This time, she couldn't seem to quit -- or didn't want to. So a friend of mine from out West -- where all new trends seem to develop first -- told me that she'd bought her husband what are now commonly called e-cigarettes, and he stopped smoking.

I had a patient who had come in to my clinic to quit smoking. He was smoking 30 cigarettes a day and had tried to quit before but to no avail. On the first night of our smoking cessation class, I taught him a simple practice.

Joe Donlan has been many things in his life -- an athlete, a businessman, a husband and father, a Marine, a good friend and... a lifetime smoker.

Unfortunately, most of today's smokers struggling with depression are still not benefiting from over a century of advances.

People talk about the power of cigarettes, how hard they are to give up, but they don't talk about what really makes them powerful, which is the most interesting part.

We mood-alter with substances (alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc.) and activities (shopping, gambling, sex, work etc.) We are unable to simply be awake and present to life -- so we medicate our existential anxiety.

Under ordinary circumstances, giving up an addiction, any addiction, is hard enough. But Obama isn't living under ordinary circumstances. Shouldn't we allow him his occasional cigs?

The lag between what we know about helping smokers and what we do to help them opens a window into the gaping hole between scientific knowledge and clinical practice.

In 1854, the essayist Henry David Thoreau published an ode to a morning fire: "Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird... Lark without song, and messenger o...

I have worked in the addiction field for forty years, since I began researching my book, Love and Addiction. I take a non-disease approach, since I find the idea that you are born to be a lifelong addict unhelpful.

You're almost there. You want to quit. In fact, 80 percent of your brain is sure you can. But 20 percent insists that you can't. How do you make it over to the other side without falling SPLAT on your face?

In the name of transparency, yes, my late father lit one cigarette off the end of another from the time he was twelve until nine months before he...