this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Nicotine is one of the hardest addictions to get over. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin or cocaine. I wish you good luck, but don't blame yourself if you can't quit.
I quit in 2000 and I think the only way I was able to quit was because I worked in a place where everyone smoked, so I got a ton of second-hand smoke. I doubt I would have been able to do it otherwise and it was still one of the harder things I'd have to do.
Lol comparing it to heroin.
It's not the substance itself that is addictive, it's cultural aspects and ease of access. When you can throw a stone in any direction and hit a store that sells tobacco, it's going to be harder to quit. Even if you are far away from a store, if your near any significant group of people you can find someone who will give you a cigarette.
Now if I wanted heroin it would probably take me a week to bounce messages around some of my more downtrodden acquaintances before I found a dealer. And you won't find anyone who is going to share their heroin with you. If you knew the hoops people would jump through and fire they would walk across to obtain heroin, you wouldn't compare that to cigarettes. Hardly anyone would do all that shit just for a smoke.
It's compared to heroin in terms of how addictive it is. And considering people have spent their entire lives trying to quit and failed, that seems right to me.
I bet you think I made that up, don't you? I did not.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nicotine+as+addictive+as+heroin
It just isn't as addictive. Period. They are comparing something with ubiquitous access to something extremely difficult to source. If people had source tobacco like they source heroin, no one would smoke.
There are almost no withdrawal symptoms from quitting smoking. I dare you to use H for a month and then quit cold turkey. I will smoke for a month and do the same... we can compare notes about how addictive they are after the experiment.
(My tinfoil hat is these points about addictiveness and nicotine relapse is just pushed by big tobacco to make it seem harder to quit than it actually is)
Based on what evidence?
Weird, because I sure had them. Like several days of shaking and nausea.
I was on various opioids for over a year due to my trigeminal neuralgia. They didn't work, but my neurologist tried one after another. So in a way, I was using thing nearly as strong as heroin with a similar profile for a lot longer. Quitting them had similar side effects, but it wasn't as hard. Something tells me you don't have personal experience with this and are just guessing.
Or maybe it's very, very hard to quit since, again, some people try over and over again their entire lives and fail. I'm sure you're aware of that, so I'm not sure why you're pretending you aren't.
Ask anyone who has tried both. Ask all of the people who tried smoking in their teens and didn't continue.
I had a minor headache for a couple days, and that's about it other than cravings. I have yet to meet anyone whose quit who had significant withdrawal symptoms, and some of them have smoked for decades.
Comparing a clinical doses of opoids is not the same at all as street heroin where no one is controlling the dose. Your doctor will keep your dose standardized, when you do heroin you will eventually get bags that are way stronger, your tolerance will increase to a level that a doctor wouldn't prescribe to someone unless they were on hospice. Once you have that tolerance, quitting is incredibly excruciating, you will be sicker than you ever have been in your life. Maybe after a week you will stop being sick, and if your lucky after 2 weeks the extreme depression might ease a bit.
It's just not a good comparison. Ubiquitous access vs extremely difficult access is the only reason people compare them. The substances themselves are not even in the same ballpark in terms of physical addictiveness.
Yeah, my doctor switched me to a different dosage and even a different type of opioid on the regular.
It's almost as if you don't know me.
And you have not actually negated the many articles which say the opposite of your evidence-free claim.