Is Smoking Addictive?

Physically, is it physically addictive? Think about it. Now, I know most of you out there will think, "Well, of course, it's physically addictive otherwise, I'd just stop." You'd be wrong and I'm now going to take a few minutes to explain why you're wrong and why it's not physically addictive to you.

See about 10 years the AMA, American and Medical Association, they got together the best doctors, the best neurosurgeons, the best addictions specialists, psychiatrists in the world. They threw tens of millions of dollars at this project and it was simply to find if nicotine was physically addictive onto your system. And after 10 years of research, a big, heavy paper that you can probably find online somewhere, it's about 657 pages if you wanna read it. Best minds in the world researching it, you know what they concluded? That nicotine is not physically addictive.

Now, interesting when you say, to yourself, "Well, why do I keep smoking?" Well, keep watching the video. See, a cigarette has about 2,500 ingredients in it, about 67 of those are proven to cause cancer. Now, with an addictive substance that somebody uses in their life, you need to keep upping the dosage to get the same effect. Hence, the alcoholic is drinking far more beverages, far more units of alcohol now than when he first started or when she started, the same with the heroin addict, the heroin addict isn't on the same level of heroin now as they were when they first started because they had to keep up and upping, and upping the dosages.

Now, what tends to happen with smokers is, a smoker doesn't tend to go from one packet a day to two packets a day to four packets a day to eight packets a day. They generally find their level and they level out that might be one that might be two-packet but then they pretty much have a holding pattern of smoking that same amount throughout their smoking career, but they don't have to smoke more and more and more once they've leveled out to get that same high, it's another reason why smoking isn't physically addictive.

Now, basically, if smoking was physically addictive then people who work in areas that are filled with smoke like in Las Vegas, like I recently came back to, people who work in bars, people who work in clubs, the casinos, these types of environment where smoke is present. For some of these people who don't smoke, what would happen is and what does happen oftentimes with them, is they get lung cancer, they actually get cancer through working in these areas, and passively smoking through, years and years and years of this. They die but they still don't smoke. The passive smokers still doesn't smoke but they catch lung cancer before they smoke, doesn't that seem ridiculous? Because it was addicted...if it was addictive they've actually got 10, 20 years working in this casino-like or bar environment, they'd be smelling those Marlboro Lights and if it was physically addictive, they'd just come over to you and be like, "What is that? Is that Marlboro Lights? Can I score some of those off you?" No, they don't smoke. In fact, their system would rather give them cancer or make them die, it does that before they become physically addictive.

And I ask you as a smoker, when was the last time that you woke up at 2:37 a.m. and your body is shaking uncontrollably and you are foaming at your mouth, and you're willing to kill your most beloved person next to you in order to get a hit of your drug, to get a hit of that cigarette? Now, you might wake up and you might go to a washroom, and you might say to yourself, "You know what, think I like a little cigarette to go with this," you might do that but you don't have an uncontrollable urge in your body where you foam and there's a chemical reaction in your body that you have to have it. It doesn't happen.

Now, when was the last time you went two, three, four, eight hours when you were awake and you didn't have a cigarette? Now, yeah, you might say, "Well, yeah, I got really angry, I got really annoyed," yeah, you got emotionally annoyed, you got emotionally angry, you got frustrated perhaps because you used to do that and you used it to help you to control your emotions on some level. I get that but is it physically addictive? Are you going to go into spasms? No.

I get alcoholics who'd come and see me. Alcoholics are to a level where their actual medical doctor says to them, "If you stop drinking alcohol cold turkey, you could die," so they have to be weaned off alcohol. You can stop smoking cigarettes like that. I've seen thousands of people do it. In fact, I've have helped thousands of people doing it for over 20 years now.

I'm not saying it's necessarily easy to quit smoking but what I'm saying is completely emotional, "Am I discounting what you go through with all those emotions when you stop?" No, it can still be, really, really hard, I get it, I really get it because I've seen so many smokers doing this but is it physically addictive in your system/ No, not at all.

In fact, here is something I want to say to you, children smoke, adults don't smoke. I'm going to say that again, children smoke, adults don't smoke. When was the very first cigarette you ever had, the very first puff ever? Now, if you're like 98% of the people I met, their very first puff, it doesn't mean they started shame smoking but their very first puff, their very first cigarette tends to be in their teen years, tends to be in the teen years because you see smoking is a habit that children do.

If you're watching this video now and you're smoking, you're an adult over the age of 25, with the mind and intellect, the maturity you have now, do you really think with this mind, with your maturity, with your experience that you've had to this point, if this brain was in that teenager or perhaps younger, younger adult, if that brain was in that body, do you think you would choose to smoke? No, you wouldn't because smoking is something that children do, adults don't do it. They just end up getting caught with it.

See, another reason that smoking is not physically addictive. In 20 years of helping people quit smoking, again, over a thousand people. I'm not saying that to impress you, I'm saying that to impress upon you that I know what I'm talking about okay? I've never met one person who started smoking after the age of 25, again, they didn't have a puff or any cigarette at all but they had no cigarette then after the age of 25, they're like, "This seems like a good idea, I'm going to start smoking now." And they do that, never met one person who did that.

I've met an alcoholic who never had a drink, many until the age of 25, and they became alcoholics. I met heroin addicts that never had a shot of heroin until after 25, they may, became addicted. I met people who are addicted to cocaine that have never had a snort of cocaine until the age of 25 then they got addicted to it. I'm yet to find one smoker who started to smoke after the age of 25 because it doesn't happen.

See, there's an invested interest in you to keep smoking, not a lot of people realize this but a lot of the companies when you research them, they own the smoke, they own cigarettes, the cigarette companies actually own a lot of the smoking patch companies, the inhaler, the e-cigarette companies and the nicotine replacement. Oftentimes a lot of those companies that are trying to get you off, trying to get you off cigarettes right are actually the same company that got you addicted so if they can't your money this way, they'll get your money this way.

And you've got to think about it. How would you get addicted to smoking? Mentally addicted? Well, if you're like most people, not everyone but about 95% of the people I meet, they start smoking simply because it was the cool thing to do at school. Perhaps your friends were doing it at school, you want to fit in, you started smoking, it was the in thing to do, perhaps, if you were born in the '60s when they still could have commercials on TV about how cool it was to smoke and you'd see the cowboy walking around with his lovely hat, smoking, it was the cool thing to do. You were already hypnotized to start to smoke, whether it was by the media, commercials, advertisements or whether it is by society or friends unconsciously.