Quitting Time?

What are some of the challenges to quitting today?

• According to the surgeon general’s report, nicotine is a highly addictive drug. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says it takes only a few seconds for the nicotine from one puff of cigarette smoke to reach the brain. The drug causes brain cells to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a crucial role in humans’ feeling pleasure. Over time, smokers’ brains come to demand those regular dopamine bursts, leading to intense cravings when a smoker tries to quit.

• The CDC reports that many smokers make multiple attempts at quitting before they’re successful. While 8% of smokers said they had quit in the past 12 months, the Food and Drug Administration finds that it can take many attempts over months or years for a smoker to fully kick the habit.

• In addition, a 2017 CDC report on “Quitting Smoking Among Adults — United States, 2000-2015,” points out that smokers with private health insurance reported a higher rate of quitting smoking (9.4%) than did smokers who were uninsured (5.2%) or enrolled in Medicaid, including people with dual Medicaid-Medicare eligibility (5.9%). It’s possible that smokers who are uninsured or enrolled in Medicaid may have a harder time quitting because they are less likely to have affordable or no-cost access to smoking-cessation programs and medication regularly covered by insurance, or to see health care providers as often as those who have insurance.

While the CDC finds that cigarette smoking causes about 1 in every 5 U.S. deaths annually, the nation’s smoking rate has steadily fallen — it reached an all-time low of about 14% in 2018. And as of 2018, 55 million American adults had quit smoking. But it’s important to note that e-cigarette use is on the rise — it increased from 2.8% to 3.2% between 2017 and 2018, according to this CDC report, which marks a significant increase in adult e-cigarette use that was detected for the first time.