By: Eric Wang
It’s no surprise that smoking causes many bad effects on smokers. These include a shorter lifespan, lung cancer, blackened lungs, heart attacks, miscarriages, and birth defects. Smoking can also worsen other conditions such as decreased HDL cholesterol, higher blood pressure, less oxygen flow, and poorer lung function. As a result, the FDA is now moving towards drastically reducing nicotine levels in smoking and vaping products by up to 95 percent.
While tobacco has many chemicals that do a lot of damage, nicotine is the reason why smokers keep coming back to it. Nicotine is an alkaloid naturally produced in the nightshade family of plants, which includes tobacco. It is highly addictive because it triggers a dopamine rush, which gives the smoker a feeling of calm and pleasantness. However, this rush is short-lived, making the smoker go back for more.
As the smoker smokes more and more, the brain creates more dopamine receptors, which makes smoking even more enjoyable. However, this is why it is so hard to quit smoking. When all these receptors are left unfilled, it creates waves of want and desire, which often pushes the smoker trying to quit back to the cigarettes.
Bruce Holiday, 69, describes the feeling as “... a sudden earthquake of desire and need, and then there would be these tremors for the next 10 to 15 minutes.” This addiction affects over 30 million people in the United States and claims 480 thousand lives a year.
Federally funded studies have found that an immediate 95 percent reduction of nicotine levels in cigarettes and other sources of nicotine is most efficient in helping smokers kick the bucket on nicotine. Tobacco expert at Wake Forest University School of Medicine Eric Donny, who has conducted multiple experiments on low nicotine cigarettes, says that many scientists have embraced a 95 percent reduction of nicotine levels as the perfect amount. He warns that anything higher could cause participants to inhale deeper and smoke more often to compensate for the lower nicotine levels.
The studies Dr. Donny conducted were performed with genetically modified tobacco that expressed less nicotine. They are not allowed to bring the nicotine level down to zero due to the Tobacco Control Act passed in 2009, which gives the FDA power over the manufacture and marketing of tobacco.
“When you get the nicotine in tobacco low enough, you just can’t get enough nicotine to maintain the dependence,” says Dr. Donny.
However, this will be enormously challenging for chronic smokers, even among the 70 percent that would like to stop. Fewer than 1 out of the 10 smokers that try to quit succeed, reflecting the power nicotine holds over smokers.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, showed her confidence in the studies that suggested a sudden cut was better than a gradual decrease. However, she warned that scientists have yet to address the unforeseen consequences of such an action. “You cannot completely predict outcomes based on a clinical randomized study. Biology and life are not so precise.”
Other scientists have also warned that the existing research on low nicotine tobacco is imperfect, given the number of participants who cheat. Lynn Kozlowski, a tobacco researcher at the University of Buffalo, says “What scares me is a national experiment with the very low nicotine cigarette that is done without some testing in the real world.” The study most experts cite when promoting the 95 percent drop in nicotine had paid participants, with many of them secretly smoking their own brands of cigarettes along with the low nicotine ones.
Tobacco company executives also warn that lowering the nicotine amount by such a large percentage could drive dedicated smokers to Mexican or Canadian cigarettes. Some also argue that this could lead to the paring of these new reduced nicotine cigarettes with other nicotine products such as nicotine gum.
In the coming years, those who smoke could one day wake up to only low-nicotine cigarettes, if the research backing the 95 percent decrease shapes up. Otherwise, we may have to turn our eyes to other ways to wean off nicotine.
Original Article: https://s3.amazonaws.com/appforest_uf/f1659883925887x524510902391496450/Breaking%20Nicotine%E2%80%99s%20Powerful%20Draw%20-%20The%20New%20York%20Times.pdf
Supporting Articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/17488-smoking