Very Low Nicotine Cigarettes May Reduce Addiction

PITTSBURGH-The question has been kicking around for 20 years: can cutting the amount of nicotine in cigarettes reduce cigarette use and dependence?

Using standard methods to measure smoking dependence, researchers found the cigarettes with 0.4- to 2.4-milligram nicotine had fewer participants with signs of withdrawal or craving.

Tindle said reduced-nicotine cigarettes may be a way to potentially lessen the harm that smokers experience from cigarettes by decreasing the number of cigarettes that they smoke per day or potentially playing a role in quitting smoking altogether.

“Way back in 1976, an early and famous tobacco researcher said the following: ‘People smoke for the nicotine but they die from the tar.’ And that tar results from burning tobacco”, he said.

“There are many studies which show that e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine, don’t actually help a lot of people break their addiction to tobacco or help get off of cigarettes”, he said.

When smoking levels were examined at six weeks, researchers found that an 85 to 97 percent reduction in nicotine content reduced cigarette consumptions by 23 percent, Reuters Health reported.

“This is a very different approach, and this one might make smokers less dependent on cigarettes and better able to quit”, he said.

Among students who now use tobacco, a higher proportion of high school than middle school students reported use of flavored e-cigarettes, flavored hookah, flavored smokeless tobacco, and any flavored product, while the proportion of male and female users who reported flavored product use was generally similar.

Publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine (the same prestigious journal that first entertained the notion), the University of Pittsburgh’s Eric Donny finds that the answer is likely yes.

But participants had significantly less nicotine in their systems at the end of the study and the amount of carbon monoxide in their systems confirmed that they were not smoking more.

“Smokers got around it by breathing deeper and more”. But the new study suggests there’s no need to reduce nicotine levels gradually over time. He explained why smokers likely responded differently to low-nicotine cigarettes than they do to light cigarettes. Most other countries around the world can also regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.

By the sixth week, the study groups showed widely different smoking habits: Those smoking their own brand or the 15.8-milligram cigarettes smoked 22.2 and 21.3 cigarettes per day, respectively.

A spokesman for Altria, parent company of leading tobacco company Philip Morris U.S., said the FDA should be cautious about changing regulations. Five smoked study-provided cigarettes that ranged in nicotine strength from extremely low (0.4 mg per gram of tobacco) to levels typical of cigarettes sold in the U.S (15.8 mg per gram).

“As the authors point out, a longer-term study is now underway”, spokesman Brian May said. The FDA’s proposed its plan for regulating them and would make it illegal for kids under 18 to use e-cigarettes. “There are various nasty toxins in smoke”, he said.

Very-low-nicotine cigarettes are not the same as “light” cigarettes, which Congress removed from the market under the 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, Donny said.

Myers, of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said that the tobacco industry’s understanding of nicotine’s addictive power has been clear in its efforts to increase the doses that smokers get with their products.

In an accompanying editorial, Michael Fiore and Timothy Baker of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison wrote that reducing nicotine levels would prevent many young people from becoming addicted and motivate many people to stop smoking.