Electronic Cigarettes: New Route to Smoking Addiction for Adolescents

[pnwmom]

84. Nicotine is so highly addictive because of its chemical makeup,

entirely aside from its combustion in tobacco. It interferes with the brain's dopamine pathways.

http://whyquit.com/pr/041210.html

Smoking nicotine is extremely addictive. An alarming 26% of youth report signs of loss of control over continued smoking after just 3 to 4 cigarettes, rising to 44% after 5 to 9 cigarettes. There's growing consensus among addiction experts that nicotine dependency is as permanent as alcoholism, that it hijacks the same brain dopamine pathways as illegal drugs, and that successfully arresting nicotine dependency is as hard or harder than quitting heroin.

Dr. Volkow's 1999 brain imaging study showed smoked nicotine's amazingly quick arrival time, its stimulation of dopamine pathways, and how cigarette smoke diminishes MAO (a killjoy enzyme), making smoked nicotine possibly the most perfectly designed drug of addiction. Not only does nicotine stimulate dopamine release within ten seconds of a puff, suppression of MAO and normal dopamine clean-up allows it to linger far longer than a natural release, such as occurs when eating food or quenching thirst.

More recently, scientists have documented how nicotine physically alters the brain. Nicotine activates, saturates and desensitizes dopamine pathway receptors, which is followed by growth or activation of millions of extra receptors, a process known as up-regulation. One cigarette per day, then two, then three, the longer nicotine is smoked, the more receptors become saturated and desensitized, the more grown, and the more nicotine needed to satisfy resulting "want" for replenishment.

SNIP

Successful recovery isn't about strength or weakness. It's about a mental disorder where by chance and happenstance dopamine pathway receptors have eight times greater attraction to nicotine than the receptor's own neurotransmitter, where just one puff and up to 50% of those receptors become occupied by nicotine.