Hi,I'm 13. About 3 weeks ago decided to have a couple of puffs out of my dads vapor cigarette , it made me cough but it felt good. I carried on having about 3 puffs every time he left his vapor cigarette around (so about 5 times a day). After a couple of days I started to really enjoy it. Last week we went round my Nan's and she smokes. So I took 2 packs of cigarettes and have had a couple a day for the last week. Now I feel I need more constantly. I tried not to have one yesterday but I really needed one. My parents don't know. So am I addicted?
Responses (2)
If you smoke cigarettes, it’s likely you are addicted to nicotine. Statistics show that three out of four people who start smoking are still smoking 40 years later. They simply can’t quit smoking, because nicotine, a drug found naturally in tobacco, is addictive. The Surgeon General has concluded that nicotine addiction has similar pharmacologic and behavioral characteristics to cocaine and heroin addictions.
A pack-a-day smoker smokes a cigarette about every hour or so, says Erik Augustson, PhD, MPH, a behavioral scientist in the Tobacco Control Research Branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. If you were to stop or even cut back, you would start to go into nicotine withdrawal — and that’s what drives smokers to smoke their next cigarette.