- Addiction Stories (48)
- Anonymous No More (3)
- Education (291)
- Links (55)
- Opinions (77)
- prevention (15)
- Rehab-Finder (3)
- Tips (76)
- Treatment (92)
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
- Addiction stories: Hellish Heroin – Bambi’s heroin addiction story
- Demand & Money: Why Mexican drug cartels aren’t losing this war.
- Crystal meth withdrawal – It’s not like heroin, but don’t expect it to be easy
- Addiction stories: How I recovered from my addiction to crystal meth
- Addiction brain effects : Opiate addiction – Heroin, oxycontin and more
- Simply Sober Won’t Do – From Crystal Meth Addict to Scholar
- Is abstinence the only option? Moderate alcohol drinking is possible and there’s help
- Correlation, causation, and association – What does it all mean???
- The brain addiction connection : Crystal meth, and our friend dopamine
- Proposition 19 – Marijuana legalization or nothing? The business of weed
More to cigarettes than nicotine
May 31st, 2010
A recent talk I gave (click here), highlighted the fact that other aspects of smoking are very important for addiction to cigarettes. For some people, this isn’t news, especially if you’ve been reading our coverage about the importance of cues for smoking addiction. But that’s not all that makes cigarettes so hard to quit.
Cigarettes, chemicals, and addiction
Thousands of chemicals are released when cigarettes are smoked, including the nicotine we’ve been hearing so much about as well as formaldehyde, benzene, and other nasty things. Some of the chemicals that are released have psychoactive effects, and a few, like acetaldehyde (the chemical that causes hangovers), and a group of monoamine oxidase inhibitors (yes, like old school MAOI antidepressants), apparently increase the effects of nicotine itself greatly, making it far more rewarding, and therefore theoretically addictive, than it would be without them.
The recent paper by a group at Duke University, suggests that there may be aspects of the smoke in cigarettes, even without nicotine, that are themselves rewarding. In the study, researchers gave people the option of taking nicotine by IV or smoking a de-nicotinzed cigarette – Overwhelmingly, participants chose to smoke the nicotine-free cigarettes.
Limitations and conclusions
Now granted, these were regular smokers, which meant that regardless of the effect, the act of smoking was so pre-programmmed for them as a rewarding one that overcoming it just for an experiment is a far-fetched notion. Still, given the hard time I’m having using nicotine as a reward, it seems likely that the other chemicals, as well as the experience of the smoke itself, play a very important role in addiction to cigarettes. Indeed, researchers years ago were very interested in discussing the role off the insula, a brain region important for bodily sensations (possibly involved in cravings and urges).
Another important limitation of this study was the fact that the “de-nicotinized” cigarettes actually had very small amounts of nicotine in them. This little tidbit of information is important because even small, “priming,” doses of a drug can cause very strong effects in terms of drug-seeking and drug-wanting. Maybe in the future there’d be some way of repeating this sort of study with cigarettes that actually contain no nicotine whatsoever.
Citation:
Rose, J.E., Salley, A., Behm, F.M., Bates, J.E., and Westman, E.C. (2010). Reinforcing effects of nicotine and non-nicotine components of cigarette smoke. Psychopharmacology, 210, 1-12.
More From adijaffe
- Nicotine addiction and genetics – It’s the little things that matter in smoking addiction
- Nicotine vaccine? It seems addicts would love one!
- Talking to NIDA about addiction research- Nicotine, cocaine, treatment matching and more
adijaffe Recommends
- How hard is it to quit smoking? (#1 Quit Smoking Blog)
- How to quit smoking completely if i smoke only one or two Cigarettes a day? (#1 Quit Smoking Blog)
Related posts:
- Smoking cigarettes just makes it better… The enhancement effect of nicotine
- The genetics of quitting smoking- Bupropion and nicotine metabolism
- Cigarettes, smoking, and drinking alcohol – The connection that may help you quit smoking
- Drugs and Pregnancy Part II: Cigarettes and Weed
- Nicotine vaccine? It seems addicts would love one!
| Posted in: Drugs, Education Tags: acetaldehyde, addiction, antidepressants, benzene, chemicals, cigarettes, cigarettes smoking, Duke, MAOI, nicotine, poison, quit smoking, smoke, smoking |
|
2 Responses to “More to cigarettes than nicotine”Leave a Reply | |
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mike Ferguson and Adi Jaffe, Adi Jaffe. Adi Jaffe said: New A3 post: More to cigarettes than nicotine http://bit.ly/dnjNpX #addiction #benzene #chemicals [...]
Ineed for me. I quit cigarettes because smoking them no longer brought the comfort that I was used to with them. It no longer brought sensations of pleasure just guilt and anxiety. I do not wish to spend any more $ on something that does me for me nothing except an early on set of cancer or some other life threatening problem down the road. I didnt suffer from nicotine withdrawls as much as I did the habit of smoking something in general. The habit is what must be conqeured!! Thank You!