The Truth about the Stop Smoking Injection
There have been several attempts to develop a stop smoking injection. Since nicotine is the main addictive ingredient in cigarettes, many medical researchers have attempted to block it from working in the brain. If you do a search on the internet, you will find several sites that claim to have found the holy grail of all anti-addictive shots, the stop smoking injection.
The truth however, is that there is no simple, one shot cure to stopping smoking. Once nicotine has gotten its nasty little hooks in you, getting loose from your addiction is a long and difficult process. Like every other addiction, it requires you to commit to the process of breaking your addiction, and then to recommit to it day after day, for the rest of your life. One bad day, one slip, and you are right back where you started.
The Theory behind the Stop Smoking Injection
The main idea behind the stop smoking injection is to create a physiological barrier between the nicotine and the body’s natural nicotine receptors. Researchers actually have found a set of drugs like this. Clonidine and scopolamine are two of the more recent attempts to use medications that the medical community first employed as anti-depressants in an attempt to block the body’s ability to absorb nicotine. In theory, with an injection of one or both of these drugs, your body will no longer recognize nicotine and you will thus be freed from having the addictive effects of it.
Effectiveness of Such “Cures”
The main problem with these attempted cures is that they don’t address the underlying addiction. Smoking and addiction to nicotine is more complex than just getting nicotine to your body. You might think of it a little bit like this. Let us say that you are used to receiving a movie in the mail each week. If I cancel your subscription or if I intercept the mail carrier every week and steal your film, I can keep it from getting to you. If you have built up the habit of watching a movie every weekend for years, however, you will still want to see a movie and you will notice when you are not getting it.
The stop smoking injection, by itself, has the same effect. You might be able to keep your body from getting the pleasurable effects of nicotine through this sort of drug intervention, but you haven’t really addressed your body’s underlying desire to smoke. If you have been a long time smoker, you have built up a deep-seated physiological pathway for nicotine. Even if you manage to keep your body from receiving the pleasurable effects for a while, your body is still wired for nicotine. When the stop smoking injection wears off, and you happen to get a whiff of someone smoking your favorite brand of cigarettes then it is easy to fall right back into your old, bad habits.
The second problem with this type of a treatment is that even if you block your physiological response to smoking, you still haven’t done anything about the psychological aspects of the addiction. Long time smokers often have built up a psychological habit of smoking and a set of “smoking” friends. Even though your body may not be receiving the pleasurable response to smoking, your mind can easily fool you into thinking that you are getting something from it. You have so long connected smoking with a positive psychological payoff, that your mind may still reward you for going through the motions.
Finally, you should also be aware that there are also several side effects and counter-indications to the drugs that break you from your nicotine habit. If you have other underlying conditions such as depression, then using these anti-depressants for quitting smoking may actually create unexpected negative outcomes. The whole process is much trickier to calibrate from individual to individual than you might expect.
The Verdict
All this is not to say that there is no place for chemical help in breaking yourself from a smoking addiction. The chemical dependence of your body is a real physiological dependence and you physician needs to address it. Rather, I would like to disabuse smokers of the notion that there is a one shot cure to your smoking problems. Like many addictions, the best way to tackle it is from multiple angles. If you are going to succeed in stopping smoking, you will need to get help from a medical professional that understand both the bodily and the mental aspects of your addiction.