Nicotine not alone in causing addiction

Researchers in New Zealand say that nicotine is not the only ingredient in tobacco products that makes quitting difficult, according to a story by Peter Sergo for the Medical Daily.

At the Smokefree Oceania conference in Auckland, Penelope Truman, of the Institute of Environmental Science and Research, presented a study that was said to show how rats exhibited a greater desire to obtain a dose of smoke from non-nicotinic hand-rolling tobacco than from either doses of nicotine or from smoke from factory-made cigarettes that contained nicotine.

Truman, along with researchers from Victoria University, gauged how keen rats were to press a lever to obtain a dose of saline that was infused with either just nicotine or a type of tobacco smoke. “Because rats showed a significantly higher willingness to go the distance to get a taste of rolling tobacco smoke, the authors concluded that a substance other than nicotine must be getting them hooked,” Sergo wrote.

The study authors concluded that non-nicotinic components had a role in tobacco dependence and that some tobacco products had higher abuse liability, irrespective of nicotine levels.

“This extra chemical is an additional thing that makes smoking harder to give up,” Truman reportedly told The New Zealand Herald. “This is a formal proof that some tobacco substances are more addictive than nicotine is.”

What the specific tobacco component is has yet to be identified.