Nicotine Is the New Wonder Drug

Fantastic Lad sends us to Wired for a story on the upside of nicotine. Researchers are developing drugs based on nicotine that may prove beneficial for brains, bowels, blood vessels and immune systems. "Nicotine acts on the acetylcholine receptors in the brain, stimulating and regulating the release of a slew of brain chemicals, including seratonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. Now drugs derived from nicotine and the research on nicotine receptors are in clinical trials for everything from helping to heal wounds, to depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, anger management and anxiety." A separate story talks about nicotine warding off Parkinson's disease.

Re:Oh great

[jimstapleton]

I think they are planning on modified nicotine. Anyway, considering all the stuff in cigarettes, I don't think nicotine is the worst part - it's just the part that makes it hard for you to quit.

Well, in the quantities present, it's not the worst part, but put a drop of that stuff on your tongue, and it's all over.

Re:Of course it does

[MoonFog]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that while the nicotine makes quitting smoking hard to do, its health effect is not as great as that of the other substances in smoke such as tar. That's what gives you lung cancer, not the nicotine itself.

'medicine'

[abigsmurf]

Nicotine is a toxin. Heck it's more toxic that arsenic and roughly the same toxicity of cyanide (roughly 50mg). Something as dangerous as that shouldn't be prescribed for non-life threatening situations (smoking can be considered life threatening).

Re:'medicine'

[bradmacd]

Most things are toxic at some level, be it 50mg or 500mg. If you take too much tylenol it can kill you. That doesn't mean that at low doses its not useful.

And also, they are not saying smoking is healthy, they are investigating the properties of nicotine and how it affects the brain. Smoking is not the only method of getting nicotine into the body. If they can isolate helpful effects of the drug, maybe it can do some good.

Re:Suspicious at best.

[morgan_greywolf]

This certainly sounds too good to be true. Makes me wonder who's funding the research.

Actually, according to TFA (you did RTFA, right? Nevermind, "I must be new here" ;), the company doing the research was founded by a guy who used to work for RJ Reynolds. RJR retains a 4% stake in the company.

Still, why poo poo the research just because its linked to RJR? It's not like they're trying to use it to sell cigarettes here ... they're developing drugs based on a modified nicotine. Sounds good to me.

*shrugs*

Now excuse my while I go outside to light another Marlboro.

Re:'medicine'

[vigmeister]

One study found that tobacco grown in India averaged only 0.09 pCi per gram of polonium 210, whereas tobacco grown in the United States averaged 0.516 pCi per gram.

Quick guide to Indian tobacco:
If you're poor, smoke beedis (unflavored ones); If you're rich, Trichnopoly cigars (Woraiyur suruttu used to be an excellent choice).
The first is probably available at your local Indian store and the second at elite tobacconists'.

Cheers!

Since most dont RTFA....

[Tuoqui]

They're planning on using Nicotine as a basis for new drugs by using similar structures to target receptors in the brain and slow, pause or reverse diseases like parkinsons.

Alternatively they're looking at cremes which can be used to promote blood flow to parts of the body (begin Viagra jokes now please). Mostly as a way to prevent Diabetic amputations which means its better for the health care system since they wont have to chop off as many legs which means less people in wheelchairs and such.

It's not endorsing that people go light up. Just that they can probably make these things new drugs and get them in 'patch form' in the future (because lets face it lighting up a cigarette is not the best method of administering such a drug)

Maybe they'll start working with Marijuana again.

Re:better than SSRI?

[adamkennedy]

Wait a sec, you tell him there's alternatives to absorbing nicotine, and then proceed to give him a DIFFERENT way put carcinogens into his body.

Am I the only person that's noticed that nicotine comes in patch now?

The "Separate Story"

[DynaSoar]

The separate story referred to on the lead article is not about nicotine, it's about smoking. My dissertation was based on showing that at least one substance that prevented Parkinson's was active in the brains of smokers despite 8+ hours of abstinence (reduction of plasma nicotine levels to less than 1% of usual). I tested smokers abstaining and after smoking either a normal cigarette or one made from denicotinized tobacco and found no difference between conditions or groups. Nicotine or lack thereof had nothing to do with the EEG signature of chronic increased dopamine levels compared to non-smokers (which was the study I did prior to my diss). This work, and that of the folks in the chemistry department that isolated and synthesized the hypothesized active component, was what was referred to in "Thank You For Smoking". And to preempt any conclusion jumping, this doesn't mean you should smoke. Knowing what the substance is (trimethyl naphthoquinone) and how it works (dopamine releaser and reuptake blocker as well as MAO inhibitor) means it or something that does the same thing can be developed and used without needing tobacco in the process.

The carbon monoxide effect has some merit too. CO in the blood scavenges excess hyperoxides, a source of oxidative stress which is a known cause of Parkinson's and other apparent autoimmune problems. As above, you don't need to smoke to get the effect and can obviously find other things to do the same job. They're called anti-oxidants.

Nicotine may well also have some other protective effect, but it doesn't prevent mitochondrial MPTP from turning into MPP+, a very potent neurotoxin that causes Parkinsonian apoptosis. To read up on the mechanism, look up the "frozen addicts". As an interesting aside, at least one of them was all but completely cured in weeks using injected stem cells before the fundies got ahold of the concept and strangled it.

Re:better than SSRI?

[lawpoop]

Wow. You knew you had a problem to the extent that you actually went to the trouble of seeing a psychiatrist (not a quick or cheap thing to do in our society, sadly, both in terms of financial and social costs), who recommended drug therapy. I'm assuming s/he also suggested psychotherapy, which any psychiatrist worth beans will recommend way before they get to the point of doling out medication.

They gave me three options. One one for the three drug cocktail that they wanted. The other was for effexor I think. The final option he gave me was for norpremin, which I remembered helping me in the past. Psychotherapy wasn't on the list; I couldn't afford it anyway.

I've seen various counselors, social workers, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists since I was in the third grade. I was hospitalized for depression when I was 12. I was one of the first kids prescribed prozac in the early nineties, when I was about 13. I think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to figuring out who's a good shrink and who's not.

I talked to the guy for 40 minutes and he wants me on a combo of three mind-altering drugs, none of which I can even afford individually? That's a lousy doctor.

But you opted for neither of these. Instead, you started self-medicating with St. John's Wort and smoking. Do you think maybe you went wrong somewhere along the line?

Not at all. If a guy talks to you for 40 minutes and wants you on a three-drug cocktail of mind-altering, that guy is a bad doctor. As I said above, I've been in and out of mental health services since I was 8. I've been working constantly since I was 15, except when I've traveled to various countries for extended periods. I graduated Magna cum laude with a double-degree from Ohio State. I'm not a basket case; I had an episode and needed a little help.

A lot of people self-medicate depression and anxiety with cigarettes and alcohol. It's part of the reason why these two vices are so popular. Unfortunately they're not as well-designed as drugs like fluoxetine and bupropion, and they have massive side effects that double-blind studies have proven the risk of (you know, the same scientifically rigorous protocols that show the minimal adverse effects of prescription antidepressants).

Um, we don't have *any* data on the long term studies of the new anti-depressants on the body or mind. I don't drink but maybe twice a month, and I don't smoke. Alcohol and cigarettes are relatively safe -- you see smokers and drinkers who are in their 80s. I predict we will see *massive* side effects from decades of wellbutin abuse, just like the wonder drugs we were giving housewives in the 60s.

It's also helpful to have a trained doctor following the course of your therapy and making adjustments/changes as needed. Of course, if you're one of those wingnuts who thinks that doctors are only after your wallet (a view not even Michael Moore takes), it probably makes more sense for you to booze and smoke your way through your problems yourself. After all, what could possibly go wrong? It's not as though nicotine and alcohol are addictive or anything...

Who said anything about me drinking? I think you're getting mixed up here.

Alcohol is not physically addictive. A person who depends on drinking is different than someone addicted to heroin or nicotine. Nicotine is addictive, but it's harmless. It's the tobacco smoke that causes problems. A person who depends on drinking has a psychological addiction to alcohol, not a physical one. So if you're worried about alcohol addiction, which is a psychological addiction, you should be worried about me taking anti-depressants, because you could become psychologically addicted to any of them -- not to mention physically addicted to some of them.

We know pretty well what the long term effects of smoking and drinking are. They're not terrible, like, say, ritalin abuse -- which is the latest incarnation of amphetamines, the wonder drug of the 60

Re:Suspicious at best.

[milamber3]

You should really know more about a subject before you go on spouting things like "You can be sure the tobacco industry is funding this research." A large portion of this funding is coming from the NIH and one of the main areas of study is smoking cessation. That most certainly does not benefit the tobacco companies. In addition, none of these studies would suggest a cigarette, dip or chew as the route of administration so once again no benefit. If anything, the pharm companies stand to gain while the tobacco companies stand to lose because the drugs in question are all synthetic nicotine like substances that are patented and solely under big pharma control.

Re:Tobacco companies would sell med mar.

[Shatrat]

The tobacco companies don't own the farms.
If the farmers start growing something other than tobacco then they will start selling to someone other than Phillip Morris.

Re:Of course it does

[runderwo]

Nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. When your arteries are already clogged and hardened, it has the potential to turn disease into death.

But the real problem is in how nicotine works together with carbon monoxide to destroy your heart. When your body takes in carbon monoxide, oxygen distribution becomes less efficient. The heart muscle specifically requires a continuous supply of oxygen to sustain itself. When you smoke a cigarette, at the same time you're taking in carbon monoxide, the nicotine is also constricting your arteries and reducing blood flow. This is the same mechanism that causes incremental micro-damage to the heart of crack cocaine smokers. Fortunately for smokers, the constricting effect of nicotine is much less pronounced than that of crack cocaine, but it takes its toll over time -- the most common time for smokers to drop dead of a heart attack seems to be right after a cigarette.

Drugs info in school is bullshit

[DerangedAlchemist]

I was told after a single trip on LSD you could experience flashbacks from it without taking the drug again and these could be good or bad. So from what I was told (at school) LSD sounds like it's worse than nicotine.

By scientific literature, LSD is one of the SAFEST drugs known to man and completely non-addictive. Seriously (it stunned me too, I've been trying to find any valid finding of dangers for a while.) Flashbacks appear to be a psychological effect and rare, more like Viet Nam vet's flashbacks.

Here's some perspective in people averaging over 3 drinks of alcohol per day, PERMANENT deficiencies in problem solving, concentration and memory begin to appear. (This is a statistic, so it is probably people who binge drink on weekends that have the damage, not those who have a few every day. I'm sure you remember mornings when you had brain damage.)

The relapse rates for quitting smokers are on par with heroin addicts.

Re:Tobacco companies would sell med mar.

[afabbro]

The primary assett of a tobacco companies is hundreds of thousands of acres of farms. They could grow anything on them.

Nonsense. The primary asset of tobacco companies is their brands. They don't own tobacco farms.

What are you talking about?

A couple of points. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

1. The Filter. --One of the more harmful elements in cigarette smoking is the filter; loose fibers from the filter which are .3 microns in length have the remarkable ability to lodge in your lungs and never come out again. Much like asbestos, this can cause problems. Unlike asbestos, fibers from cigarette filters also come coated with toxins in smoke tar. I recently read a study, (blowed if I can find it again), which found that small cancers in the lungs typically had a tar-coated filter fiber at their center.

2. Additives. --In looking at the toxicity issue with regard to tobacco, I have noted that it is incredibly common for people to ignore the fact that cigarette companies use an assortment of 500 additives into their products, many of which are known carcinogens. [about.com] When studies are done on the toxicity of tobacco smoke, this detail is often left unmentioned. Are they testing tobacco per se, or are they testing corporate tobacco?

3. Radioactive tobacco leaves. --Your basic cigarette probably came from a farm which used phosphate fertilizer, known to contain radioactive metals [cannabisculture.com]. After years of use, these radioactive metals build up in the soil to high concentrations. Many foods are similarly affected, but you don't smoke most foods. This element of tobacco is considered by those who have studied the issue to be one of the leading reasons smoking can cause cancer.

You can buy organic tobacco, [motherearthtobacco.com] and you can smoke it in a pipe. No filter, no deliberately added poisons and no radioactive particles. I wonder if they've ever done health tests on this kind of tobacco smoke.

Probably not.

Here are some more points. . .

1. Pavlovian Responses to stress indicate that when you raise the anxiety level in a subject to the breaking point, you can then easily insert a new set of behaviors which become locked into place. . .

Pavlov demonstrated that when Transmarginal Inhibition began to take over a dog, a condition similar to hysteria in a human manifested. The applications of these findings to human psychology suggest that for a "conversion" to be effective, it is necessary to work on the subject's emotions until s/he reaches an abnormal condition of fear, anger or exaltation. If such a state is maintained or intensified by any of various means, hysteria is the result. In a state of hysteria, a human being is abnormally suggestible and influences in the environment can cause one set of behavior patterns to be replaced by another without any need for persuasive indoctrination. In states of fear and excitement, normally sensible human beings will accept the most wildly improbably suggestions. [. . .] Most of Pavlov's findings applicable to Mind Control are reported in a series of Pavlov's later lectures translated by Horsley Gantt, published in Great Britain and the United States in 1941 under the title "Conditioned Reflexes and Psychiatry." [5] Professor Y. P. Frolov's book about these experiments, Pavlov and His School [6] has also been translated into English. Article here [cassiopedia.org]

2. Tobacco smoke quickly lowers stress and anxiety and feelings of anger. It is one of the only two commonly used drugs on the market which while increasing clarity of thinking does not affect judgment. (Caffeine is the other). Old native bands meeting to discuss problems would all first smoke before opening their meeting, (hence, the "peace pipe"). Tobacco lent itself well to averting unnecessary anger and anxiety. In a world like ours today when fear is regularly promoted in such a way which guides the decisions and acceptance of the public with regard to international policy, knowledge

Re:better than SSRI?

[Johnny5000]

Alcohol is not physically addictive. A person who depends on drinking is different than someone addicted to heroin or nicotine.

Sorry to pick a nit, but I had to throw in here...

from wiki [wikipedia.org]:

Alcohol withdrawal

Alcohol withdrawal differs significantly from withdrawal from other drugs in that it can be directly fatal. While it is possible for heroin addicts, for instance, to die from other health problems made worse by the strain of withdrawal, an otherwise healthy alcoholic can die from the direct effects of withdrawal if it is not properly managed. Heavy consumption of alcohol reduces the production of GABA, which is a neuroinhibitor. An abrupt stop of alcohol consumption can induce a condition where neither alcohol nor GABA exists in the system in adequate quantities, causing uncontrolled firing of the synapses. This manifests as hallucinations, shakes, convulsions, seizures, and possible heart failure, all of which are collectively referred to as delirium tremens. All of these withdrawal issues can be safely controlled with a medically supervised detox.

Not only is alcohol physically addictive, it's even worse than heroin and nicotine.

Re:Suspicious at best.

[burndive]

Also,

To say, "nicotine is good for you" isn't quite true either. It's simply being found to be a useful tool to manipulate the body. Healthy bodies get along just fine without drugs. When something goes wrong, and they go to a doctor, the doctor tries to counter-act what is going wrong, selecting from a set of tools that he has available to him. Nicotine is, apparently, a good candidate for this collection of tools.

That is all.

Re:Suspicious at best.

[R3d M3rcury]

I can guarantee you that delivery system for all the new nicotine based drugs will not be cigarettes.

You're right. Your doctor isn't going to say, "Take two Marlboro's and call me in the morning." If necessary, the doctor would prescribe some pill that you take which contains nicotine or a synthetic version that is not addictive.

That said, there are plenty of people who like to do things that are supposedly good for them. The Grandparent's example of drinking wine is a great one--I know of a few people who have started having a glass or two of wine in the evenings because it's supposed to be good for them.

So a smokeless cigarette [aerosinfo.com] that delivers nicotine without all the tar and other chemicals in a regular cigarette may be the new "healthy" thing to do, like drinking wine.

Re:Oh great

[Anonymous Coward]

I smoke. Not because I suffer from an addiction to nicotine, or an innability to change any number of related habits, but because I choose to.

You don't choose shit. It's a chemical response in your brain. Your 'choice' to smoke is part of the addiction. I hear it all the time from the smokers around me. "Oh no, I choose to smoke! I like it, and the addictive qualities won't change whether or not I stop. I just don't want to stop."

You not wanting to stop, you know what that is? Addiction. Your brain has a dependency on smoking, it makes you feel good and so you don't want to stop. You've got to realize that in order to fight an addiction, you have to do something you don't want to do. You are not choosing to smoke, any more than you are choosing to breathe. This delicious addiction you love so much, it *will* kill you or make your old age absolutely miserable.

For anyone that has opinions on smoking that borders on the hysterical, I'd suggest they lighten up. Or better still, light up once in a while. There are many things in life that are good for you in small amounts, but dangerous or poisonous at higher levels. Put another way, you'd be better served by not moralising your (and everyone else's) choices and instead, pick your favourite poison and enjoy it responsibly. Besides, what else are you going to do after sex? Peel an orange?

You will of course, brush off everything I've said under the false pretense that my opinion borders on hysterical, that I'm trying to thrust my own code of morality and ethics on you. No, I'm not hysterical, and I'm not pushing a moral code. I'm warning you that in twenty or thirty years, you'll look back on your life of smoking, and you'll wonder why you did it, especially if you started during your youth. All those things youth take for granted; being able to run, exercise, sports, just being plain healthy... You won't have that when you're old, and with smoking, you won't have that when you're young, either.

Re:Oh great

[Anonymous Coward]

I smoke. Not because I suffer from an addiction to nicotine, or an innability to change any number of related habits, but because I choose to.

Quit right now then. No BS, no rationalizations about "choice", just quit, right now.

Whatsamatter? Your denial not quite up to the reality of your addiction?

Re:Not Sure Why...

[yurigoul]

I have a disease called Colitis Ulcerosa which went unnoticed for 25 years because of smoking (If you smoke and have the symptoms I have they will not think of Colitis Ulcerosa first because smoking cigarettes stops it).

And then I quit and started bleeding internally.

What I have come to understand though is that smoking cigarettes has a better effect as smoking cigars or pipe or even using skin patches with nicotine or nicotine chewing gum. My doctor said it probably is not the nicotine but one of the other things that are in there. He mentioned there have been clinical tests with skin patches and that did never work as good as cigarettes do.

So there I am: at what point will my disease become so bad that I start smoking again (I smoke cigarillos and did smoke pipe but as I said, that does not have the same effect as cigarettes, alas). And yes you can take cortisone and even heavier hormones (Immuran) - but the side effects are to heavy for my taste: a different mood every 30 minutes or needing to have your blood checked every week ...