Smoking e-cigarettes may lead to addiction marijuana and cocaine

A new study has observed that smoking e-cigarettes may encourage the addiction to other substances, such as marijuana and cocaine.

The study presented at Massachusetts Medical Society examined that the e-cigarettes may act as a "gateway drug" to addiction to drugs.

Co-author Denise B. Kandel, PhD, professor of sociomedical sciences (in psychiatry), Department of Psychiatry and Mailman School of Public Health, at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), said that while e-cigarettes eliminated some of the health effects associated with combustible tobacco, they were pure nicotine-delivery devices.

Dr. Eric Kandel said that their findings provided a biologic basis for the sequence of drug use observed in people and one drug altered the brain's circuitry in a way that enhanced the effects of a subsequent drug.

Kandel continued that e-cigarettes had the same physiological effects on the brain and may pose the same risk of addiction to other drugs as regular cigarettes, especially in adolescence during a critical period of brain development and nicotine clearly acted as a gateway drug on the brain, and this effect was likely to occur whether the exposure comes from smoking cigarettes, passive tobacco smoke, or e-cigarettes.

The study is published in the online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Low nicotine cigarettes may reduce addiction

Cigarettes with low levels of nicotine may reduce addiction in smokers without increasing exposure to toxic chemicals, says a study.

The study monitored the smoking behaviour of 72 adults as they switched between three types of cigarettes with markedly reduced nicotine levels.

When the participants switched between conventional cigarette brands - which have similar nicotine content - there was no significant change in their puffing behaviour, number of cigarettes consumed or levels of toxic chemicals in their systems.

"We found that smokers were unable or unwilling to compensate when there was markedly less nicotine in the cigarette," said David Hammond, from the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences at University of Waterloo in Canada.

The cigarettes - Quest 1, Quest 2 and Quest 3 - had a nicotine content of 8.9, 8.4 and 0.6 mg, respectively, as opposed to an average of 12 mg in a regular cigarette.

The study appeared in the journal Cancer Epidemiology.