Addiction linked to cigarette brand

It is for the first time that scientists measured the amount of the freebase nicotine that cigarettes deliver to smokers.

A team of researchers from Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, USA compared eleven brands of cigarettes and they found that some contained 10 to 20 times higher levels of freebase nicotine than experts had previously believed.

Brands were compared with a laboratory reference cigarettes containing 1% free base nicotine. Results varied greatly, ranging from 1% or 2% to 36% in a particular brand.

Professor James Pankow, who led the study, reported in the Journal of Research in Toxicology, that they found big differences in the percentages of freebase nicotine among 11 cigarette brands.
Like 'crack' cocaine causes vaporized cocaine to reach the brain in seconds, freebase nicotine vaporizes and passes rapidly through the lungs during smoking.
Professor Pankow added that during smoking, only the freebase form can evaporate from a particle into the air in the respiratory tract. Since gaseous nicotine is known to deposit quickly in the lungs and from there, it is transported to the blood stream and rapidly to the brain. Since scientists have shown that a drug becomes more addictive when it is delivered to the brain more rapidly, freebase nicotine levels in cigarette smoke thus are at the heart of the controversy regarding the tobacco industry's use of additives like ammonia and urea, as well as blending choices in cigarette design.

Professor Jack Hennigfield, from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, said that cigarettes deliver much higher levels of freebase nicotine than previously thought, thus helping to explain their enormous addictive potential. It appears likely that ingredients used in modern cigarette manufacture such as ammonia and urea account for this addiction-enhancing effect.

Professor Pankow said that in the US there were no formal tobacco industry or Food and Drug Administration guidelines on appropriate levels of freebase nicotine in cigarettes.
However, the message from the manufactures was that cigarettes contained only small percentage of freebase nicotine.

A requirement of the new rules of the European commission oblige manufacturers and importers to submit to governments a list of all ingredients, and quantities thereof, used in their products. Therefore only additives on a permitted list from the Department of Health are allowed in cigarettes made in Britain.

Although freebase nicotine may be produced by additives, it is not an additive itself.