Nicotine

Bad as it is, smoking is still widely popular among people of all ages and nationalities. Although more and more smokers give up this nasty habit, undaunted millions remain faithful to Oscar Wilde's words that “a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure.” All this fuss is about one substance: nicotine.

One man, Jean Nicot (1530-1600) is solely responsible for millions of nicotine victims. This French diplomat discovered tobacco in Portugal while negotiating a marriage between a six-year-old French princess and a Portuguese prince one year her junior. As cigarettes were unknown in Europe (unlike in South America), Nicot and other fashionable aristocrats snuffed tobacco powder rather than smoke it. The habit quickly caught on in France and from there moved rapidly east and south, reaching the frontiers of Russia and Turkey.

Because Jean Nicot popularized tobacco in Europe, the curious plant earned his name. Its Latin form – herba nicotiana – was coined circa 1600, and could be translated as Nicot's herb. Now by “Nicotiana” we mean “any of various flowering annual or perennial herbs of the genus Nicotiana, native to the Americas and including the tobacco plant and ornamental species with fragrant flowers” (the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition). It is worth mentioning that the word “tobacco” dates back to 1588 and is of Indian origin.

On the other hand, the word “nicotine” made its way to the English language only in 1819. To quote the same source, nicotine is “a colorless, poisonous alkaloid, derived from the tobacco plant and used as insecticide. It is the substance in tobacco to which smokers can become addicted.” A pair of German chemists, Posselt and Reimann, who first isolated nicotine in 1828, gave it a less appealing name – C10H14N2 .

Why is nicotine so dangerous? “Nicotine in high doses acts as an effective nerve poison and can have a number of potentially harmful side effects,” writes Wise Geek, a website which provides “clear answers for common questions.” In other words, the substance works like a drug that enslaves people who, in order to satisfy their nicotine hunger, need it in bigger and bigger quantities. Moreover, nicotine – apart from cigarettes' other ingredients – increases the chance of developing cancer. The same applies to various nicotine patches and gums, advertised as safe alternatives to smoking.

Women are especially prone to nicotine addiction. In 2005, the New York Times published a scientific research that found female smokers less successful “with nicotine replacement therapy and are more affected by 'cues' that set off a desire to smoke.” If this does not sound convincing enough, many women will shiver at the thought that one of nicotine's effects is “to make women's brains work more like men's.”

It was never Jean Nicot's dream to go down in history as the name-bearer of an addictive drug. The French diplomat died 40 years after first snuffing tobacco and there is little prove that his habit rendered his health. But contemporary statistics do not lie: nicotine claims hundreds of thousands of people every year all over the world.