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Your weekly dose of drug facts while dispelling fiction
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on Public Radio. KUNV 91.5. Welcome to another episode of The Chemical Collective. I'm Kendra McLaughlin.
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And I'm April Contreras. The Chemical Collective will offer you your weekly dose of drug facts and fiction.
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I'm super excited today because we are going to be talking about an interesting topic about nicotine and some of the effects it has on not only the brain, but society as a whole. So let's get started with some of the basics. Can you give us a brief overview of what nicotine even is? Yeah, absolutely. So nicotine is a colorless, odorless substance that's found in the tobacco plant. It's a stimulant that affects the central nervous system or CNS and can cause feelings of pleasure, increased focus and alertness, and nicotine is a substance known to be highly addictive. Okay. I think that it's really common for a lot of us to generally hear about nicotine, but I think something that's not as common is kind of understanding the historical background surrounding nicotine. So can you speak a little bit to that? Yeah. The history for nicotine use can date way back, hundreds and hundreds of years. So yeah, nicotine has been used by indigenous peoples in the Americas for thousands of years for spiritual, medicinal, and social purposes. Then in the 16th century, nicotine was introduced and transported to Europe, where it quickly became popular as a recreational drug. By the 19th century, then nicotine was starting to be used as treatments for various disorders. In contrast to kind of what we know about it now, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So people use nicotine to help treat disorders like depression, anxiety, decline in cognition. And funny enough, nicotine was even used as a pesticide. Yeah. And to remedy other ailments ranging from like your average headache to stomach problems.
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That's a really interesting that I never would have correlated those two together. You have on one hand, people might be able to use it for something like anxiety. Now the other people are using it as a pesticide. That's, that's interesting.
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Yeah, multipurpose. Yeah, and you know, more modern times, nicotine's been found to be, you know, highly addictive and its medicinal use and potential has declined for sure. And over time, we're becoming even more aware of the negative health effects associated with nicotine use, which has led to increased regulation and restriction in the sale of tobacco products.
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Yeah. I think that that's like a really good kind of scope as far as the United States is concerned, but it makes me really wonder about the historical significance of nicotine in different cultures. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Yeah, I can expand some more on that. So we started by talking about the use of nicotine by indigenous peoples of the Americas, right? Right. And so what they would do, for example, was they would take nicotine from the actual tobacco plant. That's what they were working with, just nicotine itself. They would use it for religious, medicinal, and social purposes for thousands and thousands of years. What they would do is they would take the plant, dry the leaves, and grind them into a fine powder. And then they would either inhale it through their nose or kind of mix it with other ingredients into a beverage or a different type of a concoction. Once tobacco was kind of introduced over to Europe, then kind of the utility and uses were starting to kind of diversify. So people were also using it for medicinal purposes, but then it started becoming more of a widespread pastime. So people were just commonly smoking tobacco kind of in the way you would think of now. Okay. So is there any kind of differences you would see in maybe like Asian cultures or anything like that? Is it pretty similar across the world? How people were using it? Yeah, so other cultures in Asia and Africa, you know, we're using tobacco as medicinal purposes also.
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Okay.
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Yeah, recreationally and incorporating it into their own cultural practices.
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Got you. Because I did hear something specifically about like Asia being the home of some of the largest tobacco markets in the world, and that like really shook me. And it's interesting to think that where they started to where they are now.
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a lot of different compounds. Nicotine especially has really helped shape the social, economic, and cultural norms of whatever area it is in. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And it continues to be a part of a lot of cultural traditions even today. Yeah, yeah. The concept of how things change over time I always find super interesting. Can you speak to how maybe the scientific understanding of nicotine
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may have changed over time.
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Yeah, it's definitely evolved from when it was kind of first extracted and discovered in the 19th century. So nicotine itself was first isolated from tobacco by a German chemist called Wilhelm Heinrich Fossett. Yeah, and then an Austrian toxicologist called Ludwig Reimann helped extract it too. And initially, nicotine was primarily considered to be toxic, and its potential therapeutic benefits were ignored. Yeah, funny how it started that way, right? Yeah, it started, yeah. Yeah, but then, you know, scientists started looking at it a little bit more closely and trying to understand the effects of nicotine itself. And they discovered that it had multiple properties. So it can be both a stimulant in the central nervous system and also kind of help relax, improve your focus and your concentration. And this kind of led to its development as a potential medication. So things like what? Yeah, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Oh, like ADHD. Mm-hmm. Okay. And even major depression.
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Wow.
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Yeah. Okay. And advances are still being made in understanding how nicotine can be utilized, but largely we kind of know a lot of the mechanisms.
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Oh, yeah. Okay, well, that would lead me to my next thing that I'm wondering is, can you explain how nicotine works in the brain specifically, and then maybe the body too?
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Yeah, absolutely. So when nicotine is consumed, it quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier. What's that blood-brain barrier? Yeah, the blood-brain barrier is this tightly packed layer of cells that line the blood vessels in the brain. And it kind of acts, you know, like a barrier, this wall. So it prevents harmful, toxic substances from going in while still allowing molecules that can help nourish the brain. Got it, so it's protecting it from what doesn't need to be there. Okay, got it. Yeah, so once nicotine crosses this blood-brain barrier, it binds to a receptor called the acetylcholine receptor. Okay. Yeah, and these acetylcholine receptors are really abundant in the brain and are involved in a lot of different processes, including functions like your attention and learning and memory. Yeah, and once nicotine binds to acetylcholine receptors, this leads to an increase of tons of other chemicals or neurotransmitters in the brain, such as dopamine and norepinephrine. Oh, okay. So what do dopamine and norepinephrine primarily do in the brain? Yeah, that's a great question. Dopamine and norepinephrine are also highly involved in improving your attention, but they also increase other things like your heart rate and general alertness. Okay. But long-term exposure to nicotine can lead to maladaptive changes in the brain, which relate to the development of addiction. And this includes an increased tolerance for nicotine, a dependent on the compound, so much so that when you stop taking it, you start to experience withdrawal symptoms. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And additionally, nicotine has been linked to other negative consequences, like a decrease in brain plasticity, and alterations in your overall brain structure and function. Whoa, so like brain plasticity, as in like making new connections
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in the brain. So how does nicotine impact that?
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Yeah, so nicotine use has been shown to have negative effects on brain plasticity by preventing its ability to change and adapt and response to new experiences and information. And we know that this occurs due to nicotine's effects on the brain's neural circuits and the neurotransmitter systems that I mentioned earlier, like dopamine and norepinephrine. And this prevents neuronal connections from forming, prevents the neurogenesis, so the formation. The creation of new neurons. And it alters the way other neurotransmitters are released in the brain. Okay. So that's super fascinating. I never really sat and thought about the ways that nicotine is being used as a drug to essentially alter neuronal connections. That blows my mind. Has long-term nicotine use been shown to lead to things like cognitive decline? Yeah, there's a lot of negative effects associated with nicotine use. Some of them we kind of mentioned earlier, like prolonged exposure to nicotine can really increase your risk of developing cognitive impairments. People try to use it to improve their cognitive abilities, like learning and memory, but you can actually develop memory problems, and eventually you're not able to hold attention as well, and you have decreased executive function, so it's harder to make decisions. And actual specific use of nicotine in the form of tobacco products has even been linked to an increased risk of developing age-related cognitive decline and diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
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That's really, really interesting. Like that compared and combined with what you just told us about the historical relevance and how nicotine has changed over time. It makes me wonder kind of like what makes people go back for more. Like I remember reading something from the CDC or the Center of Disease Control and Prevention that nearly 40 million people in the U.S. use nicotine, making it the leading cause of preventable diseases and disabilities and even death here in the U.S. It makes me wonder what's making people go back for more. Are there short-term benefits of nicotine use?
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Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. And so that's part of the appeal, right? There are these acute benefits, like your increased focus and alertness, like we talked about. And it can, at times, help people relax. And it has this calming effect and helps reduce your feelings of anxiety, which swap later, right? Once you're starting to withdraw those actually. Yeah, that's interesting. And become aversive. Okay, yeah. When you start taking nicotine and are considering short-term benefits, you might experience an increase in your energy because of that increase in heart rate and blood pressure. It feels like a boost of energy. Like short-term? Mm-hmm. Okay. Acutely. And using it, people feel that their mood feels enhanced. It can cause a release of endorphins, the body's natural feel-good chemicals, which can lead to this temporary improvement in mood. But it's really important that even though nicotine can provide these short-term acute benefits, the long-term effects of nicotine use can be really harmful and detrimental to one's health.
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Yeah, for sure.
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Yeah, and it can increase the risk of other maladies like your potential for heart disease, stroke, and various other cancers.
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Definitely not outweighing that.
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Yeah, no. I think that something else that I heard was that people are drawn to it for things like appetite suppression. Is it true that nicotine can decrease wanting to eat? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Nicotine has been used as an appetite suppressant, and the way that it does this is by increasing the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline, other chemicals in the brain and body. And this can actually increase your metabolism and suppress your hunger. But it's important to note that nicotine really shouldn't be considered as a first-line treatment
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Yeah, no.
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And again, partly because it's a highly addictive substance and long-term exposure leads to the serious health conditions that we just talked about. Yeah, and yeah, it's just not worth it. Yeah, but honestly, like, I'm curious, what makes nicotine so addicting? What makes nicotine is so addictive is because it triggers the release of those neurotransmitters, dopamine. And so once dopamine is released, it begins to start this cycle, reinforcing cycle of
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use.
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Okay. So whenever you start to want to seek out nicotine, you're seeking it out to experience that feeling of pleasure that you get from the release of dopamine. And you're seeking that out over and over again. And over time, the brain eventually becomes dependent on nicotine to get those feelings. And when you stop taking nicotine, you experience withdrawal symptoms that don't really feel good. And so you're gonna wanna try and get that feeling of dopamine and pleasure back. What are some of the withdrawal symptoms that are associated with nicotine? Yeah, they're pretty gnarly. You have cravings, intense anxiety, you become pretty irritable, and you even have difficult concentrating. So you can see how that could really impact your day-to-day life, right?
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Yeah.
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And each of these symptoms alone and even combined can make it really difficult to quit using nicotine in general. And the combination of the pleasurable effects that you get, the short-term acute pleasurable effects that are backed up by that release of dopamine, and the negative effects of withdrawal are what make it really hard to want to get off nicotine and quit.
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Okay.
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Are there any resources that are currently put in place to help people in quitting nicotine? Yeah. Again, quitting nicotine can be really difficult. So you need a support system that can help you maintain the ability to quit because overall, you know, it's going to be worth it for your health. Some resources include what's called nicotine replacement therapy, counseling. They even have support groups for people that are quitting nicotine. And on top of this, you're going to want to learn how to avoid triggers that make you want to use tobacco products. Some triggers can include stress and boredom.
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Earlier, you just mentioned something called nicotine replacement theory. What is that?
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Yeah, nicotine replacement therapy. Therapy, sorry. Thank you. placement therapy or NRT is a method that can be really helpful in helping smokers quit and overcome their nicotine addiction. So you probably have seen NRT products at the store like nicotine gum, nicotine patches. Okay. Yeah, I know.
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I think I have seen that. Yeah.
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In the store. Yeah. And so what these do is they deliver low doses of nicotine to help kind of alleviate and ease those withdrawal symptoms and cravings without exposing the user to actual cigarette smoking and that accessibility to the harmful chemicals found in tobacco products. And despite the continual use of NRT, overall safety and efficacy of nicotine as a medicinal substance is still ongoing, but not really there. Okay. So what are some of the limitations for using something like NRT? Yeah, like any treatment, NRT isn't going to be effective for everyone. Some people need to try multiple forms of nicotine replacement therapy, or use a combination of different methods in order to, you know, quit successfully. Additionally, there's still not a lot that we know about long term effects of NRT and the best ways to use it as part of, you know, establishing it into your treatment plan. Okay. I feel like there's been like a new wave of a form of nicotine that's kind of taken society by storm in the form of electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes. But I'm curious if these e-cigarettes are just as harmful as the traditional cigarettes that we know about. Yeah, like e-cigarettes and vape pens, you see them everywhere, right? Yes. Yeah, so e-cigarettes are marketed often, and you probably remember when they were starting to be rolled out, like there were ads everywhere. Everywhere you looked, every person that I knew was like, oh, what's this new thing? And I was like, yeah, yeah. And part of, I think that interest was because they were marketing as a healthier alternative to tobacco products. Like you could still get the effects, but it wouldn't be as bad as smoking a cigarette. But I don't think people realize, maybe not, that it contains just as much nicotine as a cigarette. Yeah, they thought they were gonna get those short-term benefits, but not the long-term detriments kind of a thing. Yeah, and so it's important to note that e-cigarettes can still cause harm to your health, and that the nicotine in e-cigarettes can cause cardiovascular and respiratory problems, just like smoking a cigarette, and that the flavorings in the e-liquid can actually be harmful to your health, too. You'll notice that all of the campaigns haven't been as in your face.
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Yeah, they've been way more subliminal. I haven't seen as many when I think about it.
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I think studies are ongoing to kind of see what the long-term effects have been from that initial wave of interest in accessibility.
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Yeah. Speaking of accessibility, I'm curious about what is the current scheduling status of nicotine, at least in the United States?
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Yeah, well, nicotine delivery systems like e-cigarettes under an act called the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The FDA has the authority to regulate the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of nicotine-containing products to protect the health of the public. And related to our conversation just now on e-cigarettes, the FDA is starting to take steps to regulate e-cigarettes, particularly those that are marketed to minors, because they look fun, right? Yeah, they don't look as terrifying to use. They're almost more inviting somehow, I don't know. Yeah, and there are other things being implemented, like verifying a person's age when they're purchasing these online, and the FDA also issues, you know, warning letters and labels to companies and on their products. Okay, so like further to that, what are some of the regulations or the restrictions currently around nicotine that, you know, we have put in place? There are various different methods of implementing this to address the negative health effects that you might experience by being exposed to nicotine and tobacco use over the years. Some examples include restrictions on advertising. So in a lot of countries, including the United States and the European Union, there are a lot of restrictions on how nicotine and tobacco products are advertised. Yeah, so it can't be very obvious and made to look super fun, especially to minors. You can't cater your marketing to minors. That makes sense, yeah. Like I mentioned briefly, a lot of these products have to have warning labels that indicate all of the dangers of nicotine and tobacco use. There's age restrictions. Many countries have raised the minimum age for purchasing nicotine and tobacco products to prevent minors from accessing these products. Other things, you know, your money, people increased the taxes on nicotine. Oh, so people would be scared away from wanting to spend more
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on it.
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Yeah. Okay. They're using, you know, cost as like a barrier. Okay. And you know, there are a lot of smoke-free policies that have been implemented in countries and a lot of public places. Now, okay, so how would the scheduling of nicotine here in the US compared to other countries? Yeah, in some other countries, nicotine is classified as a controlled substance. And you know, subject to regulation as a medicine, a tobacco product or both. For example, Australia, they classify nicotine as a scheduled seven dangerous poison. And it can only be supplied with a prescription for medicinal use. You can't just buy it at the store like we do here. And other places like Canada, nicotine is regulated as a therapeutic product and is subject to control under their Food and Drugs Act and regulations. In the European Union, nicotine-containing e-cigarettes are also can be classified as a medicinal product if the person makes a health claim.
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Wow.
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Yeah, otherwise they're classified as a tobacco product.
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OK.
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And the regulation and scheduling of nicotine can vary from country to country, like we've discussed, and are influenced by a lot of factors as to the extent of tobacco use, the presence of a nicotine replacement therapy market, and just general public health concerns about the use of e-cigarettes. Yeah, I remember being a little bit younger and seeing this change in how people were approaching nicotine specifically in Las Vegas alone. I remember there was a time that not too long ago, every restaurant had a smoking or non-smoking section. I wonder what ultimately led to prohibiting smoking in public spaces. Yeah, in many countries, smoking's no longer allowed in restaurants due to concerns about the health risks associated with exposure to secondhand smoke. So a lot of the people around you are probably going to be experiencing adverse effects. It's not just to yourself. So studies have shown that secondhand smoke can cause a range of serious health problems like lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, and respiratory diseases. And as a result, many countries have implemented these laws that prohibit smoking in public places, including restaurants, and like you just mentioned, in order to protect, you know, not only the health of patrons, but other people working there too, you know? Yeah, for sure. Can you speak to what the process might look like for changing some of the scheduling status of nicotine in the United States? Because I don't think that it just happened. I'm sure something happened along the way, but what does that process maybe look like? Yeah, there are a lot of steps. So first, you want to gather information. So gather evidence from scientific and medical studies about the substance and its effects on both human health and safety. Then you want to propose for a scheduling change. So once you've gathered enough of this information, you're going to craft a proposal calling for changing the scheduling status of the substance. And you're going to make this to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA. And the proposal can be made by the FDA or by a private individual, organization or individual. Okay. Yeah. And then the DEA reviews the proposal, makes the available scientific and medical information, and determines whether to move forward with the scheduling change. It puts it out for public comment so people can, during a small period, make comment about the proposal, make changes, and then their final decision and implementation is made. It's important to note that this process can take several years to complete and rounds of public comment before a final decision is reached.
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Wow.
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That is insane how long something like that would take, even though it's clear that there's so many long-term disadvantages of it. And it looks like we are coming to an end. We're reaching our time for today. Thank you so much for a great conversation. Yeah, and thank you.
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And thanks to everybody for listening to The Chemical Collective to get your weekly dose of drug facts and
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fiction.
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Please be advised that the voices and opinions you may hear do not necessarily represent the views of KUNV Las Vegas, Please be advised that the voices and opinions you may hear do not necessarily represent the views of KUNV Las Vegas,
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the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.