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THE ADDICTIVENESS OF NICOTINE

  

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doc04.gif (346 bytes)Lack of Efficacy of Transdermal Nicotine in Smoking Cessation - The "patch" does not even work as well as a placebo for quitting smoking after 48 weeks. Most of those studies showing the patch marginally effective were sponsored by  the PHARMACEUTICAL companies -- which have a clear goal to profit by selling nicotine "replacement" drugs.  Here is a letter written to the New England Journal of Medicine by the Veterans Affairs Medical Center on the lack of efficacy of the patch that the World Health Organization and other anti-smoker groups insist on promoting.
Fact Sheet on Smoking and Addiction - From Forest UK.
doc04.gif (346 bytes)Failing of the Disease Model of Addiction - "Especially during the last four decades, 'addiction' in this extreme pejorative meaning has been portrayed alternatively as a disease or a sin, and has been subject to social and moral sanctions. In an open society of free individuals such a coercion cannot be justified unless the condition is defined precisely by the simultaneous attributes of severe psychotoxicity, severe withdrawal symptoms, and recurrence tied to the loss of self-control and individual volition. Still, these attributes are open-ended, and an explicit metric of severity at which they may trigger social objection has not been clarified. As a consequence, 'addiction' allegations are left to elicit emotional, subjective, and value-laden responses ready to be exploited. A clamorous example is the claim by US officials that cigarette smoking is equal to the abuse of heroin or cocaine. An unequivocal definition of 'addiction' may restore some sense of proportion to official normative intervention." Analysis by Dr. Gio Batta Gori
When Will We Understand That Nicotine Is Not Addictive? - Yet another study discovers the obvious: smoking cessation gadgets do not work in the long run.  Why? The answer is simple: nicotine itself is not addictive, and smoking is a habit -- the habit, like all such behaviors, is psychological, not physical, and it is exerted through association. This view of the smoking habit is of course blasphemy nowadays, for everybody says that nicotine is addictive. But look at the players: 

$$  The pharmaceutical companies support the addiction "model" in order to sell patches and other devices; 

$$  Doctors profit by selling smoking cessation programs; 

$$  The tobacco industry profits when smokers feel they are hopelessly addicted and cannot quit;

$$  The anti-smokers, whose goal is to control 'unacceptable' personal behavior, exaggerate the concept of addiction in order to generate a feeling of guilt, so that smokers (and their families and colleagues) will accept and tolerate the anti-smokers' intrusive intolerance.  

Of course, once the flood gates of mislabeled addictive behavior are opened, it becomes possible (and profitable) to attempt to "control" other behaviors -- over-eating, drinking, etc.