Smoking can lead to premature death

Addiction and Recovery

By Bob Gaydos

“The cigarette is a very efficient and highly engineered drug-delivery system.”

      The sentence appears on the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. With its sheer bluntness, it says all you need to know about why more than 50 million Americans smoked a cigarette last month despite massive campaigns detailing the health risks of smoking, despite the fact that many of those risks are printed right on the cigarette pack, despite restrictions on smoking in public areas, and even despite the increasingly high cost of smoking because of taxes placed on tobacco products.

     Nicotine delivers endorphins, euphoria, dopamine to the brain with each puff on the cigarette. A pack a day is about 200 “hits” of good feeling. Stop puffing, it goes away. The brain doesn’t like the change in mood. Withdrawal can be unpleasant.

     “Cigarette smoking harms nearly every organ in the body, and smoking is the leading preventable cause of premature death in the United States.”

    That sentence also appears on the NIDA web site (www.drugabuse.gov) and the two statements taken together are why it’s important not to ignore the addiction health threats staring us in the face — or assaulting the senses of non-smokers — amidst the daily serving of headlines on drunk drivers and drug overdoses. 

    Nearly half a million deaths annually are still attributed to smoking and, despite significant progress in reducing the number of smokers, according to NIDA, “if current smoking rates continue, 5.6 million Americans who are currently younger than 18 will die prematurely from smoking-related disease.”

    Nicotine is addictive. Smoking kills people before their time. 

And yes, a lot of people have gotten the message. Surveys show smoking rates for people 18 and older continue to go down and the rate of smoking among those under 18 is at historically low levels. That latter is key because tobacco is often the first substance adolescents use to emulate adults and often leads to other substance use disorders. Research also suggests that nicotine has a strong impact on still-developing adolescent brains, making it more difficult for those who want to quit when they are older. And nearly everyone who smokes has tried to quit. Some succeed. Some have a hard time.

   The jury is still out on e-cigarettes as a replacement for cigarettes. They remove the chemicals that, when burned, are responsible for the various health risks attribute to cigarettes, leaving vapers to go for the nicotine rush. But some research suggests other possible risks, especially for young users, so it’s buyer beware.

    Significantly, for the focus of this column, research shows a strong connection between smoking and persons with alcohol or other substance dependence and a prevalence of smoking (65 to 85 percent) among persons in treatment for all substance use disorders. Addictions often go together, but quitting one doesn’t always mean quitting others is easier. The next column will report on what some people with alcohol or other substance use disorders have experienced as they tried to quit smoking.

Bob Gaydos is a freelance writer. rjgaydos@gmail.com

Lining up for the smell of death in D.C.

By Bob Gaydos

People viewing -- and smelling -- the corpse flower (titan arum) in Washington, D.C.

  There was a distinct stench of decay in the nation’s capital last week and thousands of visitors showed up to get a whiff -- heck, a full, deep inhalation -- of it. What’s that? No, no, this had nothing to do with the White House or Congress … stick with me. The odor emanated from, of all things, a flower.

  The corpse flower. These large malodorous plants are not for sale at your local garden store. For one thing, they’re huge -- this one is 8 feet tall -- and bloom rarely. Unpredictably, really. And then for only two days at most.  This makes such occasions an excuse for people to line up around the block, as they did at the U.S. Botanic Garden Conservatory, to look and smell.

  A plant scientist who is public programs manager at the U.S. Botanic Garden, told the website LiveScience “... once you get into that room, it really hits you pretty hard. It reminded me of a dead deer on the side of the road in the Florida Everglades with a big pile of really soggy, moldy laundry next to it. It was really, really unpleasant.”

  I think I know what the man is talking about. In my neck of the woods in upstate New York, about 75 miles from New York City, some farmers have taken to spreading what they say is fertilizer on their land, but which, to noses familiar and comfortable with normal fertilizer, smells like dead deer times ten. Death smell, we call it. Really unpleasant. The farmers never said it was the corpse flower, though. Duck eggs is the story they’re going with.

  Unlike the corpse flower, no one around here lined up to take a good, deep whiff. You really only had to drive by to get it. A lot of people did complain to public officials, however, and that may have stopped the practice. Lately, it’s just been good, old-fashioned cow manure.

  In Washington, though, Amorphophallus titanum was holding forth last week to no apparent purpose. While it rarely blooms and no one can say when one will bloom, the plant can be long-lived and botanists say the blooming has a specific purpose. Get this: The corpse plant uses its death smell to attract flesh-eating bugs such as beetles and flies that will carry its pollen to cross pollinate other corpse flowers.

  So its purpose is simply to perpetuate itself apparently. Thank you, Mother Nature. One bloomed in the Bronx last August, but the plant is native to the rain forests of Sumatra and I suppose it makes sense in the ecological framework of western Indonesia. As for the D.C. transplant, I’m not certain.

  This particular plant, which blossomed for the first time, is said to have grown from 4 feet tall to 8 feet tall just in the time it was put on display in the greenhouse -- less than a week-and-a-half. It reeked of death for a couple of days then withered.

  The folks at the Botanic Garden said this particular plant was the first corpse flower to bloom in Washington, D.C., since 2007. So for eight years -- from 2008 to 2016 -- there was no call to line up for the smell of death in the nation’s capital. This year -- bloom!

  Hmmm. Maybe I was wrong about the plant’s purpose. Maybe it’s trying to tell us something. Let’s see … what blooms big and garish without warning for no purpose other than to promote itself, attracts a crowd, appeals to flesh-eating bugs, stinks to hell for a brief period and then withers and goes away for a long time?

  Maybe they’ll have a clue at the White House.

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