You're mixing tobacco and nicotine. There are ways to get nicotine in you without consuming tobacco. I know at least of nicotine gums and nicotine patches.
Benefits are mostly in appetite suppression (if one is prone to overeating/unhealthy binging), mental stamina (usually due to the aforementioned appetite suppression), emotional anti-lability, and greatly improved saliva production (from nicotine gum, ergo oral hygiene).
Tobacco itself contains a lot more psychoactive chemicals (MAOIs, and such), and are definitely more useful in the emotional-regulation department. If you're going through severe, inescapable emotional and physical hardship, tobacco generally keeps you from losing your mind and having a breakdown. And generally, I believe this is the most addictive quality: it keeps the stress to a manageable level (that becomes unmanageable once you stop tobacco, but don't do anything to change your environment).
One cigarette/cigarillo every few days is nothing in the grand scheme of things. It becomes a serious problem when you're smoking a pack a day, every day, without giving your lungs any time to heal and clear out (i.e. once the sharp perma-cough comes in, it's time for a break). Even having a cigar once a month (and even inhaling it), it is basically nothing, if you're perfectly healthy otherwise.
For what its worth, if the U.S. stopped selling tobacco completely, the economy would fall apart. No one would work all of the absolute dogshit jobs that "underpin" everything else (see: low-skilled, manual labor, etc.); and weed would not be able to fill the void.
[0] - https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/health-effects-tobacco-...
Having used nicotine, tobacco, and been around people that have used nicotine and tobacco, there is little observational evidence that is addictive, relative to every other drug out there (including caffeine).
From my experience, the effects of nicotine are exceptionally mild compared to caffeine. The most serious is usually severe nausea/vertigo/lightheadedness if you dose too high.
Vapes are a different beast, though. You can easily get the same effects as a whippit by chain-vaping 50mg salt nic. However, I would still put whippits as vastly more dangerous long-term (the cause of effect for whippits is oxygen deprivation, including cell death in the brain, whereas for nicotine it's neuronal in nature; but I'm having a hard time finding actual research on the pathways involved, due to the politicized nature of this drug).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide#Neurotoxicity_an...
I've done free base nic, salt nic, and nic polacrilex. Salt nic would be, in my opinion, the most habit-forming (but not addictive), due to a quick and high "peak," and quicker clearance -- leading to a need to re-dose more often. That's also granted that the route of administration (vaping) allows for an insane amount of nicotine to be absorbed, much more than you can ever get with pouches, gums, and patches.
As well, I'm not certain, but I believe Zyn uses salt nic, and not free base.
I've done snuff as well, and it's similar to nicotine gum (except being more of a nuisance).
I haven't seen evidence for basic nicotine products being addictive. I have little comprehension how something so mild can become addictive. Habit-forming? Yes. Full-blown addiction? No.
Cigarettes are different. They're a cocktail of various psychoactive chemicals that get dumped straight into the bloodstream in large amounts. I understand how they can become addictive. I have first-hand experience of all the necessary things that must come together for the "addiction" switch to come on.
In my experience, nicotine alone is not enough for that switch to be flipped.
Do you?
This is pretty much settled science, and has been since 1986. Page 30: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK179276/pdf/Bookshelf_N...
This reads like a thinly-veiled marketing piece for Nicorette (now owned by J&J and GSK) via lobbying -- four years after nicotine gum receives FDA approval in the U.S.
I have yet to see any actual research on isolating nicotine as the addictive component in tobacco products.
You are somewhat mistaken. Natural tobacco is fairly non-addicting because it doesn't contain nearly the amount of nicotine than what is in cigarettes, and what is in cigarettes is not natural tobacco. Nicotine, itself, is highly addictive, and there are myriad reference of studies to back this up. The addictiveness of nicotine is often compared to that of heroin. Vaping with nicotine is most likely just as addictive as smoking national brand cigarettes only due to the amount of nicotine present, thus natural tobacco is most likely not as addictive as vaping nicotine. Nicotine gum, due to the difference in delivery system, is likely just as addicting as chewing tobacco (which is also not natural tobacco but highly manipulated tobacco product to increase addictiveness). But nicotine, itself, beyond it's addictiveness, is not all that bad to consume, it won't kill you (below the lethal dose of 30-60mg), thus, vaping nicotine or nicotine gum is not all that bad, maybe not bad at all (but, again, addiction is bad in and of itself, not due to killing you, but due to messing with your free will, making you a slave to the addiction).
The only justifications I've come across are a matter of post-hoc rationalization ("because nicotine is addictive, X, Y, and Z"; but no "nicotine is addictive, because A, B, C"), and taking it as granted.
I have yet to see anything explaining why nicotine is addictive (not merely, how it could be addictive, but the evidence behind why this statement is just taken as fact).
Everything being written about it just flies in the face of my experience with nicotine/tobacco, and what I've seen from talking first-hand with smokers, vapers, and other types of users. It's like I'm listening to a bunch of upper middle class people talk about what it's like to be homeless: completely detached from reality -- and simply repeating a bunch of thoughts and ideas that they've seen somewhere else.
Even Cochrane's, a gold standard in this field, Tobacco Addiction Group just takes it at face value that nicotine is addictive. Where is the evidence? Where is the paper trail? Who has decided this? When and why? Why cannot I find any high-impact, high-citation count research that explains and justifies why nicotine is addictive?
The only thing that has moved my opinion of this matter, was a Surgeon General report another poster replied to me with: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK179276/pdf/Bookshelf_N...
Page 30:
"It was not until the 1988 report that the Surgeon General declared that cigarettes are addicting, similar to heroin and cocaine, and that nicotine is the primary agent of addiction (USDHHS 1988)."
Four years after nicotine replacement therapy via nicotine gum is introduced, the Surgeon General declares cigarettes to be addicting, in the same vein as cocaine and heroin (no it's not what was actually said, but it is implied), and that nicotine is the cause of addiction. I'm going to have to read the original 1988 report, but I'm not convinced that this is anything but political (when is it not?), rather than actual.
I'm more liable to agree with (same page):
"Additionally, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the general understanding of smoking behavior and nicotine addiction was very limited. At the time, health scientists viewed smoking as primarily psychological and social, rather than pharmacological or biological. The 1964 report concluded that tobacco dependence should be characterized as a form of habituation rather than addiction (USDHEW 1964), drawing on a distinction established by WHO in 1957. That definition emphasized the physical effects of the drug, the compulsion to obtain it at any cost, and the habit’s detrimental effects on the individual and society (WHO 1957). The WHO Expert Committee on Addiction-Producing Drugs observed that for cigarette smoking, evidence was lacking at the time for a typical abstinence syndrome. “In contrast to drugs of addiction, withdrawal from tobacco never constitutes a threat to life,” they wrote. “These facts indicate clearly the absence of physical dependence” (USDHEW 1964, p. 352)."
I keep seeing things just claimed as fact, without a single shred of evidence, besides "we've all agreed upon it. There are WMDs in Iran."
Apologies for the hyperbole and hysterics, but this is just maddening. Who gets addicted to nicotine? Who is actually physically and mentally dependent on nicotine products (excluding tobacco)? Where are these people?
The only people I've met who have issues with nicotine products are smokers -- including those that are trying (always unsuccessfully) to quit via nicotine replacement therapy. I'm more convinced nic gum manufactures lobbied the Surgeon General, under some plausibly deniable pretenses, than I am to believe nicotine, a chemical weaker than caffeine, is addictive.
Absolutely mad.
I understand the low-level pharmacodynamics (but these are seldom useful when talking about high-level, system-wide, and complex effects).
BUT, this portion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Reinforcement_disorde... has a few interesting tid-bits, especially the article on DeltaFosB/"as a critical factor in the development of virtually all forms of behavioral and drug addictions." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB#Delta_FosB) As well as, "Based upon the accumulated evidence, a medical review from late 2014 argued that accumbal ΔFosB expression can be used as an addiction biomarker and that the degree of accumbal ΔFosB induction by a drug is a metric for how addictive it is relative to others."
Fascinating stuff -- and exactly what I was complaining about.
A more nuanced take on why drug-mediated DeltaFosB expression may be involved in addictive (see: habitual drug usage) behaviors: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2607320/
BUT, so many things cause DeltaFosB expression (e.g. sugar, exercise, drugs, etc.), that we need to establish how significant of an effect nicotine has compared to everything else. Fortunately, we do have one study comparing caffeine's and nicotine's DeltaFosB expression: https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jchemneu.2017.10.005
Results (page 9; "number of DeltaFosB-immunoreactive nuclei per 1 mm^2" in the nucleus accumbunus):
| Control | Nicotine | Caffeine |
| 43,83 ± 16,80 | 117,33 ± 14,36 | 112,77 ± 10,12 |
To me, that looks like a similar addiction-profile. Granted, DeltaFosB is probably not the be-all end-all, but a small piece in untangling why and how nicotine (and other drugs) may or may not be addictive.
It would be even better, if we could put these two side-by-side with other drugs, notably cocaine and heroin, to see if the effect expression is logarithmic (and DeltaFosB over-expression is similar across-the-board for all drugs considered addictive).