Smoking & Alcoholicism

No smoker I have met has denied the relationship between smoking and alcohol – Rolf Harris has even written a song about the two of them: Nicotine and Alcohol.

Some smokers have had to stop alcohol while they were giving up smoking, or at least kick the habit of going to the pub. Indeed, one of the benefits of the smoking ban is that it makes it so much easier for smokers to give up, as well as making it harder for social smokers to make the jump to becoming addicts.

The opposite may also be true.

Both alcoholics and those helping them to stop drinking have argued that nicotine can be a crutch for stopping smoking. There can be little doubt that when drinking alcohol turns to alcoholicism, nicotine addiction is the lesser evil.

However, new research suggests that it may now be better to give up both alcohol and smoking at the same time.

A study in Madison, Australia looked at the brain function of recovering Alcoholics, who included both smokers and non-smokers. They found that alcoholics failed to recover certain brain functions as well as non-alcoholics.

This recovery of brain function included decision making skills and thinking speed, making it more difficult for the subjects to remain sober in the future. Other functions improved, but not as well as for the non-smokers.

So it looks that alcoholics may now have to kick two habits at once. As if they didn’t have enough to be dealing with in the first place!

Related posts:

1. Smoking & the Brain
2. The Electronic Cigarette and Quitting Smoking!

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