How addictive are cigarettes?
It’s amazing what some smokers would do for a cigarette. Serious addicts will go to amazing, often ridiculous extremes, sometimes risking death and serious injury just to smoke another cigarette. These are true stories.
A man has a laryngectomy for cancer of the larynx from smoking and a permanent tracheostomy hole in his neck. Go back to smoking THROUGH his trach!
A hospital patient on oxygen, lights a cigarette (in violation of hospital rules), turns on the oxygen line and catches fire; she ends up in the burn unit with third degree burns. Another hospital patient once tried to light a cigarette inside an OXYGEN tent!
A lung transplant patient and lung cancer survivor then goes back to smoking with his “new lung.”
“In 1983, our chemistry professor at FSU tells our class that he once saw a lab chemist dispense diethyl anhydrous from a 5-gallon drum with a lit cigarette in his mouth.”
Tallahassee 1985 – A woman pumping gasoline at a gas station while smoking a cigarette catches fire, resulting in third-degree burns to more than 60% of her body.
Surprisingly, many former heavy smokers in their 50s and 60s who take oxygen for tobacco-related emphysema continue to smoke while receiving oxygen. More than one smoker has set himself on fire.
A young aspiring aerospace engineering student, touring the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in strict violation of the rules, pulls out a cigarette and lights it INSIDE the VAB! He is IMMEDIATELY expelled from the Space Center, told to never come back, and loses his scholarship.
During the Bosnian civil war of the 1990s, hungry smokers were known to trade food rations for cigarettes.
Smokers on airline flights, desperate for a smoke, have been known to tamper with the smoke detector in the plane’s bathroom, attempting to deactivate or unplug it in order to “escape” a smoke. They always get caught and find themselves in big trouble.
Poor people on food stamps have been known to return food for a refund so they can scrape together enough for a package.
“Tonight, my sister, who had just flown in from Los Angeles, and I were on our way to visit my father at Tampa Gen. Hosp., when a middle-aged patient getting on the same elevator says, ‘This is one of the best hospitals. I had new heart valves and a bypass 5 days ago, but I learned one thing in life… Nothing is more important than that cigarette I just smoked.’ DeeDee: “I thought you were smoking.” The patient said, ‘My doctor told me I won’t need to quit smoking yet, because it would be too stressful for me.'”
From a retired nurse in Kamloops, BC Canada: “Smoking outside in Canada is hard on patients in the winter, but they still do it anyway, so patients getting IVs take their IV poles and pumps outside and the lines begin to freeze and the bomb alarms continue.”
Never underestimate the power of cigarette addiction! Stories like these show how bad it is. Smoking like other addictions is a disease. The most important thing you can do to improve your health is to stop smoking. Stories like these should serve as a wake-up call as to why quitting is so important.
