Nicotine is an addictive substance; it is THE addictive substance in tobacco, although tobacco’s combustion products are responsible for most of its adverse health effects.
Nicotine has been in the news a lot between the plan to remove JUUL, a nicotine delivery system from the market, and the FDA proposal to require cigarettes to have lower nicotine levels.
I asked myself a simple question for which I did not have a ready answer, what amount of nicotine is necessary to get you addicted – what dose makes the poison?
The decision by the FDA to require lower nicotine levels in cigarettes is predicated on the idea that by lowering the dose sufficiently, a non-addictive cigarette could be created. What scientific evidence do we have on what that nicotine dosage might be? To find an answer, I looked at a nicotine review from 2012. Here is what I found.
The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA), passed in 2009, gives the FDA the authority to reduce but not eliminate nicotine from tobacco products. This involved “denicotinization” of tobacco, reducing the amount of nicotine, either by chemical extraction or through modified tobacco crops. It is not a “light” cigarette, which reduces nicotine by placing small ventilation holes in the filter – which has never been shown to reduce nicotine, and this labeling is banned in the US. As the decline in smoking through the current regulations and taxations seem to be “hitting a wall” (declining from 19% to 14% between 2010 and 2018), regulators seeking a science-informed approach have focused on identifying a nicotine-addiction threshold.
Nicotine’s Addiction Threshold
Chuck Dinerstein – American Council on Science and Health – 2022-06-27.