[hvs]

Nicotine is sort of a mixed bag, but it isn't really the bad part of tobacco products. Cigarettes are generally bad for you because of all of the other things in them besides nicotine. The bad part of nicotine is that it is so highly addictive, but it's health benefits for things like ulcerative colitis and other afflictions are becoming better studied.

[matznerd]

The ingredients in cigarettes are what actually make nicotine addictive...alone, it can actually be beneficial to the brain

[BugBrother]

>> The ingredients in cigarettes are what actually make nicotine addictive

Uh, that sounds wrong.

"Snus" users get addicted. That is tobacco, even if it isn't burned. But afaik, users of e-cigarettes also get dependent -- that isn't tobacco.

[ethagnawl]

> But as laboratory scientists know, getting mice or other ani­mals hooked on nicotine all by its lonesome is dauntingly difficult. As a 2007 paper in the journal Neuropharmacology put it, “Tobacco use has one of the highest rates of addiction of any abused drug. Paradoxically, in animal models, nicotine appears to be a weak rein­forcer.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/29/sciences_obsession_the_searc...

[casualobserver]

There's a bunch of on-going research on nicotine gum dependence too. I was a participant in a study for this.

[jrlocke]

Radioactive polonium is the really worry with tobacco use.

[jrlocke]

Not sure why I was downvoted, look here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium#Tobacco

Edit: I stand corrected. Thank you

[Alex3917]

It's not entirely true. Even though the vast majority of tobacco-related cancer deaths may be caused by polonium, cancer deaths are still only around a third (iirc) of total tobacco deaths.

[maxerickson]

Compare the 12,000 at the Wikipedia link to the 1.6 million here:

http://www.who.int/cancer/prevention/en/

From those numbers, the polonium is not a primary concern.