Smoking
The Artificial Passion
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
What compels millions of people to ignore the medical evidence and continue smoking? David Krogh offers some fascinating and surprising answers in this critically acclaimed analysis of what doctors and scientists know about the passion for tobacco.
This feisty and provocative work gives smokers, ex-smokers, non-smokers, or anyone captivated by the quirkiness of human behavior a better understanding of this complex, deep-rooted habit--and in a broader context, drug use of any kind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This study will be of enormous interest to the legions of smokers who have failed to give up cigarettes permanently, the estimated 75% of quitters who become re-addicted within a year. Krogh, staff member of the University of California Academic Center, here reviews the scientific literature to explain what motivates people to smoke--and, by extension, why stopping is extremely difficult. The book analyzes a complex of addiction and attachment factors:ok? personality, culture, genetics, neurobiology, pharmacology. Nicotine, we're told, does things for smokers; it stimulates the brain, helps concentration, is an aid in weight control, moderates moods (smokers, unlike other addicts, smoke to get ``medium''). But smoking also does things to smokers; it is controlling and it can be lethal. In offering advice on how to quit, Krogh, not surprisingly, can do little more than give encouragement. And his endorsement of nicotine gum as a crutch is questionable--its use is censured by the American Cancer Society's quit-smoking program, for one.
