New research has found people who have problems with alcohol will have more difficulty quitting smoking than those without current or past alcohol problems.

A study regarding the quit rates of smokers conducted by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Wisconsin found people without alcohol problems were more likely to have quit after intervals of four and eight weeks in a smoking cessation program.

The program included patch therapy and counseling.

The study was published in the current issue of Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

“One of the things that makes addiction so difficult is the tendency to switch addictions,” said David Sahr, executive director for the Center for Addictions Recovery in Ames, 511 Duff Ave.

Smoking and alcohol addictions often are associated together, and recovery from one often leads to a heightened dependency on the other, Sahr said.

Also, people recovering from one abuse are not pushed to quit the other by those in counseling programs.

Rick Gibbons, professor of psychology, said correlations between substance abuse and smoking have been made in the past and significant work has been done in the area of addiction.

“It has been shown that some people can be biologically prone to an addiction, and also the cessation of smoking requires a constant conscious decision to abstain,” Gibbons said.

Drinking can make it harder, and people can lapse, developing an addiction to both, Sahr said.

“It is a fact that there are those in the recovery community that say dealing with one addiction is hard enough without quitting other drugs,” he said.

Recovering alcoholics often depend on nicotine when attempting to abstain from alcohol and defend smoking in this manner.

“A lot of them use the excuse that ‘I’m giving up alcohol, at least let me smoke,’ and ‘I can’t make them quit when it’s legal to smoke,'” Sahr said.

Sahr said the Center for Addictions Recovery offers the opportunity to take advantage of all the resources available in the Ames community, including smoking cessation programs.

Linda Enders, assistant professor in human development and family studies, said she did work in addiction recovery field and she recalls a lot of the people she counseled with alcohol problems were relying on nicotine.

“It’s very common to see addictive personalities switching from one addiction to another, with smoking being the lesser of two evils,” she said.