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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (296153)	9/12/2002 1:49:32 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The issue of nicotine addiction has been marred by the loose use of the term "addiction": ....A psychiatrist who has done so [evaluated relative addictiveness] is Yale University lecturer Sally Satel, M.D. In a 1996 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial, she stated: Is it true that cigarettes are more addictive than heroin? This is ridiculous. When cigarettes are temporarily unavailable, smokers—as lousy as they may feel without a cigarette—don't initiate a crazed effort to find their next "fix." In contrast, people addicted to heroin commonly lie, cheat, or steal to get money to buy more, so distressing are the symptoms of heroin withdrawal. In the case of cocaine, the rush is so stimulating and the "crash" after a binge so wrenching that addicts will often do virtually anything to get more cocaine. Even alcoholics sometimes resort to desperate measures.... ...Alcohol and illegal drugs can render users unable to cope with ordinary life. It's a vicious circle for many users, who turned to alcohol or drugs because they had trouble coping and the substance prom-ised to numb their pain. By contrast, even the heaviest smokers don't forsake their families and jobs to pursue a nicotine habit. Cigarettes may shorten one's life, as sociologist James Q. Wilson has said, but they don't debase it.... ...According to a 1994 edition of The New York Times, Dr. Jack E. Henningfield of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and Dr. Neal L. Benowitz of the University of California at San Francisco independently ranked alcohol, caffeine, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and nicotine in terms of each of five categories: withdrawal symptoms; "reinforcement"—the likelihood that using the substance will result in its repeated use in preference to other substances; tolerance—the necessity of increasing use of the drug to maintain one's response to it; intoxication; and dependence—e.g., relative difficulty of discontinuing use of the drug. Neither scientist ranked nicotine as first among the six drugs in any of the above-mentioned categories except that of dependence—in which category both Henningfield and Benowitz ranked nicotine as first. And dependence of the kind they have defined is basically addiction of the "addicere" sort. This rank apparently holds across cultures. The Bottom Line Inherently, other drugs may have more "reinforcement" power than nicotine has; for example, they may please users more than nicotine pleases cigarette smokers. But addictive cigarette smokers smoke cigarettes more often than "drug addicts" use the drugs they favor. I consider cigarette smoking the most addictive form of drug taking. acsh.org Most people who diet gain the weight back within a year, and take several times to make it stick. Maybe they are "food addicts".......