Nicotine addiction means the inability to stop using it, despite the realization that nicotine use is associated with serious health risks.
Nicotine is a substance present in tobacco that can change your mood but can only give you pleasant sensations temporarily. Nicotine use can cause addiction making it difficult to quit smoking, despite being aware of the health problems associated with this habit.
Tobacco smoke has been proven to contain more than 60 substances that can cause cancer, as well as hundreds of other molecules that are harmful to health. Ultimately, these substances damage almost all organs with the result that more than 60% of people who do not quit smoking die from the consequences of this habit.
While the nicotine in tobacco is addictive, its toxic effects are mainly due to other substances in tobacco smoke. While smoking, the need decreases rapidly, but it makes the nicotine receptors insensitive and these keep asking for more, which increases the need for another cigarette. This stimulation leads to chronic consumption and forces you to keep increasing the amount of nicotine to create the same intense sensations. This morphological adaptation that takes place in the central nervous system is responsible for the physical dependence.
The cause of this addiction is nicotine’s ability to increase the secretion of neurotransmitters responsible for regulating your mood and behavior. These neurotransmitters or transfer substances are signaling substances that include dopamine, a molecule responsible for generating a feeling of pleasure. It is precisely this effect that causes tobacco addiction.
Symptoms of nicotine addiction include the inability to quit smoking, even when health problems have already occurred. When you are addicted to nicotine and stop smoking, withdrawal symptoms can occur such as a bad mood, irritability, excitement, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, anger, frustration, insomnia, increased appetite, diarrhea or constipation. If you started smoking as a teenager, you will likely be more dependent on nicotine than if you started at a more advanced age.
The only way to avoid becoming addicted to nicotine is to never start smoking.
However, nicotine in small amounts also has some positive effects on the body. When taken in very small doses, nicotine slightly increases heart rate, stimulates metabolism, reduces hunger, relieves stress and increases concentration.
The chemical structure of cytisine, the main ingredient in Tabex, is similar to nicotine and affects the same receptors in the brain. This makes the effects almost identical, but without the harmful consequences. In addition, cytisine has a stronger ability to bind to these receptors and thus prevent nicotine from binding to them. As a result, the symptoms of nicotine addiction gradually diminish and disappear.
With nicotine, however, the problem manifests itself when the dose is increased. In fact, nicotine is extremely dangerous and the lethal dose is barely 60 mg when injected directly into the vein. Inhaled nicotine is known to be a substance capable of inducing addiction equivalent to that of heroin and cocaine.
Once nicotine is ingested, it spreads through the bloodstream and reaches the brain within seconds. There it stimulates the release of dopamine and thus induces a feeling of pleasure. At the same time, it releases other important neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and adrenaline, which induce a feeling of euphoria in smokers. Physical addiction caused by nicotine also depends on our physical need to maintain high levels of dopamine and other substances.
On the other hand, people who do not smoke or smoke very little do not have the same dopamine needs as an inveterate smoker. The brain’s dopamine craving is at the root of the addiction that nicotine causes and the withdrawal symptoms in smokers when they try to quit. If dopamine is not released, you become nervous, agitated and can even cause physical pain. Although it varies from smoker to smoker, it takes an average of three weeks to fully detox from nicotine. Unfortunately, an ex-smoker will never be completely free from nicotine addiction, as our brains will always keep asking for dopamine. Ultimately, willpower alone will help satisfy the hunger for dopamine.
In principle, it is possible to exceed the lethal dose of nicotine and cause an overdose, but luckily our body has the ability to regulate itself. In short, sooner or later you just don’t want to continue smoking. In addition, some of the nicotine is eliminated during combustion. Nicotine patches are much more dangerous if they are not used according to the directions on the packaging.
You may remember the scene in the movie “Thank You for Smoking” where the protagonist is kidnapped and covered in nicotine patches, nearly causing him to die a slow and painful death.
That is why Tabex is more suitable as a smoking cessation aid. It is safe and has no known serious and certainly no fatal incidents.