If you find yourself in a social group in which drug-taking is common and approved, the chances are that you will try the drug of fashion that is offered to you – cigarettes, alcohol, pot, et cetera. Accordingly, close to 100 percent of Americans have tried at least one cigarette and 85 percent have had al least one drink of alcohol. Of course, on drink or smoke does not make a habitual user (just as one shot of morphine does not create a morphine addict – although I do not advocate even one). To form a drug habit, you must use the drug repeatedly and obtain some reward for doing so.
At first, the reward is social – approval by one’s peers or self-approval for having undertaken a popularly accepted or adult activity. For a boy, puffing a cigarette or taking a drink may be governed as much by t eh insistence of his friends as by his own manly view of himself; for girls, smoking provides a self-image of sophistication or sexiness. Those social rewards and supports must be fairly powerful, because the first few with almost any drug produce physical effects that are downright uncomfortable.
Cigarettes produce coughing and choking; cigars, nausea; alcohol, stomach upset and dizziness; heroin, overwhelming fear and nausea; LSD, terror. Marijuana, for may people, creates no physical or mental effect the first time, making it easy for social reinforcement to cause continuation of its use. As the drug experimenter repeats his experience, his body begins to tolerate the adverse effects. Out of the multiple responses of mind and body he learns to distinguish the pleasurable from the unpleasurable.
With some drugs, the distinctions are made more rapidly than for others. Drugs like heroin, morphine, and cocaine are powerfully rewarding; others, like cigarettes, coffee, and tea, less so. At the beginning of this period, the drug user is in a position to form a drug habit. As he takes the drug, he is immediately rewarded by the pleasure response: the lift of the cigarette inhalation; the calming effect of alcohol; the sexual throb of heroin injection; the delusions and illusions generated by LSD; the dream state created by marijuana; the intense stimulation of cocaine.
Of course, the more frequently the drug is taken, the more strongly the habit is confirmed. Take cigarettes as an example. The average smoker takes ten puffs on a single cigarette before he uses it up. Each inhalation is rewarded by the lift effect of nicotine and the taste of the tars. A smoker who takes in two packs a puffs and is rewarded 400 times a day, or about 150,000 times a year! Even if the cigarette reward is mild, 150,000 reinforcements a year is enough to make any habit rock-firm.
Remember, too, that the more immediate the reinforcement the more powerful it is in confirming behavior. With cigarettes and with most other drugs, the reward follows within seconds after the drug is taken. Each drug has its own reinforcing power, and the more powerful the reward, the fewer the trials needed for habitualization. Although, for almost people, heroin, morphine, and cocaine do not require many trials to create a habit, they do not induce habit formation after one or even few trials.