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People smoke for a wide variety of reasons. Once they have smoked their first few experimental cigarettes, which can cause coughing, nausea and sometimes vomiting, most smokers get pleasure from the taste and aroma of tobacco and tobacco smoke. They may also get pleasure from the whole ritual of lighting up; from handling cigarettes, a lighter or matches; from the action of inhaling and from watching the smoke curl upwards. Smokers make two claims for their habit. First, that smoking sedates them, or ‘settles their nerves’ when they need sedating. Second, that it acts as a stimulant when they need to work. Evidence has shown that these effects are due to nicotine and that both these claims are true, depending on the dose, on what the smoker is doing and on his or her particular psychological and physical make-up.

There may be a true physical addiction to nicotine so that when deprived of the drug the person concerned suffers from unpleasant physical withdrawal symptoms which are only relieved by a further dose. We know from research results that smokers of a cigarette with high nicotine content who change to a brand with a low nicotine yield automatically increase their puff rate or smoke more cigarettes in order to get the same amount of nicotine as they did previously. (See Nicotine’, pp 1370-72.)