Why People Smoke? Nicotine May Be the Answer.!?!

Well duh! And I always thought it was to look cool.

How stupid is this? Really stupid, and, cruel.

According to an article in the Toronto Daily News with the headline Why People Smoke? Nicotine May Be the Answer: "Nicotine use is highly addictive, which is why most smokers who want to quit may not be able to succeed." May be the answer?? Bet you didn't know that.

This news comes from a publicly-funded study at the Preclinical Pharmacology Section, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health-Department of Health and Human Services in Baltimore. The paper is freely available on line here.

The problem addressed in the study was explained by the authors:

"[The] reinforcing effects of nicotine alone have often been difficult to demonstrate directly in controlled laboratory studies with both animals and humans as experimental subjects. Consequently, there has been continuing controversy in the literature about the validity of previous findings of reinforcing effects of nicotine in experimental animals and human subjects."

Did you get that? These dick wads (and everyone along the way who felt this study had merit) claim that there is controversy concerning whether nicotine is addictive. And so, they decided to torture five monkeys.

Subjects
Five naive male squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciurea), weighing 730 to 950 g were subjects. They were housed individually in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room and were maintained on a 12-h light/dark cycle; the lights were on from 6:45 AM to 6:45 PM. Experiments were conducted during the light phase. Animals were maintained in facilities fully accredited by the American Association for the Accreditation of Laboratory Animals used in this study were maintained in facilities fully accredited by the American Association for the Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC) and all experimentation was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Institutional Care and Use Committee of the Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, and the Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (National Research Council 2003). In each monkey, a polyvinyl chloride catheter (inside diameter, 0.38 mm; outside diameter 0.76 mm) was used for i.v. injection of drug and was passed through the right or left jugular vein or through the femoral vein to the level of the right atrium under halothane anesthesia. Subcutaneous catheters led to the monkey's back where they exited the skin. The monkeys wore jackets at all times to protect these catheters. Each weekday the catheters were flushed, refilled with saline (0.9% NaC1) and sealed with stainless steel obturators. Before acquisition of nicotine self-administration, the monkeys have been euthanized to performed brain imaging experiment using positron emission tomography to measure the expression of brain nicotinic receptors. These results will be reported elsewere.

What total pricks.