The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,87

is someone who smokes no more than five cigarettes a day but who smokes at least four days a week. As Shiffman writes:

Chippers’ smoking varies considerably from day to day, and their smoking patterns often include days of complete abstinence. Chippers reported little difficulty maintaining such casual abstinence and reportedly experienced almost no withdrawal symptoms when abstaining from smoking.... Unlike regular smokers who smoke soon on waking to replenish the nicotine that has cleared overnight, chippers go several hours before smoking their first cigarette of the day. In short, every indicator examined suggests that chippers are not addicted to nicotine and that their smoking is not driven by withdrawal relief or withdrawal avoidance.

Shiffman calls chippers the equivalent of social drinkers. They are people in control of their habit. He says:

Most of these people had never been heavy smokers. I think of them as developmentally retarded. Every smoker starts out as a chipper, in the early period, but then graduates more heavily into more dependent smoking. When we collected data about the early period of smoking, the chippers look like everyone else when they start out. The difference is that over time, the heavy smokers escalated whereas the chippers stayed where they were.

What distinguishes chippers from hard core smokers? Probably genetic factors. Allan Collins of the University of Colorado, for example, recently took several groups of different strains of mice and injected each with steadily increasing amounts of nicotine. When nicotine reaches toxic levels in a mouse (nicotine is, after all, a poison) it has a seizure—its tail goes rigid; it begins running wildly around its cage; its head starts to jerk and snap; and eventually it flips over on its back. Collins wanted to see whether different strains of mice could handle different amounts of nicotine. Sure enough, they could. The strain of mice most tolerant of nicotine could handle about two to three times as much of the drug as the strain that had seizures at the lowest dose. “That’s about in the same range as alcohol,” Collins says. Then he put all the mice into cages and gave them two bottles to drink from: one filled with a simple saccharin solution, one filled with a saccharin solution laced with nicotine. This time he wanted to see whether there was any relationship between each strain’s genetic tolerance to nicotine and the amount of nicotine they would voluntarily consume. Once again, there was. In fact, the correlation was almost perfect. The greater a mouse’s genetic tolerance for nicotine, the more of the nicotine bottle it would drink. Collins thinks that there are genes in the brains of mice that govern how nicotine is processed—how quickly it causes toxicity, how much pleasure it gives, what kind of buzz it leaves—and that some strains of mice have genes that handle nicotine really well and extract the most pleasure from it and some have genes that treat nicotine like a poison.

Humans, obviously, aren’t mice, and drinking nicotine from a bottle in a cage isn’t the same as lighting up a Marlboro. But even if there is only a modest correlation between what goes on in mice brains and ours, these findings do seem to square with Pomerleau’s study. The people who didn’t get a buzz from their first cigarette and who found the whole experience so awful that they never smoked again are probably people whose bodies are acutely sensitive to nicotine, incapable of handling it in even the smallest doses. Chippers may be people who have the genes to derive pleasure from nicotine, but not the genes to handle it in large doses. Heavy smokers, meanwhile, may be people with the genes to do both. This is not to say that genes provide a total explanation for how much people smoke. Since nicotine is known to relieve boredom and stress, for example, people who are in boring or stressful situations are always going to smoke more than people who are not. It is simply to say that what makes smoking sticky is completely different from the kinds of things that make it contagious. If we are looking for Tipping Points in the war on smoking, then, we need to decide which of those sides of the epidemic we will have the most success attacking. Should we try to make smoking less contagious, to stop the Salesmen who spread the smoking virus? Or are we better off trying to make it less sticky, to look for ways to turn all smokers into chippers?

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