Easy to start, hard to quit

Did you know that nicotine is as addictive as heroin or cocaine? If someone uses nicotine again and again, such as by smoking cigarettes or cigars or chewing tobacco, his or her body develops tolerance, he or she needs more drug to get the same effect. Eventually, a person can become addicted. Once a person becomes addicted, it is extremely deifficult to quit. People who start smoking before the age of 21 have the hardest time quitting, and fewer than 1 in 10 people who try to quit smoking succeed.

When nicotine addicts stop smoking they may suffer from restlessness, hunger, depression, headaches, and other uncomfortable feelings. These are called “withdrawal symptoms” because they happen when nicotine is withdrawn from the body.

Withdrawal may be bad, but long-term smoking can be much worse. It raises your blood preassure, dulls your senses of smell and taste, reduces your stamina, and wrinkles your skin. More dangerously, long-term smoking can lead to fatal heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, and cancer.

You may be surprised to learn that tobacco use causes far more illnesses and death than all other addicting drugs combined. One out every six deaths in the United States is a result of smoking.

But even when faced with risk of death, many people keep using tobacco because they are addicted to nicotine. Believe it or not, half of the smokers who have heart attacks keep smoking, even though their doctor warns them to stop. That’s a strong addiction!

Smokeless tobacco also has harmful effects. Chewing tobacco can cause damage to gum tissue and even loss of teeth. It also reduces a person’s ability to taste and smell. Most importantly, smokeless tobacco contains cancer causing-chemicals that can cause cancer of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus. This can even happen in very young users of chewing tobacco. In fact, most people who develop these cancers were users of chewing tobacco.