Why Nicotine Replacement Therapy Does Not Work as Expected

As I wrote in my entry, which described my last day as a smoker, I decided to quit smoking by going cold turkey. I had been using nicotine replacement products during my previous attempts to stop smoking, and my experiences about them were not so positive. This entry describes my opinion about nicotine replacement therapy and argues, why it does not work as expected.

As I wrote in my entry mentioned earlier, my experiences about nicotine replacement products can be summarized by using following three sentences:

1. I ended up getting addicted to nicotine replacement products.
2. They did not really remove my urge to smoke, but they made it disappear after it had first appeared.
3. I started using nicotine replacement products like candy.

This raises a question, why I feel that nicotine replacement therapy is not the ultimate answer, which will help people to quit smoking? My reasoning is explained in following:

First, I want to start by stating that smoking is not just a bad habit. People smoke, because they are addicted to nicotine. The reason, why smoking is often referred as a bad habit, is that it sounds a lot more better than a drug addiction. In the end, smoking is just one way to submit nicotine to a human body. And as we all know, a huge number of companies want to ensure that addicts remain as addicts.

Second, it does not make any sense to try to cure an addiction by simply changing the method, which is used to submit the addictive substance to a human body. I admit that using nicotine replacement products is a lot more healthier than smoking, but if you really want to quit smoking, you should start thinking my experiences and try to figure out the answers to following questions:

• Why nicotine replacement products did not remove my urge to smoke?
• Why I ended up using nicotine replacement products like candy?

I have been thinking about these two questions for a while now, and I have managed to find a reasonable answer. I believe that the usage of nicotine replacement products prevented me from dealing with my psychological addiction to smoking. Thus, even though my internal addict received its dosage of nicotine on a regular basis, cravings for tobacco were caused by my untreated psychological addiction.

I also believe that my psychological addiction was the reason, which triggered my excessive usage of nicotine replacement products. Because I was still having an urge to smoke, I simply came to a conclusion that I should increase the amount of nicotine submitted to my body. The easiest way to that was to use more nicotine replacement products. Eventually this led to a situation, which was described earlier.

But wait. There is still one more question. The last and most important question is obviously: Why I ended up smoking again every time? Because even the excessive usage of nicotine replacement products did not prevent me for having an urge to smoke, the only thing that kept me from not smoking was my willpower. In the end, I just ran out of willpower. I decided to smoke only one cigarette. What harm could it do? Before I noticed it, I was smoking on a regular basis.

Nicotine replacement therapy did not do the trick for me, but perhaps it can still help someone else. It would be interesting to know, what kind of experiences do you have from nicotine replacement therapy? Did it do the trick for you?