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Comment by Georgelemental | Hacker News Reader

Nicotine is addictive, much more so than coffee

It is really not so clear at all this is the case for pure nicotine products. See https://gwern.net/nicotine#habit-formation, and https://gwern.net/nicotine#dependence for a starter / some brief counter-evidence.

Anecdotally, I found I developed a dependence on nicotine pouches very quickly. It was also very easy to exceed the nicotine equivalent of a pack of cigarettes daily without even noticing.

But it was also easy to quit by substituting nicotine-free pouches, and withdrawal symptoms only lasted like 3 days.

Nicotine is depending on how you measure the 3rd or 4th most addictive substance on the planet. It's up there with Heroine, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Meth.

If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.

What dimension of “addictive” are you anchoring on? Capture rate? Withdrawal severity? Reinforcement strength? Relapse rate after quitting? Nicotine dominates on some of those and not others.

Pretty clear from the responses to OP that most people are quite unaware there is almost two decades of decent research on pure nicotine now, and that, outside of vaping (where hard evidence is mostly lacking, due to the novelty), the purer stuff probably really isn't all that addictive, in the grand scheme of things. In many cases it is hard to even say it is much different than caffeine.

It's a reasonable mistake, I'd say. We spent those decades conflating "nicotine" with "smoking" and, through herculean efforts, managed to get the smoking rate down to 12-14% (in Germany it's still 22.7%!). Now, tobacco companies have come through with genuinely less harmful, genuinely less addictive products, but because of their previous wild duplicity, nobody really "believes" it. They think that nicotine must cause cancer. "Fool me once," for sure.

Whether nicotine is addictive is a completely different question than whether it causes cancer

Can you point to said research because everything I can find from any kind of authoritative source is that form doesn't matter and nicotine is strongly addictive in all of them.

There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/20...

The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.

There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.

Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes

Plenty of the sources I linked at https://gwern.net/nicotine are scientific and high-quality, that is not just some lazy list or junk compilation.

Nothing wrong with still being cautious about pure nicotine products though, and I definitely would be cautious about vaping.

it's like 25x more addicting than coffee, not sure how OP misses that

Probably not the case for some modern pure nicotine products (gum, patches). Vaping is harder to say due to lack of data and clear cases of addiction in young people, but pure nicotine is definitely a different animal than the classical delivery forms. See my response to GP.

I wonder if the issue with vapes isn't the sweeteners they put in them. I sometimes vape a specific liquid, which has never given me any cravings. I'll just stop after my bottle is done for multiple months until I remember to buy some more. I never carry my vape with me when I leave home (not to the office, not for multi-week holidays, nothing). It's not difficult to go without, I don't even think about it when I don't have it.

But the other day I ended up vaping some melon-flavored liquid. When it was empty, I was going crazy for a few hours, I absolutely had to have more. And it didn't even have more nicotine than what I usually vape. It was just the sweet taste that had me wanting more, exactly like back in my college days when I was eating Snickers bars like no tomorrow. Now that was a habit that was tough to break. And most people I see vaping out in the street seem to be vaping those ultra-sweet smelling liquids.

An interesting thought, I myself have met at least a couple people that tried to break an addiction by switching to vape products that were essentially just flavour (no nicotine, no THC; THC vapes are common and legal in Canada) and somehow stayed just as addicted to the flavour / oral stimulation. So that sounds at least plausible to me.

> which has never given me any cravings

I've seen multiple friends that could give up an addiction: until after a while and then they couldn't.

For many people, addictions are not that addictive until they are.

Be careful generalizing from your own experiences. Try and learn from the mistakes your (often older) peers have been taught the hardest way.

I've seen it with drinking, vaping, smoking, meth, bad partner, gambling; my friends that weren't hooked, could take it or leave it, and then one day they find they are hooked.

Take care.

they miss it because they're an industry plant, mate.

bots are very active on HN and are very effective

bullshit. i've been smoking cigars for 5 years now. sometimes 2 or 3 a day and have zero issues stopping or going without a smoke for months. i was surprised as i was never smoker, but it is what it is. nicotine addiction is not nicotine addiction but cigarette addiction. cigars are pure tobacco. nothing else. cigarettes have over thousand ingredients in them. cigars also have higher nicotine dose than cigarettes and as i have said, zero issues.

know thy enemy.

It is bullshit. Stopping nicotine is like 2 days of mild discomfort. Stopping caffeine is absolute hell.

as i said, nictoine is a non-factor. as for caffeine, i quit multiple times. once the headaches are gone, which takes a week or two, followed by another week, or few, of feeling lethargic, it is back to normal(ie. give it a month altogether). so it's not too bad. it might be also easier to wean off slowly by decreasing caffeine consumption over longer period than quitting cold turkey to avoid the negative effects altogether.

Utter nonsense. I have replaced my ADHD prescription with nicotine patches, and in my experience I have had worse withdrawals, and greater desire to consume caffeine than either dermal nicotine or dexamfetamine. And I’m only a cup a day kinda guy, and I used to be a heavy smoker for years, so I know how dangerous the stuff can be.

If we’re talking about smoking or vaping, or nicotine pouches, sure, but mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.

Utter nonsense

Got something other than anecdata? Because a web search returns a list of contrary sources as long as my arm.

But, hell, if we are trading stories, I dipped snuff for 30 years and I’ve consumed coffee since middle school. I can go days without coffee, even if I might not be happy about it. Quitting tobacco, OTOH, that was tough, with multiple starts and stops until success.

Tobacco is not pure nicotine. If you can’t even get your basics straight, I’m not sure on what level we can even have a discussion about it.

Here’s from someone that knows what they’re talking about: https://gwern.net/nicotine

> mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.

Then surely you have some evidence, especially that caffeine is more addictive, rather than "hand-waving it away" via personal anecdote?

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