Electronic Cigarettes: New Route to Smoking Addiction for Adolescents

[jayfish]

121. By Golly, I Found Some. And The Results Don't Look Good For The ANTZ

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21617206

The combination of alterated gene expressions and strongly inhibited DNA synthesis was only detected in cells exposed to smoke extract. In the presence and absence of ethanol, pure nicotine and Snus extract induced abnormalities in the cytoplasm without any significant degree of cell death. With similar doses of nicotine and ethanol, the additional components in smoke extract had a dominant effect. The smoke extract induced vast cellular abnormalities and massive cell death.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8614291

The rats breathed in a chamber with nicotine at a concentration giving twice the plasma concentration found in heavy smokers. Nicotine was given for 20 h a day, five days a week during a two-year period. We could not find any increase in mortality, in atherosclerosis or frequency of tumors in these rats compared with controls.[/b Particularly, there was no microscopic or macroscopic lung tumors nor any increase in pulmonary neuroendocrine cells. Throughout the study, however, the body weight of the nicotine exposed rats was reduced as compared with controls. In conclusion, our study does not indicate any harmful effect of nicotine when given in its pure form by inhalation.

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20031012195753data_trunc_sys.shtml

"These findings don't mean people should smoke," warns neuroscientist Michael Kuhar of Emory University. "Any benefits from the nicotine in cigarettes or other tobacco products are far outweighed by the proven harm of using those products. But pure nicotine-like compounds as medications do show promise for treating human disorders."

http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_layman/tobacco/en/l-2/4.htm

Nicotine has a range of actions in the body and the mechanisms of addiction are still poorly understood. Individual responses to nicotine vary widely. Addiction to nicotine is difficult to measure directly, and experimental studies usually involve set-ups in which animals can self-administer the drug. Such animal studies indicate that pure nicotine is only weakly addictive. There is little human data on pure nicotine use. However, dependence is strongly linked to the number of cigarettes smoked per day.

Moreover, data on human drug use indicate that the addictive potential of tobacco is very high. More than 30 per cent of those who have ever used tobacco become dependent, a higher figure than for other drugs of dependence such as heroin, cocaine or alcohol.

Even with that that data available on the positive or negative of pure nicotine is thin.