The Hook That Snags Smokers

Just what is it about nicotine in tobacco that, as neuropbiologist Lorna B. Role so fittingly put it, makes people “willing to inhale a couple of hundred class A carcinogens in order to get some of it”? The answer, as countless smokers have learned to their immediate gratification and, so often, ultimate sorrow, is that sucking the nicotine in tobacco smoke into the body produces a good feeling. Now Role and her colleagues at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons have discovered why.

Nicotine has a powerful physiological effect because it stimulates the release of a chemical called glutamate. As it happens, most of this occurs in that primitive part of the brain known as the limbic system, which controls the emotions and such basic drives as eating and reproduction. Even a minute amount of nicotine can produce transient pleasure. But people aren’t usually satisfied with a transient pleasure; why stop when doing it again can bring back the experienced good feeling? In short order, then, an addiction can develop. Wheezing and hacking, smokers light up yet another one. And the tobacco companies get richer and richer.

The great value of discovering just how nicotine works in the brain is that a chemical route to blocking its activity might now be found. Take the gratification out of smoking and all that’s left is the utterly pointless ingestion of cancer-causing compounds that Role speaks of. A drug to block the addictive effects of nicotine is a goal that cries out for support.