By Ronald Soderquist, Ph.D.

Click here to contact Ronald and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile

Before we explore whether smoking is an addiction or a habit, let’s look at tobacco’s “Good Old Days”. In 1566, tobacco cured many diseases. Catherine de Medici, the Queen of France, received snuff (powdered tobacco) to treat her migraine, and later decreed it Herba Regina. Numerous claims were made of the benefits of tobacco, such as prevention of toothache, losing fingernails, worms, halitosis, lockjaw, and cancer. Talk about the Good Old Days for tobacco, it didn’t cause diseases – it cured them!

“Good Old Days” even had melodrama! It was Sir Francis Drake who introduced tobacco to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585, and, as the story goes, a servant finding Raleigh smoking thought he was on fire and dumped a bucket of beer on his head!

Cigarettes were a great comfort to the millions fighting in W.W. II. Tobacco companies (generously?) gave cartons of cigarettes to millions of soldiers and sailors. W.W. II movies showed chaplains handing lit cigarettes to wounded soldiers to comfort them. And smoking was romantic. As seen by millions, when Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lit up, it heated up the romance! At single bars, a guy could make a friendly move by offering to light a gal’s cigarette. Smoking was a way for patients and their relatives to pass the time in the hospital, where patients, doctors and nurses would light up. It was “relaxing”.

Cigarettes were more pervasive until recently. People smoked in their homes, offices and restaurants. Smoking ads were on T.V., Billboards, everywhere you looked. In 1983, the Brown and Williamson tobacco company agreed to pay Sylvester Stallone $500,000 to use their cigarettes in each of his next five films. Cigarette companies were everywhere, too. How weird is it that the University of Virginia accepted 20 million from Philip Morris reportedly to study how to “prevent” children from starting the smoking habit. Lately, the popular television series Mad Men has revisited the cigarette as art form, to capture the ambiance of American culture in the early 1960s. Are cigarettes making a comeback? The tobacco companies sure hope so.

For those of you of the younger generation, it was only in 1988 that California barred smoking in airlines, buses and trains to and from the state.

In the 1970’s when we took our family to Hawaii I asked for the non-smoking section. Our “non smoking” seats were immediately behind a chain smoker who kept us coughing for five hours. From that time I agreed with a friend who said: “A smoking section in a plane or restaurant is like a peeing section in a swimming pool.”

Now, back to the question: is smoking Addiction or Habit?

The case for “Smoking as Addiction” is found in the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report, “Nicotine Addiction,” which concluded that:

•Cigarettes and other forms of tobacco are addicting.

•Nicotine is the drug that causes addiction.

Dr. Sharma, professor and researcher reported: “Research has shown that nicotine, like cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, increases the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which affects the brain pathways that control reward and pleasure…Nicotine, is a powerful addiction, and a very tough one to break. Nicotine meets the criteria of a highly addictive drug.”

Now the case for “Smoking as a Habit.”

The first bit of evidence is that of the estimated 40 million ex-smokers in the U.S, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop determined the vast majority quit on their own. The second bit of evidence: when Philip Morris was so generously taking care of our servicemen with free cartons of cigarettes, 44% of U.S. adults smoked. Now, it’s only 22%. The third bit of evidence: when the price of a pack of cigarettes went up to $5, smokers didn’t rob banks to get money to smoke. Lots of them just quit.

I have a prediction. If you are over the age of 30, you know one or more smokers who quit on their own. Some years ago I got curious about self-quitting smokers. My goal was 65 ex-smokers. I didn’t have much trouble finding them. Ex-smokers were everywhere! Neighbors, relatives, and friends. I interviewed them and they were kind enough to fill out a questionnaire. What did I discover? The majority remembered the quitting experience as rather easy to moderately difficult. Memories, of course, are subjective and unreliable. But only a small minority remembered a difficult struggle. According to the addiction experts quitting is supposed to be very hard for everyone!

When my own father was about 80 I asked him how he quit smoking. Here is what he said: “I started smoking at age 15 and quit at 65. That’s 50 years. How did I quit? One evening I noticed I was out of cigarettes. I usually walked down to a nearby store to get my supply. That evening I decided I would wait until tomorrow. The next day I decided to wait again. I never smoked again.”

Surprisingly, some experts changed focus from “addiction” to “habit.” In 1976, Columbia University psychologist Stanley Schachter wrote: “We smoke because we’re physically addicted to nicotine. Period.” Dr. Schachter was himself a chain smoker at the time.

But just six years later, in 1982, Dr. Schachter wrote in Psychology Today: “The generally accepted professional and public impression that nicotine addiction is an almost hopelessly difficult condition to correct is flatly wrong. People can and do cure themselves of smoking. They do so in large numbers and for long periods of time, and in many cases, apparently, they’re able to do so permanently.”

What happened between 1976 and 1982? Dr. Schachter began talking to ex-smokers. In fact he interviewed 77 smokers who had tried to quit on their own. He reported: “66% were successful, a higher rate than most with professional help.” He discovered, as I did, that most self-quitters said their only technique was deciding to stop.

A therapist friend recently told me that men and women seem to have a stubborn streak that goes something like this: “You say I’m addicted? You say I can’t quit? You say nicotine controls me? I’ll show you! I’ll just quit!” Research experts object that you aren’t supposed to be able to do that. That it takes at least three weeks to change a habit and it’s really, really hard. To that the smoker says: “I broke the rules. I stopped on my own.”

So what is your conclusion, is it an Addiction or Habit. Or both? As you can see, I believe that, for most smokers, it is more habit than addiction.

No matter which view you believe to be correct, if you have friends that smoke you can help them get beyond the myth that all smokers have a hard time quitting. Encourage them to talk with ex-smokers to learn how they did it. It’s O.K. that some smokers need help to quit. They may be relieved to know researchers have decided hypnosis has the highest percentage of success with smokers. At my office we developed our Quit Easy program with medical hypnosis. It has worked so well we offer a lifetime guarantee—and rare is the smoker who has returned to their cigarettes.

My favorite self-quitting story came from a university professor friend, Dr. Mark Matthews. “I was reading the paper and enjoying my pipe when my 5 yr old grandson came up and said: ‘Grandpa, you are smoking.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do smoke a pipe.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t you know smoking will give you cancer of the uterus?’ I did a double take. He was so sweet and so serious, I didn’t laugh. But I thought: ‘Isn’t it wonderful that he already knows smoking is dangerous.’ So right then and there I put my pipe away for good.”

©Copyright 2009 by Ronald Soderquist, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact Ronald and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile