Breaking nicotine’s powerful draw

The New York Times quoted Lynn Kozlowski in a story reporting that millions of smokers could be forced to confront the agony of nicotine withdrawal as the FDA weighs calling for a drastic reduction in the addictive lure of cigarettes. Kozlowski said nicotine was a highly addictive drug, with a stranglehold on users that could rival cocaine and heroin, and that the FDA needed to consider how a sweeping decrease of nicotine in cigarettes would affect smoker behavior. “What scares me is a national experiment with very low nicotine cigarette that is done without some testing in the real world,” he said. The studies many experts cite when promoting a 95 percent drop in nicotine levels relied upon paid participants, he noted, adding that some of them secretly smoked their own brands at the same time that researchers were plying them with low-nicotine cigarettes.