The role of nicotine in tobacco use

Abstract

The 1988 US Surgeon General's Report titled "Nicotine Addiction", is cited frequently in the literature as having established the "fact" that nicotine derived from cigarette smoke is addictive in the same sense as "classic" addicting drugs such as heroin and cocaine. This manuscripts critically evaluates key research findings used in support of this claim and identifies shortcomings in the data that seriously question the logic of labeling nicotine as "addictive". In addition, the manuscript argues that the role of nicotine in tobacco use is not like the role of cocaine in coca leaf use as argued by the 1988 Surgeon General's Report, but is, in fact, more like the role of caffeine in coffee drinking as concluded in the 1964 US Surgeon General's Report.

Alcohol and tobacco use disorders in a general population: short-term and long-term associations from the St. Louis Epidemiological Catchment Area Study

“…Schulenberg et al (in press) suggest that prospective associations between adolescent substance use and young adult functioning may be in part due to "a mutually reinforcing web of contemporaneous influences (p. 12)". Our own findings showing mediation through concurrent substance use disorders speak to the high chronicity of alcohol and tobacco use disorders, particularly the latter, given the highly addictive nature of smoking (Department of Health and Human Services, 1988;Robinson and Pritchard, 1992). 4.1.3.…”

Nicotine induces conditioned place preferences over a large range of doses in rats

“…Although these intravenous drug self-administration procedures work well in rats and dogs with opioids and psychostimulants, nicotine has been a weak reinforcer in rats and dogs when compared to other drugs of abuse, such as cocaine, under progressive-ratio schedules of drug injection (Risner and Goldberg 1983;Donny et al 1998;Caggiula et al 2001Caggiula et al , 2002. Although American (Fiore et al 2000) and European (Lagrue et al 2003) guidelines on smoking dependence acknowledge the major role of nicotine in maintaining smoking behavior, the ability of nicotine to act as a reinforcer of selfadministration behavior in animals and humans has been frequently questioned (Robinson and Pritchard 1992;West 1992;Stolerman and Jarvis 1995;Frenk 2002, 2004). Interestingly, the magnitude of nicotine CPP in our experiment with rats (Figs 2, 3) was lower than the magnitude of CPP often described with other psychostimulants and opiates in rats (Bardo et al 1995), supporting these previous conclusions, that the rewarding effects of nicotine, by itself, are weaker than those of other psychostimulants or opioids in experimental animals (Risner and Goldberg 1983;Caggiula et al 2001) Nevertheless, nicotine is able to maintain significant self-administration under both fixed-ratio schedules in rats (Corrigall and Coen 1989;Shoaib and Stolerman 1999;Caggiula et al 2001), monkeys (Sannerud et al 1994) and dogs (Risner and Goldberg 1983) and progressive-ratio schedules in rats (Donny et al 1999;Paterson et al 2004) and dogs (Risner and Goldberg 1983).…”

Deprivation state but not nicotine content of the cigarette affects responding by smokers on a progressive ratio task

“…Second, we included a measure of cognitive performance, to examine the relationship between the objective e¤ects of nicotine on performance and the behavioural measure of smoking need provided by the PR task. Smokers may smoke to maintain or improve concentration (Warburton 1990;Robinson and Pritchard 1992). Deprivation clearly impairs cognitive performance (see Heishman et al 1994 for a review), and it has been suggested that this e¤ect is linked to craving, which occupies cognitive resources otherwise directed towards the task in hand (Cepeda-Benito and Ti¤any 1996).…”