Tobacco craving reflects a conscious desire or intention to use tobacco. Many accounts of TD include craving as an important dependence symptom [15, 54–56], and there is evidence that craving plays a causal role in relapse [14, 41, 57–60], is meaningfully correlated with smoking heaviness [17, 19, 25], and is correlated with other important features of TD [29, 61]. Amongst all withdrawal symptoms craving stands out as being most highly associated with TD, and as a predictor of abstinence following a quit attempt [14, 62–64]. Finally, subscales that assess craving tend to be the most valid subscales on the major multidimensional measures of TD; i.e., NDSS “Drive” (e.g., [18]), and WISDM “Craving” (e.g., [9]).
