The third effort to distinguish cigarette use from addiction alleges that cigarette use does not lead to antisocial behavior. As shown in Part I, however, it is not heroin addiction but the limited availability and high cost of black-market heroin which leads to antisocial behavior among heroin addicts. Much the same is true with respect to nicotine addiction. When the supply of cigarettes is curtailed, cigarette smokers behave remarkably like heroin addicts. Following World War II, for example, the tobacco ration in Germany was cut to two packs per month for men and one pack per month for women. Dr. F. I. Arntzen of the Research Center for Psychodiagnosis in Munster, Germany, questioned hundreds of Germans during this cigarette famine, and reported his findings in the American Journal of Psychology in 1948.
"Up to a point," Dr. Arntzen noted,
"the majority of the habitual smokers preferred to do without food even under extreme conditions of nutrition rather than to forego tobacco. Thus, when food rations in prisoner-of-war camps were down to 900-1000 calories, smokers were still willing to barter their food rations for tobacco. Of 300 German civilians questioned, 256 had obtained tobacco at the black market, 37 had bought tobacco and food, and only 5 had bought food but no tobacco. Many housewives who were smokers bartered fat and sugar for cigarettes. In disregard of considerations of personal dignity, conventional decorum, and esthetic-hygienic feelings, cigarette butts were picked up out of the street dirt by people who, on their own statements, would in any other circumstances have felt disgust at such contact. Smokers also condescended to beg for tobacco, but not for other things...."
In reports on subjective impressions, 80 percent of those questioned declared that it felt worse to do without nicotine than without alcohol. *
* Reports of women who are willing to prostitute themselves for a carton of cigarettes, and of men who trade stolen goods for cigarettes, are also common during and after wars.
