All You Need To Know About Nicotine

All You Need To Know About Nicotine

Everything important about nicotine is here. There is a lot more, but it's all good - such as the long list of benefits for certain medical conditions. The full details of the biomechanisms that a nutrient employs are interesting but not pertinent to this list of topics, which concerns nicotine's public image and its distortion for commercial purposes.

What you think you know about nicotine is almost certainly wrong.

Nicotine and dependence

• It is virtually impossible to become dependent on pure nicotine [1] [2]
• It is impossible to create nicotine dependence clinically [3] except by co-administration with tobacco
• No person in the history of medical science has ever been reported as becoming dependent on nicotine as a result of the administration of pure nicotine to never-smokers in a clinical trial - and this would be very easy to demonstrate, if there were any factual basis for statements such as "nicotine is addictive"; indeed it is likely to have been a prime target for researchers in the past - and the fact it has not been achieved, ever, even once, despite the huge financial benefits that would accrue to the person achieving it, tells us that it is impossible [4]
• Smokers commonly become addicted to smoking and addicted to nicotine, but persons who have never consumed tobacco cannot be made to become dependent on nicotine; this tells us that something apart from nicotine is creating the dependence, and since tobacco/smoke contains 9,600 compounds identified to date, there are plenty of candidates for this agent or agents [5]
• Nicotine by itself cannot create dependency (see for example FDA NRT labelling consultation: "Nicotine appears to have no potential for abuse") - and with market experience of NRTs since 1984 they should know

Nicotine and harm

• No government agency anywhere (such as the FDA or UK NICE) can supply any materials that prove nicotine is harmful to the normal person [6] [19]
• Nicotine is not associated with cancer: it does not cause it, or promote it, or enable it in any way (see NICE PH45, FDA NRT labelling advice; qv References)
• The UK NICE (in effect the UK government medical oversight body) have now licensed medical products that contain nicotine (called NRTs) for long-term use and multi-use; it is expected that the US FDA will follow very soon [7]
• Many doctors give incorrect advice about nicotine, and may even be guilty of professional negligence due to their belief in propaganda that is opposite to the facts [8]

Nicotine and toxicology

• The old propaganda that "nicotine is highly toxic" has been utterly demolished [9]
• It is regarded as almost impossible to die from ingestion of nicotine alone, because the dose required is so large; and because swallowing it induces a vomit reflex that expels it and an anaesthetic is required to prevent emesis (vomiting); and it is so rare to find any example of an adult dying from nicotine ingestion alone that the suggestion is that some other agent was also consumed as an anaesthetic or anti-emetic [10]
• Using several different delivery routes for nicotine at the same time, and deliberately causing an overdose, is harmless [11]

Nicotine and blood pressure

• Nicotine does not "raise the blood pressure" as the propaganda strongly asserts (except of course for a very short time), and in fact the opposite is true: long-term consumption actually reduces the blood pressure [12]

Nicotine in the diet

• Nicotine is a normal part of the diet and everyone tests positive for it. In all of the large-scale clinical surveys where hundreds of subjects were tested, no person has ever tested negative for nicotine [13]
• Nicotine is a normal ingredient in vegetables and everyone consumes it (13]
• Nicotine is an active alkaloid [14] and an active part of the diet [15] - removing it has negative consequences for some [16], and supplementing it has benefits for some [17]
• Its sister compound nicotinic acid, co-located in the same plants and with several benefits in common with nicotine, has been allocated vitamin status as Vitamin B3 (although the researchers had to invent a new name for it in order to get it accepted) [18]
• You feed your baby nicotine in her mashed-up vegetables, and no corrupted medic has ever dared to claim this is a bad idea since nicotine is so closely associated with the B vitamin group that a nutritional deficiency would almost certainly be created if an attempt were made to try and artificially exclude any active ingredient such as nicotine [20]

Nicotine propaganda
The nicotine taboo and all the propaganda surrounding nicotine has two substantial benefits:

• It allows the pharmaceutical industry to claim ownership of nicotine, since it can be falsely described as a dangerous, alien, addictive drug - when it is none of those, as can be seen from the above. Pharma is keen to eliminate competition from vitamins, nutrients and herbal remedies, and vigorously employs legislation to either claim the product is a pharmaceutical, or remove competition or price it out of contention by introducing costly and unnecessary regulatory processes.
• It allows the Public Health industry to add another topic to the reasons for their existence and the reasons why they need funding. It adds into the false evidence claims and the puritanical beliefs of the ideologists and religious fundamentalists who determine the agenda, and who are often unwittingly working for industry as against the public good.

Nicotine and vascularity
An interesting feature of the propaganda used against nicotine is that, in some cases, it ludicrously tries to use both sides of the argument. Vascularity is one example:

"Nicotine promotes cancer because it increases blood flow and growth of new blood vessels, causing them to proliferate, thus enabling growth of tumours and promoting cancer", is a common claim made by researchers who are close to funding sources that have an anti consumer nicotine agenda.

And the next day you will read:

"Nicotine must not be used before or after surgery because it restricts blood flow and growth of new blood vessels, thus hindering healing, and may result in failure of the treatment. Therefore we will not operate on smokers, oral tobacco users or vapers" - often heard from a hospital's admin department or a surgeon.

You can have one or the other, but not both. Please make your mind up. The trouble with lying is that it becomes difficult to maintain consistency...

Citations
References for all the statements made here, and links to the citations, can be found on the References and the Quotations pages on this site.

* for notes etc... please check the site:
All You Need To Know About Nicotine

 

Thanks for the post Buzz.

 

They should re-title the article : All I think I know about Nicotine that I can back up with poorly sourced information.