Nicotine Addiction Treatment in Los Angeles, CA

Like alcohol, and often considered a complement to it by many drinkers, nicotine is readily available at almost any convenient store, gas station, grocery store and beyond in the form of cigarettes and vaping products. Most often right at the point of sale so it’s the very last thing you see before paying. Tempting those who are hooked even more.

Nicotine is naturally occurring in the tobacco plant itself and is both a powerful, yet subtle, addictive substance.  Highly addictive in fact, but because it doesn’t bring with it the intense, debilitating and visceral highs of other drugs, nicotine is seen as “acceptable”. Moreover, and troublingly, some tobacco products include additives to increase nicotine absorption, making them even more addictive.

While the effects of the drug are altogether less intense than other drugs or alcohol, that doesn’t stop it from slowly wreaking havoc on a user’s body. So much so that, as per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States with nearly 500,000 Americans dying every year including 41,000 deaths from secondhand smoke which is without a doubt the most striking of the nicotine facts.

Additionally, smokers live 10 years less than nonsmokers. On top of that, smoking is connected to many other issues with more than 16 million in the U.S. living with a disease caused by smoking, everything from cancer to heart and lung disease to emphysema and more.

Aside from the gargantuan human toll that it takes, smoking also has a vast economic impact with the cost of it running more than $300 billion a year, $170 billion of that related directly to medical care.

What keeps people hooked in spite of the clear dangers? Nicotine.

That’s how powerful the drug is.

Among the most unfortunate aspects of nicotine addiction is the age at which it sinks its talons into people. Each and every day, roughly 2,000 people under the age of 18 will smoke their first cigarette and of those, 300 will become daily smokers. To bring that into stark relief, nearly 9 out of 10 adults who currently smoke daily first tried smoking by the age of 18 and 99% tried by age 26.

Vaping hasn’t helped either with 39% of high school seniors having tried it in the past year.

Given that, there’s little doubt you’ve seen anti-smoking ads and public service announcement campaigns warning you of the dangers of tobacco. 

Perhaps you’ve even seen the graphic images of decimated lungs, destroyed teeth and more staring back at you from the packaging showing those dangers in stark images. The United States has trailed other countries in this approach due to the powerful tobacco lobby but it will likely soon be commonplace on packaging in America as well.

For good reason, research supports the idea that “larger, graphic health warnings that convey loss-framed messages as most effective in communicating health risks to U.S. adults”.

On a positive note, less than 14% of adults in the United States currently smoke which is down from 43% in 1965. Nonetheless though, that means that roughly 34 million people smoke, still an eye popping and astonishing amount.

And quitting is hard, arduous work too that is often marked by repeated failures before finally overcoming the addiction. Despite the fact that nearly 7 in 10 smokers want to quit, only 6% are actually able to do it in any given year.