Smokers find few places left for them to light up

The news story said something about folks with bad tempers being especially susceptible to nicotine, that their personalities made them likely to get hooked on smoking cigarettes.

If you want to see bad tempers, you need not follow scientific studies. Just be around somebody giving up smoking for Lent, or being told they can’t smoke even outside their workplaces anymore, or, worse yet, in their local pubs where they have lighted up for years.

Maine means it when it says No Puffin around here. Not in restaurants, not in offices, not in any indoor public spaces including bars. According to the Maine Coalition on Smoking or Health, Maine is one of five states that have banned smoking in virtually all workplaces in order to protect workers from secondhand smoke.

The legislation has not proved popular in some sections. Bar owners particularly are screaming foul because of the loss of customers since the smoking ban went into effect. They contend their bar patrons are still smoking, just doing it down the street at the local Elks Lodge or American Legion hall or other private clubs or off-track betting establishments. It’s just not fair, they cry.

What may not be fair indeed is the predisposition of some people who apparently were “born to smoke,” according to a recent report by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It’s the first biological evidence that people with certain personality traits are more likely to get addicted to nicotine if they ever experiment with cigarettes.

Researchers discovered the effects on people wearing nicotine patches. The nicotine “jazzed up” the brains of not just smokers who are aggressive, but of nonsmokers, too.

The study found that people prone to anger and aggression – not more cheerful, relaxed types – were more susceptible to nicotine. At least, that’s what the brain scans showed: that nicotine triggered dramatic bursts of activity in the brains of those Type A personalities, those people having more hostile tendencies toward anger, impatience and irritability.

“They may smoke to feel better, but they don’t feel better,” said psychiatrist Steven Potkin of the University of California, Irvine, who led the study. “Nicotine made them even more aggressive.”

That may be true if the scientists say so, but the lack of nicotine surely can make them aggressive.

Just stand next to the guy in the airport lounge, madder than a startled yellow jacket, who quickly learned there were no butts about it.