How do people get addicted to cigarettes? I know i's the nicotine but what does it do to get someone addicted?

Answer 1

Well when the nicotine goes through the blood stream it travels through out your body, which soon your body gets adapted to it and wants more....this effects your brain because, it tells you that you need a cigarettes.

Answer 2

Nicotine triggers certain neurotransmitters in the brain and gives you a "good" feeling that encourages you (subconsciously) to smoke more.

Nicotine, like heroin or cocaine, is a very powerful and very addictive substance. Be aware that everyone is different however, and will respond differently to the drug.

For example...I've smoked cigarettes in my life but find them utterly disgusting...just something to do when you're drinking or whatever. Do I smoke every day?? Not a chance...some people it just doesn't affect the way it affects others.

Also, the more exposure you have with cigarettes, the more likely you are to get addicted. Smoking is a social disease as much as it is anything else. All of your idiot friends think it's cool to smoke so you start doing it too. Pretty soon you're smoking a pack a day and you don't know why.

Don't start something stupid that you may not be able to stop. You deserve more than an untimely death from lung cancer.

Answer 3

Cigarettes are addicting on many levels. While things are changing, there is the addictive routine of pulling one out, lighting up, taking a draw, and all the mannerisms that go with that. Coupled with a few beers, you feel almost naked without a weed in your hand.

Then of course there is the soothing feeling that comes from pulling the smoke into your lungs.(probably from crowding out oxygen)

The topper is the euphoria that you get from the nicotine. A very mild narcotic that feels great and is noticed when absent.

Quitting can be so hard because of the multiple facets of the addictive behavior.

Answer 4

I'm a smoker, and I have been since I was like 14. When I went to college at the age of 19, I tried all sorts of "first time your addicted drugs" and I wouldn't do them again if you paid me. Just to give you an illustration; I've tried shrooms, meth, acid, crack, coke, various pills. And yet to this day, I still smoke camel cigarettes. I don't know why. I tried all the other drugs and said no after, but I can't however, say no to the cigarette. It's a comfort thing I suppose, knowing that the only that is going to relax your nerves is a juicy fermaldahyde* stick.

Answer 5

Scientists understand nicotine addiction quite well. The key experiment that led to our understanding was a simple one: Investigators introduced radioactively-labelled nicotine into the brain and looked to see where it went. They found that individual nicotine molecules attached themselves to a previously unknown protein on the surface of brain nerve cells!

These so-called "nicotine receptors" usually bind a natural brain chemical, acetylcholine. It was just an accident of nature that nicotine, an obscure chemical from a tobacco plant, was also able to bind to them. What then is the normal function of the nicotine receptors?

Each activity in the brain involves constant communication between nerve cells. One nerve cell communicates with another by throwing a chemical at it. The target cells have on their surface receptor proteins, each with a shape that "fits" that chemical signal and no other. Like playing catch, communicating nerve cells lob these signal chemicals back and forth.

Different brain cells carrying out different activities often use different chemical signals. The signals include chemicals such as acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, glycine, and a host of others.

With all this signalling going on, the brain cannot function effectively without a way to coordinate its many activities -- to adjust a particular activity "UP" or "DOWN" relative to others. The brain does this in a direct and logical way, by adjusting the sensitivities of each of its many different kinds of receptors to their chemical signals.

The tool it uses to do this is a central coordinating receptor -- the very one to which nicotine binds. The role of this receptor is to "fine tune" the sensitivity of a wide variety of other brain receptors to their chemical signals, adjusting particular kinds of receptors up or down to slow some activities, speed others, and in this way to achieve overall coordination of the brain's activities.

So how does nicotine cause chemical addiction? When neurobiologists compare the brain nerve cells of smokers to those of nonsmokers, they find that nicotine binds this coordinating receptor, stimulating it. By overriding the normal system used by the brain to coordinate its many activities, nicotine alters the pattern of release by nerve cells of many neurotransmitters, including acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, and many others -- like turning up the setting on a TV remote that controls many television sets. As a result, changes in level of activity occur in a wide variety of nerve pathways within the brain. These changes are responsible for the profound effect smoking has on the brain's activities.

Addiction occurs because the nervous system responds piecemeal to nicotine's fiddling with its central control. The brain attempts to "turn the volume back down" by readjusting the sensitivities of each kind of receptor individually, eventually restoring an appropriate balance of activity. Unfortunately, in many children these readjustments apparently occur after only a few cigarettes.

Answer 6

it does something in your brain to make it ask for it all the time

Answer 7

It is a drug and hooks people like most drugs

http://www.ash.org.uk/html/factsheets/html/fact09.html