Don’t despair if you’ve failed numerous attempts to quit smoking cigarettes
Don’t despair if you’ve failed numerous attempts to quit smoking cigarettes
If smoking cessation seems to require superhuman effort, that’s because it does!
In 2000, Reuters cited a report by doctors who said, “Nicotine is a powerful addictive substance on a par with heroin and cocaine and should be controlled like a drug or medicine.”, British doctors said on Tuesday.
In ascending order of the slavery of substance abuse:
Five to ten percent of the population is alcoholic.
Less than 50 percent of cocaine and heroin users are addicted to one or both drugs.
Seventy to eighty percent of smokers are addicted to nicotine.
These unlikely statistics do not come from some bogus lobby like NORML (The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), which is nothing more than a front for people, healthy or terminally ill, who want to get high on marijuana without criminal penalties or the increased cost of illicit drugs. There is an effective and acceptable alternative to marijuana. The substitute is the prescription drug Marinol, which comes in tablet form and contains THC, the psychoactive ingredient that provides the euphoria or “high” of marijuana.
In fact, Marinol is more effective than marijuana for treating pain, nausea and wasting syndrome. THC-in-a-tablet is also safer than smoking grass because the cannabis plant may be tainted with fungi that damage the lungs of patients with compromised immune systems, such as people with HIV or AIDS. But the marijuana vs. Marinol debate is a subject for another blog.
The culprit du jour is the most dangerous health threat in America today, cigarettes and the 60 carcinogenic chemicals hiding inside the product’s delivery system, waiting after a 30-year incubation period to damage the heart and lungs of its victims. The suspicious 80 percent addiction rate of tobacco users no longer seem suspicious when we learn the statistic’s impeccable source, Neal Benowitz, M.D., Chief of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Benowitz also supplied the addiction rates of the other drugs listed above.
So it’s not hysteria or the scare tactics of the Reefer Madness variety to report that nicotine is more addictive than heroin — a claim I too presumed was delusional until I learned of Dr. Benowitz’ research and credentials. The pharmacologist concluded that nicotine is much more dangerous than heroin, the popular Bogeyboy of zero-tolerance advocates who clamor for incarceration instead of rehabilitation for alleged drug offenders.
The reference to “zero intolerance” in this column’s subheadline represents a lame pun on zero tolerance, the legal theory enshrined in law that mandates imprisonment for first-time drug users regardless of what illict drug is found in their possession or bloodsteam and regardless of the amount of the drug. A single marijuana cigarette will send the convicted to prison as surely as kilos of heroin will.
The punishment is a draconian variation on the penalties imposed by, among other state ballot propositions, California’s 1994 Proposition 184 and Washington state’s 1993 Initiative 593, better known as “the three strikes, and you’re out” laws. Zero tolerance laws allow defendants only one “strike” and then “they’re in…” the penitentiary. In a 2002 study by Mary Rowe and Corinne Bendersky published by the Cornell University Press, the researchers maintain that “little evidence supports the claimed effectiveness of zero tolerance policies.”
There are obvious reasons that heroin and other narcotics are legally proscribed and incur stiff criminal penalties while cigarettes are available at liquor stores everywhere. There is no lobby for heroin or crack cocaine users, while tobacco producers and the growth industry of prison construction support the criminalization of drugs. The motivation for prison-construction companies comes from an indisputable statistic provided by the U.S. Department of Justice: 36 percent of the federal prison population consists of non-violent drug offenders.
The most lethal drug dealers, cigarette producers, and their partners in profits, the prison construction industry, fund lobbyists who persuade legislators to lock ‘em up and throw away the key. The larger the number of incarcerated addicts the fatter the balance sheets of prison builders. Drug offenders, of course, aren’t the only moneymakers for prison constructors.
NationMaster, a data base whose contributors include the CIA and the United Nations, reports that the U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any other nation, including Russia, which ranks second. At No. 155, totalitarian Cuba isn’t even a contender in the incarceration sweepstakes. Opponents of Communism will also be disappointed to learn that neo-Stalinist China weighs in at 71.
Corporate tobacco competes with the corner drug dealer for those unfortunates with addictive personalities. A rich man’s Cuban cigar