Nobody smokes just nicotine

Cigarettes and drinks carry more than chemistry. They carry comfort, belonging, applause and the feeling of having arrived. And that meaning acts before the substance does, sometimes even without it.

English edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.

The cigarette you light after an argument is not after nicotine. At least, not only nicotine. If you smoke, you know which cigarettes matter most: the one with coffee, the one on a break, the one after bad news, the one on the night nobody called. And if you drink, you know that the glass at a birthday party is not the same glass as the one on a Tuesday afternoon, alone in your room, with nothing to celebrate.

Nicotine is real. Alcohol is real. Both act on the body, and I will talk about that. But the cigarette and the glass carry something else, and that something acts before the chemistry does. Sometimes it acts even without it.

Before going on, two caveats. The first: saying that an object carries a symbol does not make the substance any less real. Nicotine dependence and alcohol dependence are health conditions, with effects on the body, and stopping alcohol suddenly can be dangerous. The second: the meanings I am about to describe are not present in everyone in the same way. They are questions to ask of your own history, not a diagnosis of anyone. People who smoke or drink are not weak or bad. In Eduardo Casarotto’s Virtology, the search for importance and the search for one’s own relief are two systems in the brain that every human being has: pride and selfishness. Addiction leans on them, and that is why it catches such different people.

In Why you keep doing what no longer gives you pleasure I described the wanting circuit, which learns to pull harder and harder. This article is about something else: what the object means to the person who reaches for it.

Nicotine weighs a lot, but not on its own

Let us start with the body. Nicotine enters, fits into a receptor in the brain, and dopamine rises along the mesolimbic pathway, the route that records what is worth repeating. The peak is small. Nobody loses their head over a cigarette. But that small peak repeats all day long. Someone who smokes a pack a day brings their hand to their mouth many times, every day, for years. Casarotto notes that no other drug is recorded so many times in a person’s brain.

With repetition, use stops being about pleasure and becomes about relieving discomfort, as George Koob and Michel Le Moal described (2008). The smoker says, “cigarettes calm me down.” To a large extent, what they are calming is the absence of the previous cigarette. They spent the morning without smoking, became irritable and anxious, lit one and felt relief. And they concluded that cigarettes treat anxiety. Above all, what a cigarette treats is the withdrawal the cigarette itself created.

So far, chemistry. Now look at two findings that Casarotto’s book places side by side, because one does not cancel the other.

The first comes from experiments by Jed Rose and colleagues (2000; 2003), which separated the pharmacological and the sensory parts of smoking. The gesture, the smoke, the sensation in the throat all took part in satisfaction. The second comes from Donny and colleagues (2015): when the nicotine in cigarettes was reduced, consumption, dependence and craving all fell, under the conditions of that study. In other words, nicotine weighs a lot. And even so, it does not explain everything. An honest explanation of smoking needs more than one piece.

The symbol acts before the chemistry

With alcohol, the evidence is even clearer.

In 1973, the psychologist Alan Marlatt ran an experiment with alcohol-dependent people and social drinkers. Half were told they were drinking alcohol, half were told they were not. And in fact, half drank alcohol and half did not, with every combination crossed. What decided how much each person drank was not the alcohol in the glass. It was what the person believed was in the glass. And the effect was larger in the dependent drinkers (Marlatt, Demming and Reid, 1973).

In 2009, in France, Laurent Bègue and colleagues applied the same logic to aggression. People who believed they had been drinking became more aggressive, and the actual amount of alcohol in their blood made no difference. In 2010, the same group showed that merely seeing a photo of a bottle, for a fraction of a second, made the brain recognize aggressive words faster, just as much as a photo of a gun did (Subra and colleagues, 2010). Nobody drank anything. The bottle, just by being seen, set off what it stands for.

And there is price. In 2008, researchers in California gave volunteers inside a scanner the same wine at two different prices: once as a 5-dollar wine, once as a 45-dollar wine. At the higher price, the same wine was experienced as tastier, and the medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the forehead involved in felt pleasure and in the value we give things, became more active (Plassmann and colleagues, 2008). The liquid was the same. The pleasure changed with what the person believed they were drinking.

The symbol is not decoration. It works in the body.

What the cigarette carries

Now Casarotto’s reading comes in. It starts from each person’s history and draws on classic clinical authors. It rests on an idea that runs through all of Virtology: Lack, the underlying hole that moves a person. It may be the basic sense of not being whole, a mark that life left behind, or a competency that never formed. In this reading, the object of use is the quickest lid the brain knows for that hole.

A cigarette is a small object you place between your lips and draw on. Something warm comes in through the mouth and goes down into the chest. The first experience of safety a human being has passes through the mouth: that is where hunger stops, where crying stops, where the body relaxes. That is why, in his reading, a cigarette can take the place of being held. It is the “there, there, it will pass.” It is why so many people light a cigarette after an argument, after bad news, when anxious or alone. In that moment, they are looking for comfort.

The English paediatrician Donald Winnicott described the transitional object in 1953: the blanket, the teddy bear, the corner of the sheet a child squeezes in order to fall asleep without the mother nearby. Casarotto takes up that idea and sums it up: the cigarette is the adult’s teddy bear, only a teddy bear that catches fire and goes into the lungs.

And the cigarette, the cigar above all, also carries strength: the protection and command of the one in charge. In the language of earlier generations, comfort was the mother and strength was the father. Casarotto makes a point of saying that this is the symbol of an era, not a rule about men and women. Comfort and protection have no sex. They belong to whoever cared and whoever protected.

The industry understood this early. In 1929, to get women smoking in public, an American tobacco company staged a group of young women lighting cigarettes in front of photographers at the New York Easter parade. They called them “torches of freedom.” In 1954 came the Marlboro cowboy, the manliest man in American advertising. The product was the same. At one moment it was sold as women’s freedom. At another, as men’s masculinity. What was sold was the symbol.

One caveat Casarotto makes, and that I repeat: Rose’s studies did not measure comfort, power or victory as causes of the habit. That inquiry into meanings belongs to listening to each person’s history. Nobody should assume that every smoker is looking for comfort, or that the symbol weighs more than the substance in any given person.

What the glass carries

With drink, the Lack being covered is a different one. In Casarotto’s reading, the cigarette covers a lack of comfort and protection. Drink covers a lack of friendship and a lack of being recognized.

First, the group. The researcher Robin Dunbar, of the University of Oxford, studied English pubs and proposed that alcohol, drunk together, activates the same endorphin system that laughter, singing and dancing activate: the bonding system. His data suggest that alcohol maintains existing ties more than it creates new ones (Dunbar and colleagues, 2017). The neighbourhood bar is exactly that: the place where very different people sit at the same plastic table.

Then, applause. Drink is the toast. We toast when we pass an exam, when our team wins, when we marry, when a child is born. Nobody toasts a defeat. The raised glass says: you won, and we are watching. This is where pride comes in, which in Virtology is the system of the need for importance, the SNO, the Pride Neurofunctional System (the Portuguese acronym is kept in the English editions). I explained that system in Pride is not what you think. The symbol of drink attaches exactly there, to “I matter” and “I am seen.”

That is why an expensive bottle is sold in heavy glass. Betina Piqueras-Fiszman and Charles Spence (2012) weighed 275 wine bottles and showed that weight tracked price, and that consumers associated a heavier bottle with a better wine. The economist Thorstein Veblen had already written, in 1899, that expensive goods are felt to be noble and honorable, and that even drunkenness tends to look honorable when it shows the person can afford it. A 1926 bottle of whisky was auctioned in London in 2023 for more than two million pounds. Nobody pays that to get drunk.

Each person drinks the trophy their pocket can reach. Someone who earns little celebrates with cheap cane spirit. Someone with more buys the expensive whisky. But both are buying the same symbol.

This symbol is so strong that it disguises the problem. According to the Brazilian research center CISA, in 2025, 82% of Brazilians who drink heavily believe they drink in moderation. If it is a party, it does not look like an illness.

When the glass becomes the finish line

The symbol can flip its sign. While drink is on the table, among friends, it says “I am with you.” When it moves into a closed bedroom, it starts to say “I can’t cope without this.”

The researcher Kasey Creswell and colleagues (2022) followed thousands of young Americans for 17 years. Those who drank alone at 18 were 35% more likely to have symptoms of alcohol use disorder at 35. Those who drank alone at 23 or 24 were 60% more likely, even when compared with people who drank the same amount.

And there is a sentence Casarotto says he has heard hundreds of times, in his practice and in therapeutic communities: “if I drink, I’ve already reached the end.” What am I working for? What am I striving for? For these people, drink has become the finish line. Since the glass carries the symbol of victory all by itself, you can skip the whole road and go straight to the finish line. Real achievement takes time, it tires you, it depends on other people. The glass delivers the feeling of achievement in ten minutes.

The sentence “I’ve already reached the end” has a second meaning, and it is a cruel one. It speaks of the finish line, and it speaks of the end.

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl placed addiction, alongside depression and aggression, among the great responses to the emptiness of meaning. And there is research pointing the same way: among 364 people with alcohol dependence followed for two and a half years, those who went into remission were the ones with the largest increase in purpose in life (Krentzman and colleagues, 2015). In Virtology, the reading is this: drink plugs Lack in exactly the place where Lack should stay open to move the person.

Why vaping caught on among teenagers

Brazil’s National School Health Survey, run by the national statistics institute IBGE, showed that among students aged 13 to 17, trying e-cigarettes rose from 16.8% in 2019 to 29.6% in 2024. Almost three in ten. Over the same period, in the same survey, trying regular cigarettes, alcohol and illegal drugs all fell (IBGE, 2026). Everything fell. Only vaping nearly doubled. And this with sales banned in Brazil since 2009, a ban the health regulator Anvisa reinforced in 2024.

If television advertising is not selling it, what is? Casarotto’s answer: the need that is waiting. The group, the party, belonging, being seen. When the need is alive, it finds the object, with or without the law.

Look at the object. It fits in the palm of the hand. No ash, no heavy smell on clothes. It has color, flavor, design. And it has no end. A cigarette finishes: it burns, it ends, it goes in the bin. There is a full stop there, even if only for a few minutes. A vape does not finish. It is in the pocket, in the backpack, under the pillow.

With tobacco, the way in was almost never nicotine. It was the group. Almost everyone’s first cigarette was offered by someone, made them cough, made them dizzy. The body said no and the group said yes, and the group spoke louder. With vaping the door is even wider: it barely makes you cough, it tastes sweet and it gets passed from hand to hand at parties.

If you found a vape in your child’s backpack, take a breath before you speak. Scolding and humiliation go straight to their pride, and wounded pride learns to hide better, not to stop. Ask and listen. What does your child get from it? The group? Being seen? Relief from anxiety? That is where the work is. And look inside your own home: children learn from what adults do, not from what adults say.

When a cigar is just a cigar

There is a famous sentence attributed to Freud: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” The researcher Alan Elms showed, in 2001, that there is no record of Freud ever saying it. But the question deserves an answer. When is a cigar just a cigar?

Virtology answers through the Evolution Bands, the seven levels of consciousness through which a person perceives and reacts to each area of life. Symbolic thinking belongs to the more primitive bands. In an area where someone is still in a primitive band, the cigar is power and the glass is a trophy. As the person moves up a band in that area, the object stops carrying the symbol and goes back to being just the object. For someone who needs to prove their worth, the glass is a trophy. For someone who already knows their worth, the glass is liquid.

That is why fighting the symbol does not work. It loses its force when the need it was paying for finds another answer.

The four questions about the object

Casarotto calls them the cigar questions. They work for a cigarette, a vape, a glass or a bottle. They neither confirm nor rule out dependence, and answering them does not require stopping use to test your willpower.

The answers are working hypotheses, not verdicts on your past. Take them to whoever supports you. They help you choose what to care for first.

Paying for Lack another way

The first step is a health assessment. Stopping alcohol or sedatives may require medical supervision, and health services offer treatment for people who want to stop smoking. The virtues come in alongside that care, never in place of it.

If the cigarette is paying for comfort, the Lack is one of being held, of contact, of company. That is met through connection, through touch, through a family learning to hold without smothering.

If the glass is paying for recognition, the work begins with pride. And here order matters, because in Virtology no virtue works alone. The Pyramid of Virtues says what comes first.

Humility comes first. Someone who no longer needs to prove their worth no longer needs the liquid trophy. It is also what allows the first step, which is to admit the difficulty and ask for help. Selflessness comes paired with it and works on selfishness, the SNE, the Selfishness Neurofunctional System: it takes the relief of right now out of the center and gives back their place to the people who live with you, the child breathing the smoke, the person who waits up at night.

Then comes the rest of the foundation level. Acceptance, to get through the first days of irritability without turning every discomfort into a catastrophe. Forgiveness, for the attempts that did not work. Responsibility, to take charge of your own treatment. The State of Certainty, to keep going without a guarantee. Perseverance, for the fourth and fifth attempt. And Individuation, to discover who you are without a cigarette in your hand, because many people no longer know who they are without it.

Only afterwards comes the Development level. Virtology’s canonical combination for addiction, compulsion, impulse and immediacy is Humility, Selflessness, Truth, Gentleness, Patience, Responsibility and Acceptance. Gentleness is the calm that needs no smoke, the pause taken by breathing rather than inhaling, and it only holds on top of the foundation. The Pursuit of Improvement, which first requires Humility, Forgiveness and Perseverance, gives back real achievement, the kind that takes time: the breath that returns, the stairs you climb without stopping halfway. Usefulness gives the recognition that comes from what you do, not from the bottle you raise.

On the horizon, at the top of the Pyramid, are Love of Neighbor and Helping Others. It is no accident that one of the most helpful treatments for alcohol is a peer group, where someone who has come through reaches out to someone just arriving. That is where a “what for” bigger than the glass returns.

The object can become an object again

None of this asks you to hate the cigarette or the glass. It asks you to find out what they are paying for, and to pay for that Lack another way, with health care, with connection and with virtue practised every day until it becomes a path.

When that happens, the object loses its force. Not because it was forbidden, but because it no longer has anything to offer. One day, the cigar goes back to being just a cigar. And the glass goes back to being just a glass.

If you drink heavily every day, do not stop all at once and on your own: alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and delirium, and it needs medical supervision. Severe tremor, confusion or seizures in the days after stopping are an emergency: call your local emergency services. To stop smoking or drinking, contact your doctor or your local addiction services, and consider a support group. If the urge to use comes together with a wish to die, contact emergency services or a crisis line in your country right away.

Continue with SNO and SNE: two systems at the root of neurosis, Pride is not what you think, or the 12-Step guided trail.