Cigarettes are said to be more addictive than heroin -- and just as deadly. Indeed, they kill 5.4 million people per year.

Yet according to a study by two economists with the World Bank, smokers in developing nations who want to quit might be able to simply phone it in. Literally.

Julienne Labonne and Robert Chase studied 2,400 households in the Philippines between 2003 and 2006, as cell phones were just taking hold of the Philippine market in large numbers, quadrupling in those three years. They found that in homes with at least one smoker, a cell phone purchase resulted in a 32.6 percent decrease in cigarette purchasing.

Come again?

Basically, this means that as people started buying cell phones, they had to cut back on other luxuries, namely cigarettes.

The authors' thesis that cigarettes and cell phones are both status symbols, and therefore interchangeable, fails to acknowledge the addiction factor. The implication, however, is that for people who are struggling financially, the desire for status may outweigh addiction.

And this could prove to be a valuable insight into the psychology of addiction.

We'll have to leave that study to psychologists or physiologists, though. Somehow this seems outside the purview of economics.

[Image: EdBrown05 on Wikimedia Commons]