Posted by Lita on 11/2/2008, 7:45 pm, in reply to "Smoking and ADD"
71.111.149.69
My boyfriend, Tom, is a closet smoker. It’s kind of cute but a tragedy, too. Anyhow, he reads your board, showed me your question, and I thought it might be helpful to respond.
My daughter was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD or ADHD, as my doctor calls it) when she was five years old, and she has been on medications most of the time for the last eight years; she has also been treated for depression. My ex-husband, now serving the seventh of a twenty year sentence for cocain trafficking, has this disease, and I take medications for chronic major depression (with full remission, so I am not clinically depressed with treatment). Anyhow, I understand it to be a genetic thing. My daughter’s different medicines generally work for awhile but loose their effectiveness, then have to be changed. She has been a difficult child to raise, having many of the problems characteristic of ADHD, including defiance, learning disabilities, poor impulse control, and antisocial behaviors. Last year, at age thirteen, she was caught stealing cigarettes from my neighbor. It turned out that she had been taking my cigarettes for six months and already learned to inhale, showing many of the signs of addiction. So I started buying her cigarettes, with smoking seeming like a much lesser evil than criminal behavior. As soon as she started smoking regularly, her overall behavior improved, and it has remained that way. The doctor explains it as some type of interaction between her prescription medicine, nicotine, and a chemical imbalance in her brain, which is probably affected positively with the combination. She now smokes up to a pack of cigarettes a day (on weekends, half that on school days) and her addiction makes cigarettes a powerful reinforcer, and this has been incorporated successfully into her behavior modification program. Her use of medicines has been reduced and this has absorbed the extra cost of the cigarettes; and her medications have continued to work without needing to be changed. At first it was difficult giving her cigarettes and watching her smoke, but it doesn’t bother me at all anymore, given the outcome.
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