Nicotine Addiction
Tobacco contains nicotine, a highly additive chemical. Nicotine changes the way your brain works and can harm brain development in youth and young adults.
Nicotine is a stimulant and causes your brain to release dopamine, the “feel-good chemical”. It can temporarily improve concentration and alertness and make you feel more relaxed. But this feeling is only short-term, and when it goes away, your body wants more nicotine. This can make you feel stressed or agitated, prompting you to smoke or vape again. Learn more about Nicotine Addiction here.
Over time, your brain gets used to receiving nicotine from cigarettes and starts to crave it, eventually making you dependent, meaning you need more and more nicotine to feel ‘good’. As soon as you stop smoking, and your nicotine levels drop, you go into withdrawal, and can experience various unpleasant symptoms such as irritability, restlessness, and difficulty concentrating. The only thing that will relieve these symptoms are either more nicotine, or time (quitting). This is what makes it so hard to quit.
Health Risks of Tobacco
Tobacco use harms nearly every part of the body.
Short term health risks
- Increased heart rate and blood pressure
- Coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath
- Weaker immune system, making it easier to get infections like colds, flu, and COVID-19 and harder for you to recover from them
Longer term health risks
- Cancers, including lung, throat, bladder, kidney, and oral cancer.
- Lung diseases, like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
- Heart disease and stroke
- Diabetes
- Fertility issues for both men and women
- Premature death
Secondhand smoke
Smoking affects the health of others even if they never smoke themselves. When you smoke, people around you can inhale the smoke from your cigarette or the air you breathe out. This is called secondhand smoke and it can harm the health of your friends and family, especially children.3 There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke.
Secondhand smoke increases the risk of3:
- Breathing problems, heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer.
- Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), lung infections, ear infections, and asthma in children.
-
Miscarriages, premature birth, and other pregnancy and labour complications in pregnant people.
Quitting smoking is one of the best things you can do for not only your health, but the health of the people around you too.
Commercial Tobacco Products
Cigarettes are the most used tobacco product, but there are also other forms of tobacco that carry similar risks to cigarettes. All commercial tobacco products are highly addictive and carry health risks.
Smokeless tobacco
Smokeless tobacco includes chewing tobacco, snuff, and snus. These products deliver nicotine directly into the bloodstream by chewing, sucking, or sniffing the product.
Smokeless tobacco products can increase the risk of cancer of the mouth, esophagus, and pancreas. It is also linked with mouth diseases such as leukoplakia, gum disease, tooth decay, and other dental issues.4,5
Cigars and Pipes
A cigar is a roll of tobacco wrapped in a tobacco leaf. Cigars can come in many flavours, including menthol, candy, and fruit flavours. Pipe smoking involves loose tobacco put into a pipe.
One large cigar, typically smoked over the course of an hour, can contain as much tobacco as a pack of cigarettes. Smoking cigars or pipes increases the risk of many of the same health problems as cigarette smoking. Even if you do not inhale, you are still exposed to harmful chemicals released in the tobacco smoke.
Heated Tobacco Products (HTPs)
HTPs are a relatively new form of tobacco, also called heat-not-burn products (e.g. IQOS). These electronic devices heat up tobacco sticks or capsules, producing a nicotine-containing vapour without smoke. Because they don’t burn tobacco, HTPs produce less carbon monoxide and other harmful chemicals than cigarettes. But even at lower levels, these chemicals can still put you at risk for serious health problems, including heart problems, inflammation, and lung diseases.6
Hookah
Hookahs are water pipes that are used to smoke specially made tobacco that comes in different flavours. The tobacco is heated using charcoal and the smoke passes through a water-filled chamber before being inhaled through a tube and mouthpiece. A typical one-hour long hookah session can expose a person to as much smoke as smoking 100 cigarettes.7
Some people believe that hookah is safe because they think the water filters out toxins, but this is not true. Even after it has been passed through water, hookah smoke exposes you to many of the same chemicals as cigarette smoke including carbon monoxide, toxic metals, and other cancer-causing chemicals. Like cigarettes, it can increase the risk of lung infections, lung cancer, heart diseases, and gum disease.8,9 Because hookahs are usually shared in a group as a social activity, it can also transmit viruses such as hepatitis, herpes, and tuberculosis.6
Non-tobacco or herbal shisha is not a safe alternative. Burning herbal shisha still produces harmful chemicals that can damage the lungs and increase the risk of certain cancers.10
