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Essential question for research: “What are the effects of smoking nicotine and how would a withdrawal from the substance affect the users mentality?”

Health Source - Consumer Edition says tobacco products (cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, pipe tobacco, and cigars) contain the chemical nicotine. Nicotine is as addicting as cocaine or heroin. Most people who quit smoking or chewing tobacco have unpleasant emotional, mental, and physical effects. This state is called withdrawal.

Nicotine affects the brain. It creates pleasure in the brain, and it improves your mood. When you quit smoking or chewing tobacco, you may have symptoms while your body is getting used to being without the nicotine.

Some people like the smell, and sight of a cigarette, and the of handling, lighting, and smoking cigarettes.

New research has overturned the dogma that cigarette addiction takes years to develop. Studies of adolescent smokers show that symptoms of addiction, such as withdrawal, craving for cigarettes and failed attempts at quitting, can appear within the first weeks of smoking.

To account for these findings, scientists have developed a new theory positing that the brain quickly develops adaptations that counter the effects of nicotine.

a 14-year-old girl told me that she had made two serious attempts to quit, failing both times. This was eye-opening because she had smoked only a few cigarettes a week for two months. When she described her withdrawal symptoms, her story sounded like the lament of one of my two-pack-a-day patients.

Vindication has come with time as teams of investigators led by Jennifer O'Loughlin of McGill University, Denise Kandel of Columbia University and Robert Scragg of the University of Auckland in New Zealand replicated all of my discoveries. A dozen studies have now established that nicotine withdrawal is common among novice smokers.

  Of those who experience symptoms of addiction, 10 percent do so within two days of their first cigarette and 25 to 35 percent do so within a month. In a very large study of New Zealand youths, 25 percent had symptoms after smoking one to four cigarettes.

 These results raise the question of how the nicotine from a single cigarette could alter the brain enough to trigger the onset of addiction.

. Amazingly, in the early stages of addiction a single cigarette can suppress withdrawal symptoms for weeks, even though the nicotine is gone from the body within a day.

PHOTO (COLOR): ADOLESCENTS can become addicted to cigarettes just weeks after beginning to smoke.  One study showed that, on average, the youngsters were smoking only two cigarettes a week when the first symptoms of addiction appeared.

By Joseph R. DiFranza

Nicotine stimulates the craving-inhibition system until its activity far exceeds that of the craving-generation system. The brain attempts to restore its balance by rapidly developing adaptations that craving-generation system. (These changes are called withdrawal-related adaptations.)

Once the effects of nicotine wear off, the craving-inhibition system is no longer stimulated and returns to a lower level of activity.

Abstinence-related adaptations: A mechanism that mimics the action of nicotine by inhibiting craving. It develops in ex-smokers to counter the enduring effects of dependence-related tolerance.

Summary: In the two articles I noticed several things. The author was trying to prove that smoking cigarettes causes the smokers mentality to change. The first paragraph tells me what the smoker goes through in a withdrawal from nicotine and the way they act. When a child wants candy, but you say no and the child  throws a fit.  This is the same as when your body has a withdraw from a cigarette. Imagine that you had given the child the candy it would lead them to think that if they act up the candy would be theirs. Your body is like a child and if you spoil the child it will take control of your actions, thoughts, and words. The facts that really surprised me was when I read that a child only has to smoke 2 cigarettes to get hooked.