10 December 2004
Nicotine as Therapy
Posted by Mikhail Esteves under: General .
Nicotine is an alkaloid in the tobacco plant Nicotiana tabacum, which was smoked or chewed in the Americas for thousands of years before European invaders also succumbed to its pleasures and shipped it back to the Old World. Nicotine has always been regarded as medicinal and enjoyable at its usual low doses. Native Americans chewed tobacco to treat intestinal symptoms, and in 1560, Jean Nicot de Villemain sent tobacco seeds to the French court, claiming tobacco had medicinal properties and describing it as a panacea for many ailments. Higher doses are toxic, even lethal—which is why nicotine is used around the world as an insecticide. Yet few of the horrendous health effects of smoking are traceable to nicotine itself—cigarettes contain nearly 4,000 other compounds that play a role. Until recently, nicotine research has been driven primarily by nicotine’s unparalleled power to keep people smoking, rather than its potential therapeutic uses.
