tion. Alcohol related health problems were associated with 36 percent of deaths and were more than four times of those expected in the general population. Hurt and colleagues stressed the importance of the nicotine-alcohol relationship as a serious risk factor for increased mortality substance-dependent people. They also noted that these two dependencies may be inherited and for those people with both addictions, smoking may be a trait co-inherited with alcoholism. The studies suggest that abstinence from smoking may benefit the cessation of alcoholic activity and that the focus on nicotine abstinence not hinder the success rate for treatment of alcohol. Possible mechanisms suggest by other researchers include cross-tolerance to nicotine and alcohol, neural reward pathways and cued responding. Others studies have repeated that smoking onset and alcohol use have similar risk factors in common that are in many times due to heredity influences, especially in adolescents and young adults. The data this study unlike other studies on alcohol and nicotine strongly suggests that not only is the threat of addiction to each of these substances a heredity factor, but that the concept of cross addiction, or dual addition is, itself a matter of genetics. It would indicate that teenagers, or young adults who are at an experimental stage of their life are especially vulnerable to this kind of genetic dual addiction. While schools and community programs in the past have focused on education, as a means to prevent the use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs and it is evident that dual addiction should be allotted an equal time in education as prevention as with the genetic predisposition to this condition.This study does have its caveats, in that the research is only limited to male twins born between 1939 and 1955. It is also confined to Vietnam era veterans. In the Pentagon has in the past provided cigarettes to its soldiers and thus might of had influences...
