There is a new smoking ban going into effect in Chicago soon, and the news radio is running a piece, within which a spokesperson for a quasi-governmental stop smoking hotline/institute states that quitting smoking is harder than quitting cocaine or heroin or some other substance I didn't catch. I've heard this claim before and never really gave it much conscious thought. Two things occur to me, first that if this is in fact true, given the number of people who die each year from tobacco use, the government position on the tobacco drug is versus these other less dangerous drugs is inconsistent. Old news.
What really occurred to me, having quit/withdrawn from all the substances she mentioned, is that this is a ridiculous assertion. In fact, I continued smoking for years because the initial symptoms of nicotine withdrawal (at least in me) are very similar to early stage heroin withdrawal. No way I'm doing that. Turns out, there are no further nicotine withdrawal symptoms.
Anyway, I can't think of a single metric whereby "nicotine is harder to quit than..." could be true. How is it that such a thing could be presented as fact by an expert?
Also, I ran into this rather long article yesterday, and wasn't going to post it, but since I've gone this far, dailynews.com
The part I found interesting is
"Back then, Fleming says, 1.3 percent of the population was addicted to drugs, which sounded alarming. He looked into it some more and found that in 1915, 1.3 percent of the population was also addicted. In 2007, he says 1.3 percent is still hooked."
I don't know if this is accurate either. Hard to know if anyone fact checks anything, or just puts out what they think is true or hope/want to be true. It must be true, I heard it on the radio.
ARS |
