| Hans-Günter Meyer-Thompson | Nikotin
NIDA: Recent Research Sheds New Light on Why Nicotine is So Addictive
NIDA: Recent Research Sheds New Light on Why Nicotine is So Addictive
Although our society currently finds itself focused on the tragic epidemic of opioid overdoses, there remains no better example of the deadly power of addiction than nicotine. The measure of a drug’s addictiveness is not how much pleasure (or reward) it causes but how reinforcingit is—that is, how much it leads people to keep using it. Nicotine does not produce the kind of euphoria or impairment that many other drugs like opioids and marijuana do. People do not get high from smoking cigarettes or vaping. Yet nicotine’s powerful ability to reinforce its relatively mild rewards results in 480,000 deaths annually. (Nora’s Blog, NIDA, 28.09.2018)