New Cigarettes To Help Quit Smoking

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If you are a smoker, or know somebody who is, then be sure to take a look at this article from Duff Wilson of The New York Times. In his article, Wilson discusses a new type of cigarette that has eliminated 97% of the nicotine but still has the flavor and smell of a regular cigarette.

When a truck recently delivered 45,000 cartons of cigarettes to a research company in North Carolina, it was a turning point in the government’s war on smoking. These were no ordinary cigarettes, but experimental ones, made of genetically altered tobacco to lower the nicotine content by 97 percent while preserving all the other tastes and smells and rituals for smokers of conventional cigarettes.

Researchers had been seeking a new and bigger supply because shortages had limited previous studies to just dozens of people. The experimental cigarettes are produced by a Massachusetts company, the 22nd Century Group, which holds 98 patents for genetic manipulation of tobacco plants to reduce or increase the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.

The National Institutes of Health bought nine million of these cigarettes, marked “for research purposes only,” from the 22nd Century Group as part of a broadening scientific effort to find ways to regulate cigarettes so that they are nonaddictive. The Spectrum brand test cigarettes have eight different levels of nicotine for research, from a nicotine content of 3 percent to 100 percent of the nicotine in the best-selling Marlboro Gold, though a 97 percent reduction is the most common level.

Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the N.I.H., which oversees the work, called the delivery crucial for the new federal research projects. These include last month’s award of $2.5 million for the first year of a planned five-year series of studies into threshold levels of nicotine addiction and the possible impact of a sharp reduction in nicotine on smoking and public health.

Read more at The New York Times