Science of Cooking

I think a lot of people making jokes about stuff like this may struggle to understand what addiction feels like from the inside and how intensity of desire is not always a function of withdrawal severity.

The popular image of addiction is something like a twitchy looking person begging for the next hit. This is rare, even for extremely addictive drugs with severe withdrawal.

Often addiction manifests internally as a fascination with something. When I smoked it was rare to not be on some level thinking about the logistics of when I would next light up. I also over emphasised the positive effects (many of which in hindsight were merely alleviating withdrawal which is hilarious) and diminished the negative ones.

As someone with a sweet tooth it's not so different to how I feel about treats. It's difficult not to think of grabbing one when shopping, I typically feel a desire after dinner, I often "cave" if something is around or eat it without much intention.

Contrast this with antidepressants, which can cause debilitating months long withdrawal. Yet when stopping SNRIs I had no powerful desires to consume them, despite knowing that doing so would make it stop feeling like my soul was being sucked out the back of my head.

There are reasons to be cautious about lots of research like this, pharma companies would love to sell a solution for example, but it's not outlandish. Nicotine is addictive because it makes your brain light up in certain ways, there is nothing special about the molecule except it does that thing (well and crosses the BBB). If there are other ways to make brains light up in similar ways without a specific chemical receptor it stands to reason that under certain circumstances addiction may manifest.