See i was at my friends new year's eve party and we were just talking about everything then my friend just out of the blue asked if it was possible to addicted to secondhand smoking. so now i can't help but wonder is it possible to get addicted to secondhand smoking? It's theoretically possible but very unlikely.
In order to get addicted, you have to reach a minimum concentration of nicotine in your bloodstream. While everyone's tolerance is different, the amount of nicotine required to establish addiction is theorized to be roughly 5 milligrams. This is based on a study which compared daily smokers against social smokers blood nicotine levels; social smokers had less than 5 milligrams of nicotine, and suffered no withdrawl from not smoking, while daily smokers had significantly more nicotine.
A single cigarette contains around 8 to 9 milligrams of nicotine, but of that amount only a small percentage is bioavailable - that is, transfered from the smoke to the blood. The range of bioavailability goes from a low of 3% to a high of 40%, with an average of 12%. The average person, therefore, gets about 1 milligram of nicotine from a cigarette, but some highly susceptable people under the right conditions can get as much as 3.5 mg.
Ok, now with that data, we can figure out some fun stuff. Let's pretend that you are locked in an airtight chamber, measuring 50 cubic meters (that's very roughly a 15 foot by 15 foot room, with 6 foot ceilings. Want higher ceilings, make the room shorter a bit.)
Now we just need to figure out how many cigarettes would have to be burned in that room for the secondhand smoke concentration to exceed the absolute minimum for addiction - someone with a 40% bioavailability rate.
The average healthy adult breaths about 9 liters of air in a minute. Nicotine in the bloodstream has a half-life of 2 hours. Therefore, let's say you have to get 10 miligrams of nicotine into your body in two hours (since half of it will be gone at the end of that two hours) to reach the 5 mg level required for addiction.
In two hours, you will breathe 9 x 2 x 60 = 1080 Liters of air.
The room with 50 cubic meters contains 50,000 Liters of air.
Therefore you will breathe 2% of the air in the room.
The average cigarette contains 8 milligrams of nicotine in total. To cause addiction, we need the amount of nicotine in the air to exceed, at minimum, 2.5 times (1 divided by 40%) of 10 milligrams of nicotine per 1080 liters. That's 1157 total milligrams of nicotine that are needed to fill the room with enough nicotine to cause a very vulnerable person to be at risk of getting addicted.
To put it in context, there would have to be 145 burning cigarettes in that room, with no one else breathing the nicotine in, in order for there to be enough nicotine in the air to addict you.
So COULD it happen? Sure - stick someone in a very very tiny glass box, barely bigger than them, and throw a dozen burning cigarettes in somewhere where they can't stomp em out. But aside from that, the smokiness of a room would have to be well beyond that normally associated with thickly smoked in areas. And that's for the type of person who would get hooked on the very first cigarette they ever try. Most people would require three to four times as many cigarettes burning in the air to actually risk addiction. you become addicted to the nicotine... so I guess you can be attracted to smoking from exposure to second hand smoking I dont think nicotine is in the smoke. so no |
