe that, as such, though I will readily accept that it is harder to quit smoking than it is to drop other narcotics. Obviously, I am not a scientist, and I don't care enough to look into all the super-geeky bits about nicotine and dopamine and bonding and whateer else there are in he way of Actual Meritorious Things To Back It Up, so it's totally possible that yes, it is actually more addictive when one breaks it down.
I don't really care.
Mostly, 'cos I am going to pose an argument that I touched on the other day: the integration of smoking into daily life.
Because I think that's what makes it so much harder than other drugs to quit - as evidenced by a number of friends and anecdotal evidence that smoking is so much more difficult than heroin to get out of the system. This is how I put it yesterday:
And yet, because we're not descending into massively destructive behaviours to fix, it it hard to wrap the mind around. I mean, people aren't typically breaking into houses to buy smokes, or driving into trees from smoking, or beating their wives 'cos they killed a pack in a few hours, or wasting away in a flophouse, smoking incessantly.
Along those same lines, we don't take a booze break every hour, or step outside at dinner to spike a vein, or do a line every time we get into a car, or have a shot of whiskey with our morning coffee (well. Most of us don't). All of these are pretty commonly accepted habits of smokers. Sure, there are those that will give smokers ugly looks, but by and large, while it's become kinda de riguer to think smoking's kinda gross, it's still pretty socially okie dokie as a vice to have. As a smoker, you will get teased for needing to have that hit after dinner, but it's not looked on with a sense of being hideously aghast that, you know, cooking down some smack might.
But it's a drug, and the science that I do know shows that nicotine hits the same reward receptors that your major narcotics do, and that's part of what makes it even more difficult to quit than Ennis DelMar ever hoped to be. And most smokers are used to getting that fix, if you will indulge me, anywhere from 10-30 times a day, depending on how heavy their habit was. For me, pretty much anywhere I was, I was going to be getting through about a pack a day.
Now, going back to the well of that analogy I am drawing:
Imagine that I was shooting heroin twenty times a day.
Ahhhh.
There we go. Now we see why it's so much more difficult to quit smoking than it is anything else. Even if it is less addictive by its nature than the big-time narcotics, you're getting a helluva lot more reinforcement on that behaviour than most do on their drugs of choice. Which, in turn, makes it infinitely more difficult to get over than hump.
Whatever the reason, it's hard as hell to stop it. Those are pretty massive receptors that ping up when a single drag is taken - in the past, I think I thought it was like... I dunno. Like, giving up Chocolate, or something. Like, LA LA, NO BIG DEAL. And I felt kinda like a dick that I couldn't just.. Get the hell over it. It's almost a cultural joke that "oh, sure, it's a DRUG, ha ha" - but it lacks the same weight of perception that most addictions do, despite evidence to the contrary. I've been guilty of it myself - when friends have quit smoking, I've never seen it as a Huge Hairy Deal. I've been like "oh, ok. Right on. Sucks for you." I know I'm not alone in that, either - it's not a Crisis!Situation! like someone getting clean from anything else is. So it's harder from that perspective, too.
It's been a long time since I got clean. It's been a long time since I've spent any real time thinking about the nature of addiction like this. It'll simmer back down shortly, but for now, these are really interesting thoughts. And, in all honesty, I kinda needed 'em - I'd lost a lot of sympathy for those still suffering in their addictions.
I promise I'll stop counting days at some point. It's been a long time since I did that, too.