The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,92

the leading nicotine experts in the world—have made some educated guesses. Chippers, they point out, are people who are capable of smoking up to five cigarettes a day without getting addicted. That suggests that the amount of nicotine found in five cigarettes—which works out to somewhere between four and six milligrams of nicotine—is probably somewhere close to the addiction threshold. What Henningfield and Benowitz suggest, then, is that tobacco companies be required to lower the level of nicotine so that even the heaviest smokers—those smoking, say, 30 cigarettes a day—could not get anything more than five milligrams of nicotine within a 24 hour period. That level, the two argued in an editorial in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, “should be adequate to prevent or limit the development of addiction in most young people. At the same time it may provide enough nicotine for taste and sensory stimulation.” Teens, in other words, would continue to experiment with cigarettes for all the reasons that they have ever experimented with cigarettes—because the habit is contagious, because cool kids are smoking, because they want to fit in. But, because of the reduction of nicotine levels below the addiction threshold, the habit would no longer be sticky. Cigarette smoking would be less like the flu and more like the common cold: easily caught but easily defeated.

It is important to put these two stickiness factors in perspective. The anti smoking movement has focused, so far, on raising cigarette prices, curtailing cigarette advertising, running public health messages on radio and television, limiting access of cigarettes to minors, and drilling anti tobacco messages into schoolchildren, and in the period that this broad, seemingly comprehensive, ambitious campaign has been waged, teenage smoking has skyrocketed. We’ve been obsessed with changing attitudes toward tobacco on a mass scale, but we haven’t managed to reach the groups whose attitude needs to change the most. We’ve been obsessed with foiling the influence of smoking Salesmen. But the influence of those Salesmen increasingly looks like something we cannot break. We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points, and those are the links to depression and the nicotine threshold.

The second lesson of the stickiness strategy is that it permits a more reasonable approach to teenage experimentation. The absolutist approach to fighting drugs proceeds on the premise that experimentation equals addiction. We don’t want our children ever to be exposed to heroin or pot or cocaine because we think that the lure of these substances is so strong that even the smallest exposure will be all it takes. But do you know what the experimentation statistics are for illegal drugs? In the 1996 Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 1.1 percent of those polled said that they had used heroin at least once. But only 18 percent of that 1.1 percent had used it in the past year, and only 9 percent had used it in the past month. That is not the profile of a particularly sticky drug. The figures for cocaine are even more striking. Of those who have ever tried cocaine, less than one percent—0.9 percent—are regular users. What these figures tell us is that experimentation and actual hard core use are two entirely separate things—that for a drug to be contagious does not automatically mean that it is also sticky. In fact, the sheer number of people who appear to have tried cocaine at least once should tell us that the urge among teens to try something dangerous is pretty nearly universal. This is what teens do. This is how they learn about the world, and most of the time—in 99.1 percent of the cases with cocaine—that experimentation doesn’t result in anything bad happening. We have to stop fighting this kind of experimentation. We have to accept it and even to embrace it. Teens are always going to be fascinated by people like Maggie the au pair and Billy G. and Pam P., and they should be fascinated by people like that, if only to get past the adolescent fantasy that to be rebellious and truculent and irresponsible is a good way to spend your life. What we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences.

I think it is worth repeating something from the beginning of this chapter, a quote from Donald Rubinstein describing just how deeply