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‘nicotine’ directory

⁠“Nicotine ”⁠, ⁠Gwern⁠2011 (, , ; ⁠backlinks⁠, ⁠similar⁠, ⁠bibliography⁠):

On the ben­e­fits and lack of de­mer­its of nico­tine⁠ (re­search up to 2015)

In 201114ya, I be­came cu­ri­ous about nico­tine gum/patches as a pos­si­ble al­ter­na­tive stim­u­lant to modafinil⁠: its much shorter half-life makes it more use­ful for evenings or sce­nar­ios like need­ing a quick alert on a long drive. I looked briefly into the nico­tine/to­bacco re­search to see whether there was con­vinc­ing ev­i­dence that nico­tine on its own, with­out any to­bacco or smoke-related de­liv­ery mech­a­nism, is ei­ther more harm­ful than most stim­u­lants or likely to lead to se­vere ad­dic­tion to to­bacco as a ‘gate­way drug’.

The psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fects of nico­tine as a stim­u­lant are long es­tab­lished by a scat­ter­shot lit­er­a­ture, so there are pos­si­ble ben­e­fits.

Cost-wise, much of the nico­tine/to­bacco lit­er­a­ture will­fully con­flates the two, lead­ing to mis­lead­ing at­tri­bu­tion of the harm of to­bacco to nico­tine; many as­so­ci­a­tions with harm are con­founded by past or present to­bacco use (eg. Kenkelet al2020⁠), but when pure nico­tine is ex­am­ined, as in patch/GUM NRT, the harms ap­peared min­i­mal: like all stim­u­lants, nico­tine may raise blood pres­sure some­what, and is ad­dic­tive to some de­gree, but the risks do not ap­pear much more strik­ingly harm­ful than caf­feine⁠ or modafinil (and cer­tainly ap­pear less than the many commonly-used am­phet­a­mines). An­i­mal ex­per­i­ments are, like usual, highly am­bigu­ous, of low qual­ity, and of doubt­ful rel­e­vance to hu­mans. There is lit­tle ev­i­dence from the NRT lit­er­a­ture that ‘never-smokers’ like my­self are all that likely to be­come highly ad­dicted, and min­i­mal epi­demi­o­log­i­cal ev­i­dence of harm from NRT use over the past 3 decades it has been avail­able.

‘Va­p­ing’ is an­other story: few ex­per­i­ments have been done, and its pop­u­lar­ity is re­cent enough that any harms are poorly un­der­stood other than it can’t pos­si­bly be re­motely as harm­ful as to­bacco smok­ing, and its de­liv­ery mech­a­nism plau­si­bly is much more ad­dic­tive than gum/patch de­liv­ery would be.

Over­all, I am per­son­ally com­fort­able using nico­tine gum (but not va­p­ing⁠) once in a while; as of 2024, I have done so since 201114ya, at fre­quen­cies rang­ing from daily to monthly, using gum/patch/spray forms, and can stop for weeks or months with­out a prob­lem.

Back­links:⁠

Sim­i­lar Links:⁠

Bib­li­og­ra­phy:⁠

See Also

Gwern

“Nootropics ”, Gwern 2010

Miscellaneous