Tobacco Addiction

What Is Tobacco Addiction?

When people are addicted, they have a compulsive need to seek out and use a substance, even when they understand the harm it can cause. Tobacco products—cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and smokeless tobacco—can all be addictive. Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you, and most people that do it want to quit. In fact, nearly 35 million people make a serious attempt to quit each year. Unfortunately, most who try to quit on their own relapse—often within a week.

Is Nicotine Addictive?

Yes. It is actually the nicotine in tobacco that is addictive. Each cigarette contains about 10 milligrams of nicotine. Because the smoker inhales only some of the smoke from a cigarette, and not all of each puff is absorbed in the lungs, a smoker gets about 1 to 2 milligrams of the drug from each cigarette. Although that may not seem like much, it is enough to make someone addicted.

Is Nicotine the Only Harmful Part of Tobacco?

No. Nicotine is only one of more than 4,000 chemicals, many of which are poisonous, found in the smoke from tobacco products. Smokeless tobacco products also contain many toxins, as well as high levels of nicotine. Many of these other ingredients are things we would never consider putting in our bodies, like tar, carbon monoxide, acetaldehyde, and nitrosamines. Tar causes lung cancer, emphysema, and bronchial diseases. Carbon monoxide causes heart problems, which is one reason why smokers are at high risk for heart disease.

How Is Tobacco Used?

Tobacco can be smoked in cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. It can be chewed or, if powdered, sniffed. “Bidis” are an alternative cigarette. They originally came from India and were hand-rolled. In the United States, bidis were popular with teens because they come in colorful packages with flavor choices. Some teens think that bidis are less harmful than regular cigarettes, but in fact they have more nicotine, which may make people smoke more, giving bidis the potential to be even more harmful than cigarettes. Hookah—or water pipe smoking—practiced for centuries in other countries, has recently become popular among teens in the United States as well. Hookah tobacco comes in many flavors, and the pipe is typically passed around in groups. Although many hookah smokers think it is less harmful than smoking cigarettes, water pipe smoking still delivers the addictive drug nicotine and is at least as toxic as cigarette smoking.

What Are the Common Street Names?

You might hear cigarettes referred to as “smokes,” “cigs,” or “butts.” Smokeless tobacco is often called “chew,” “dip,” “spit tobacco,” “snus,” or “snuff.” People may refer to hookah smoking as “narghile,” “argileh,” “shisha,” “hubble-bubble,” or “goza.”

How Many Teens Use It?

The good news is that smoking is at historically low levels among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, according to NIDA’s Monitoring the Future study. In 2011, rates for smoking in the past month were reported as 18.7 percent for 12th graders, 11.8 percent for 10th graders, and 6.1 percent for 8th graders.

Use of smokeless tobacco had been showing a decline over the past decade—until 2009, when use began to rise. According to the study, in 2011 current use of smokeless tobacco among 8th graders was 3.5 percent and 6.6 percent among 10th graders. Among 12th graders, 8.3 percent reported using smokeless tobacco in the last month, a number not seen since the late 1990s.

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This page was last updated in March 2012.