Can you guess how long cigarette cartons have had to carry warning labels? In the United States, since 1965. It has been over fifty years! And the fight is still going to keep people from literally killing themselves.
The latest idea? Australia was the first to mandate that cigarette packages can have nothing on them at all – except health warnings. No name-brands, no advertisements, just the fact that cigarettes will kill you.
quite frankly i think at this point the biggest thing keeping smoking from going away is that people don’t treat it like a real addiction. it’s more addictive than heroin, and withdrawal is incredibly uncomfortable and distracting, and can last for months, but smokers are expected to ‘just quit’ while going about life as normal. which is, of course, stressful, and if your coping mechanism for stress is smoking… yeah.
it also appears to have some effect on sensory processing disorder, so when i smoked i was self-medicating for something there is literally no treatment for. and since spd is one of those invisible illnesses people don’t even find out they have until it’s ruining their lives, i would say a LOT of addicts are self-medicating for it. my uncle’s go-to was alcohol, and it killed him.
this isn’t people not being ‘strong enough’ or not knowing it’s bad for them. at this point, everyone knows smoking gives you lung cancer. making the warnings more obnoxious won’t do jack shit. what society needs to do is start treating nicotine addiction as a real addiction that is hard as fuck to break, and needs to stop stigmatizing addiction and ignoring its causes.
sorry for the rant. it’s just that i spent a literal decade trying to quit smoking. i’m pretty much the strongest willed person on planet earth, i could punch out gods with my brain, but i relapsed over and over until i finally just took three months off from life and gave myself permission to do literally nothing except Not Smoke. spent days on end in bed. ate nothing but junk food because i had to be chewing constantly. had a terrible attitude. played minecraft for 24 hours solid. didn’t bathe. basically would’ve gotten fired from any job if i had one, and dumped by any partner except a saint like seebs. it’s a big fucking deal.
and people treat it like it’s just a bad habit like scratching your balls in public.
i just. have emotions about this ok.
Another group that often smokes? People with psychotic disorders. Think schizophrenia, bipolar – disabling disorders that are for life, and which require some of mankind’s heaviest brain-affecting medication.
One underlying cause of psychotic disorders is problems in how their brains distribute dopamine. Some areas get too much, others too little. These imbalances cause hallucinations, delusions, apathy … a long list of not-fun-at-all symptoms. Anti-psychotics attempt to fix that dopamine distribution problem. But well…they aren’t perfect and brains are pretty complex. So more people on anti-psychotic medications end up with too little dopamine in their brains.
And guess what increases dopamine? Smoking! People with psychotic disorders have high rates of smoking, as their brains try and compensate for their low dopamine cause by anti-psychotic medication. That same anti-psychotic medication which allows them to function.
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