Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There’s little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You’re more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn’t get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That’s not to say you can’t develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it’s as a substitution for smoking than “from scratch”.
Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There’s little meaningful reason to ban nicotine.
this is from a 2015 article i found on the NIH library:
Nicotine poses several health hazards. There is an increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal disorders. There is decreased immune response and it also poses ill impacts on the reproductive health. It affects the cell proliferation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, DNA mutation by various mechanisms which leads to cancer. It also affects the tumor proliferation and metastasis and causes resistance to chemo and radio therapeutic agents. The use of nicotine needs regulation. The sale of nicotine should be under supervision of trained medical personnel.
in case you think i might be cherry picking, here’s something from johns hopkins, and here’s a source from
the cdc.
here’s something recent from harvard for good measure.
edit: i should be clear that the other sources don’t say exactly the same things as the NIH one, but they do talk about how nicotine itself is very addictive, and they talk about some of the harm it can cause
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
The first link has nothing wrong in it. It’s correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:
Thus, the induced activation of nAChRs in lung and other tissues by nicotine can promote carcinogenesis by causing DNA mutations[26] Through its tumor promoter effects, it acts synergistically with other carcinogens from automobile exhausts or wood burning and potentially shorten the induction period of cancers[43] [Table 2].
This makes sense. Don’t inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words.
There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it’s perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.
What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we’re perfectly fine with.
I’ll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).
It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).
The “Materials and methods” section also goes on to say “Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded” but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. “Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume”) and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made (“Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864–78.”)
So, yes, if you make claims about how you’re going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you’ve not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.
They also end with subjective statements they’ve not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they’ve gone from “here is why it’s dangerous” to “it should be restricted”, but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it’s a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.
That doesn’t mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we’re happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don’t inhale it.
“I haven’t read this, but let me misrepresent what the thing I didn’t read says”.
I have not argued it isn’t unhealthy. I have argued it’s one of the safer stimulants we have, unless you ingest it in a way that is dangerous (e.g. inhalation). That does not mean it’s free of downsides, but neither are a whole lot of things we still decide it’s fine to use.
Next time maybe try abstaining from replying to something you’ve not bothered to read.
You just confirmed what I said. “One of the safest”
And yeah you wrote way more shit than you should ever expect people to read. Maybe abstain from writing 10,000 words ever but especially if you’re wrong
No, you made the false claim that I said it isn’t unhealthy. “One of the safest” is not the same as “isn’t unhealthy”.
If you can’t be bothered to read my ~600 words in reply to someone else and not directed at you, that is entirely your choice. Nobody is forcing you to. Neither are anyone forcing you to blatantly misrepresent what I’ve claimed, however.
Your hyperbole was so idiotic that I took 10 seconds to pipe the contents to “wc” to highlight just how lazy you were before you misrepresented what you reply to, yes. That it was such a chore for you to read 600 words before making up a strawman to reply to does indeed say more than you did with words.
Well of course not. You weren’t getting the dopamine rush of a large acute dose rushing from your lungs directly to your brain in a matter of seconds.
So in other words, you’re saying I didn’t pick the right delivery method to get me addicted. Which was my point.
Regardless, the dangers – including ease of addiction – are well-known and are scientifically proven. Your anecdata of one does not change that.
Missing the point: 1) a large part of the addiction for most people is down to delivery, not nicotine itself - something you yourself used as an argument against my anecdote above -, and most of the research focuses on that. 2) the remaining addiction potential of nicotine is real, and proven, but it’s also nothing particularly special compared to other things we’re fine with seeing the addiction to as ranging from a nuisance (e.g. caffeine) to a problem that doesn’t justify prohibition (any more), like alcohol.
My point was not that it’s impossible to get addicted to nicotine, but that confusing nicotine vs. nicotine via a given delivery method is not helpful.
Nicotine is one of the safest stimulants we know, up there with caffeine in terms of safety. There’s little meaningful reason to ban nicotine. You’re more likely to harm yourself with any number of other things we readily allow.
The addiction potential of nicotine alone is also far lower than people assume, because smoking is highly addictive both due to the rituals and the other substances involved. I tried to get used to nicotine via patches years back to use as a safe stimulant, and not only did I not get addicted, I couldn’t get used to it (and I was not willing to get myself used to smoking, given the harm that involves). That’s not to say you can’t develop addictions to patches or vapes etc. too, but much more easily when it’s as a substitution for smoking than “from scratch”.
Restrictions on delivery methods that are harmful or not well enough understood, and combining nicotine with other substances that make the addiction and harm potential greater, sure.
this is from a 2015 article i found on the NIH library:
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/
in case you think i might be cherry picking, here’s something from johns hopkins, and here’s a source from the cdc. here’s something recent from harvard for good measure.
edit: i should be clear that the other sources don’t say exactly the same things as the NIH one, but they do talk about how nicotine itself is very addictive, and they talk about some of the harm it can cause
The links from John Hopkins, the CDC and Harvard all focus on vaping, and so are irrelevant to the question of nicotine rather than the delivery methods.
The first link has nothing wrong in it. It’s correct nicotine is toxic. So is caffeine - the LD50 of caffeine in humans is reasonably high, many grams. To the issue of ingestion, the issue is toxicity at doses people are likely to deal with.
To the cancer links, again without looking at delivery methods, this is meaningless. To let me quote one small part:
This makes sense. Don’t inhale lots of particulates combined with nicotine in other words. There are also many other parts of the article that are useful. E.g. it’s perfectly reasonable to accept that e.g. if you are on chemo you should stay off nicotine, and if you breastfeed you should stay off nicotine.
What the article does not show is that nicotine, as opposed to delivery methods like inhalation, is much worse than other drugs we’re perfectly fine with.
I’ll note that the article also includes things in its conclusion that it has categorically not cites studies in support of. E.g. it just assumes the addiction potential is proven (it is, but putting that in the conclusion of a paper without citing sources is really poor form, especially in a paper claiming to set out the issues with nicotine in isolation rather than smoking).
It also tried to drive up the scare factor by pointing out its toxicity at doses irrelevant for human consumption (e.g. as an insecticide; if wildly irrelevant doses should be considered, then we could write the same paper about how apples should be banned because they contain cyanide).
The “Materials and methods” section also goes on to say “Studies that evaluated tobacco use and smoking were excluded” but then goes on to make multiple arguments on the basis of harm caused by smoking (e.g. “Nicotine plays a role in the development of emphysema in smokers, by decreasing elastin in the lung parenchyma and increasing the alveolar volume”) and cites a paper focused on smoking, in direct contradiction of the claim they made (“Endoh K, Leung FW. Effects of smoking and nicotine on the gastric mucosa: A review of clinical and experimental evidence. Gastroenterology. 1994;107:864–78.”)
So, yes, if you make claims about how you’re going to address nicotine rather than smoking, and then go on to address smoking and other means of inhalation intermingled with the rest, and if you leap to conclusions you’ve not cited works in support of, and if you throw out risks without linking them causally to nicotine, you can make nicotine look very bad.
They also end with subjective statements they’ve not even attempted to support properly. E.g. they’ve gone from “here is why it’s dangerous” to “it should be restricted”, but if that was valid logic, we should restrict sales of apples too, most cleaning agents, all caffeinated products, housepaint, paint thinners, and a host of other things, it’s a specious argument and fitting that such a badly argued paper ends with it. That this passed peer review is an incredible indictment of the journal which published it.
That doesn’t mean nicotine is risk-free, but compared to other things we’re happy to ingest, I stand by my statement. But don’t inhale it.
I didn’t read this novel but you’re arguing nicotine isn’t unhealthy and that makes you wrong
“I haven’t read this, but let me misrepresent what the thing I didn’t read says”.
I have not argued it isn’t unhealthy. I have argued it’s one of the safer stimulants we have, unless you ingest it in a way that is dangerous (e.g. inhalation). That does not mean it’s free of downsides, but neither are a whole lot of things we still decide it’s fine to use.
Next time maybe try abstaining from replying to something you’ve not bothered to read.
You just confirmed what I said. “One of the safest”
And yeah you wrote way more shit than you should ever expect people to read. Maybe abstain from writing 10,000 words ever but especially if you’re wrong
No, you made the false claim that I said it isn’t unhealthy. “One of the safest” is not the same as “isn’t unhealthy”.
If you can’t be bothered to read my ~600 words in reply to someone else and not directed at you, that is entirely your choice. Nobody is forcing you to. Neither are anyone forcing you to blatantly misrepresent what I’ve claimed, however.
You went and counted the words. That says more than I could
Your hyperbole was so idiotic that I took 10 seconds to pipe the contents to “wc” to highlight just how lazy you were before you misrepresented what you reply to, yes. That it was such a chore for you to read 600 words before making up a strawman to reply to does indeed say more than you did with words.
Well of course not. You weren’t getting the dopamine rush of a large acute dose rushing from your lungs directly to your brain in a matter of seconds.
What the heck kind of hot take is this?
Regardless, the dangers – including ease of addiction – are well-known and are scientifically proven. Your anecdata of one does not change that.
So in other words, you’re saying I didn’t pick the right delivery method to get me addicted. Which was my point.
Missing the point: 1) a large part of the addiction for most people is down to delivery, not nicotine itself - something you yourself used as an argument against my anecdote above -, and most of the research focuses on that. 2) the remaining addiction potential of nicotine is real, and proven, but it’s also nothing particularly special compared to other things we’re fine with seeing the addiction to as ranging from a nuisance (e.g. caffeine) to a problem that doesn’t justify prohibition (any more), like alcohol.
My point was not that it’s impossible to get addicted to nicotine, but that confusing nicotine vs. nicotine via a given delivery method is not helpful.