# Nicotine Itself Isn't the Real Villain



## Martin_tu (15/2/17)

Highlighting: "Nicotine is a mild stimulant and poses negligible risks in healthy people. It enhances the performance of some tasks, especially those involving vigilance and rapid visual cue processing. It can also sharpen memory, concentration and attention in the short term." END

The man in charge of tobacco regulation at the Food and Drug Administration says we “need a national debate on nicotine.” Good idea. But first we need to understand what nicotine is – and what it isn’t.

It isn’t the stuff that can cause serious illness and death from cancer, lung, and heart disease. Those culprits are the tar and toxic gases that are released from burning tobacco when you smoke.

Nicotine is a chemical that is dangerous not because it causes cancer but because it can addict you to cigarettes. As Michael Russell, the father of tobacco harm reduction theory and the developer of nicotine gum, put it in 1976: “People smoke for nicotine but they die from the tar.”

Mitchell Zeller, director of the Center of Tobacco Products, a division of the FDA, made his comments about nicotine in an interview with _New York Times_ columnist Joe Nocera on the eve of his agency’s recommendations for regulating electronic cigarettes.


The nature of e-cigarettes is that, like Russell’s gum, they contain nicotine and thus satisfy the cravings of smokers, but vaping – as puffing on an e-cigarette is called – doesn’t burn tobacco and release those carcinogens. Unfortunately, many Americans don’t understand that nicotine itself isn’t the villain.

Adolescents in the early 1980s encountered an evil character called Nick O’Teen, created by DC Comics in collaboration with the Sacramento-based Health Education Council. Nick O’Teen sparred with Superman, who tried to guard Gotham’s children against cigarettes.

But nicotine is only a menace when it can addict people to conventional cigarettes – that is, tobacco wrapped in paper. By contrast, in the process of vaping, nicotine carries little risk by itself. Negative health consequences have not materialized within the seven years e-cigarettes have been used in the U.S. – though it’s essential to keep monitoring.

In the 1960s, most psychologists, psychiatrists, and pharmacologists viewed smoking as a psychological and social habit. “Habit” was also the language used in the landmark 1964 Surgeon General’s report on smoking. At the time, some researchers suspected that nicotine played a role in cigarettes’ appeal. Drugs such as alcohol, barbiturates, and heroin are considered addictive (as opposed to habitual) based on their ability to intoxicate, cause social damage, and produce dramatic physical withdrawal syndromes. But smoking was considered neither a pharmacological nor biological phenomenon.

Not until 1988 did the U.S. Surgeon General designate smoking as an addiction, driven primarily by nicotine, which is a nitrogen-containing chemical, or alkaloid. Nicotine was deemed to have addictive properties based on three fundamental features: (1) in the initial stages of use, more of it is required to produce the same effect in the smoker, a phenomenon called “tolerance”; (2) it is “reinforcing,” meaning that it is sufficiently rewarding to spur self-administration; and (3) abrupt cessation can lead to powerful craving and a recognizable withdrawal syndrome.

Nicotine is a mild stimulant and poses negligible risks in healthy people. It enhances the performance of some tasks, especially those involving vigilance and rapid visual cue processing. It can also sharpen memory, concentration and attention in the short term.

Also, because nicotine receptors appear to regulate other receptor systems, its effect can vary according to one’s mood and level of arousal. A smoker who feels anxious or stressed can be calmed with nicotine, and a smoker who is tired will perk up with nicotine.

When nicotine binds to receptors in the brain, it releases dopamine, a primary neurotransmitter. Dopamine plays an important role in modulating attention, concentration, appetite suppression, and movement. Dopamine’s effects on movement could explain why nicotine has shown some promise in ameliorating a disorder like Parkinson’s disease in primates. In humans, in fact, large epidemiological series have found lower levels of the Parkinson’s in older smokers. Also, patients with early stages of Alzheimer’s disease show some improvement with nicotine when delivered via a patch.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallysatel/2015/06/19/nicotine-can-save-lives/#712d80d2cdfd


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