Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Spivak 110 days ago
Nicotine is depending on how you measure the 3rd or 4th most addictive substance on the planet. It's up there with Heroine, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Meth.

If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.
1 comments
46493168 110 days ago
What dimension of “addictive” are you anchoring on? Capture rate? Withdrawal severity? Reinforcement strength? Relapse rate after quitting? Nicotine dominates on some of those and not others.
link
D-Machine 110 days ago
Pretty clear from the responses to OP that most people are quite unaware there is almost two decades of decent research on pure nicotine now, and that, outside of vaping (where hard evidence is mostly lacking, due to the novelty), the purer stuff probably really isn't all that addictive, in the grand scheme of things. In many cases it is hard to even say it is much different than caffeine.
link
46493168 109 days ago
It's a reasonable mistake, I'd say. We spent those decades conflating "nicotine" with "smoking" and, through herculean efforts, managed to get the smoking rate down to 12-14% (in Germany it's still 22.7%!). Now, tobacco companies have come through with genuinely less harmful, genuinely less addictive products, but because of their previous wild duplicity, nobody really "believes" it. They think that nicotine must cause cancer. "Fool me once," for sure.
link
Georgelemental 108 days ago
Whether nicotine is addictive is a completely different question than whether it causes cancer
link
Spivak 109 days ago
Can you point to said research because everything I can find from any kind of authoritative source is that form doesn't matter and nicotine is strongly addictive in all of them.

There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.

link
46493168 109 days ago
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/20...

The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.

There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.

Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes

link
D-Machine 109 days ago
Plenty of the sources I linked at https://gwern.net/nicotine are scientific and high-quality, that is not just some lazy list or junk compilation.

Nothing wrong with still being cautious about pure nicotine products though, and I definitely would be cautious about vaping.

link