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I am uncomfortable with this policy of appeasement but I would be even more uncomfortable if the entire treatment centre were to dose if I did not make this compromise. As far as counselling staff are concerned, we no longer recruit cigarette smokers because we believe that they would be incapable of advising patients on the treatment of one addictive disorder while themselves indulging in another. As far as PROMIS is concerned, we consider cigarette smokers to be active addicts if they score more than twenty points on the nicotine addiction assessment in the Shorter PROMIS Questionnaire. Nicotine, the addictive substance that they use, may be legal, despite the fact that it is the most damaging of all addictive substances (in the UK, all the recreational drugs put together kill fifteen people a day, alcohol kills one hundred people a day and nicotine kills three hundred people a day), but it is certainly addictive and therefore it should not be used at all by people who work in helping other people to understand and give up addictive behaviour. In diagnosing other people, it does us no harm whatever if we first attack this problem in ourselves.

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