The tobacco plant is, in fact, a cousin of deadly nightshade and contains several poisonous compounds including nicotine. Nicotine is one of the most powerful poisons known to mankind. It is commonly used as an insecticide. If you were to inject the nicotine content of just one small cigar directly into your vein, it would kill you. Please don’t try it out. A student did some time ago. He died.
When you arc learning to smoke, all you are actually doing is teaching your brain and body to become immune to the foul effects. It’s rather like working on a farm. To start with, the animals smell awful, but eventually you become immune to their smell, and incidentally, they become immune to yours. The human body is an incredibly sophisticated machine. It will warn you when you feed it poison and if you are stupid enough not to heed that warning and continue to regularly feed poison, it will try to protect you. Rasputin was able to survive a dose of arsenic twenty times the size of the dose that would kill an average human being purely by gradually building a resistance to the poison.
Let’s get back to the similarity between eating and smoking. We think of hunger as a rather unpleasant experience. The truth is that it is an incredibly ingenious device. I should emphasize that I’m not talking about starvation now, but the everyday business of enjoying three meals a day.
When we eat it’s rather like filling up our car with petrol. We’ve provided our body with the fuel and minerals it needs to survive. The moment we finish that meal we start to use up that energy but we don’t immediately feel hungry again, unless, of course, we have dietary problems. In fact, if we get into a regular habit of eating, say, three meals a day, we need never even be aware of the aggravation called hunger, provided that we eat when our next meal is due and our body says to our brain, “Hey, I’m hungry, let’s eat”. You can then obtain the genuine pleasure of satisfying that hunger without being aware of any aggravation.
However, supposing, for whatever reason, that meal is not available. Now you suffer. I remember as a boy on Sundays we ate lunch at 2pm when my father returned from having a drink with his friends. The problem was the rest of the week we ate lunch at midday and my body and brain were geared up to eat then. But what physical pain do we actually undergo at such times? OK, our stomachs might be rumbling, but there’s no actual physical Pain. Nevertheless, it is physical, and we musn’t underestimate its effect. Imagine having an itch on the tip of your nose and not being allowed to scratch it. That could drive you to distraction in just a few minutes.
How would you describe hunger? There’s no physical pain. We can only describe it as an empty, insecure feeling that we know will only be satisfied by food. The feeling itself isn’t so bad — just like the itch, it’s not being allowed to satisfy it or scratch it that’s the torture.
How do you describe the craving for nicotine? Are you in physical pain? No, you have just an empty, insecure feeling which you know will be satisfied by a cigarette. Just like a hunger for food, provided your brain is not aware of it, you do not suffer one iota, and provided when you do become aware of it, you are allowed to light up and relieve the empty, insecure feeling, you get genuine pleasure and relaxation.
