Flavor does not increase abuse of nicotine chewing gum

October 11, 2019

but suddenly when flavor is taken into consideration for eLiquids it's the devil himself playing pied piper, luring children to their adolescent nicotine addicted dooms?  That headline is a truncated grab from a 2002 abstract posted on pubmed. 

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine produced a wonderful bit of research well before any of this vape hysteria took hold, the Food and Drug Administration required a rigorous abuse liability assessment before nicotine gum could even come to market.  The study was to examine whether enhanced palatability, AKA various flavorings of nicotine gum,  would increase the nicotine gums potential for abuse. 

What did they find? No association between flavor and abuse.  Subjective, physiological, and psychomotor effects of mint flavor and original nicotine gum were tested in adult smokers 22 to 55 years old, as well as a group of younger subjects aged 18 to 21 years old were also included to allow for assessment of abuse liability in young adults specifically! It's almost like they were actually concerned with flavoring leading to increased consumption of nicotine back then, rather than just making up assumptions and doing zero science. 

The study used amphetamine and confectionery gum as positive controls for testing palatability. Those involved in the study rated the palatability of mint gum higher than original nicotine gum, but far lower than the confectionery gum. Palatability was also observed to decrease with increasing doses of nicotine.

Neither original nor mint gum increased ratings of traditional abuse liability predictors, and both flavors of nicotine gum decreased craving during the first 2 hours of abstinence. These effects were more pronounced in the adult group and mint gum was actually more effective than plain original gum.  Younger subjects reported fewer withdrawal symptoms and lower ratings for drug effects and flavor, while in both groups improved flavor of nicotine gum did not increase abuse liability by any factor measured in the study. 

Of course this kind of solid scientific evidence is going to be easily ignored when you have a hysterical level of panic induced mania sweeping over and through the general public, who seem so disinterested in public health harm reduction in the first place, because something dangerous is easily feared and therefore falsely understood and immediately digested.  As we know, any fool can know something, regardless of if it is true or not, but the difficulty lies in understanding that thing. 

What do you think? Have we lost the vape war? Will we make it out alive from underneath this mountain of fake news and misinformation? Will big tobacco win and get rid of all us small guys when these bans go away in a few months and the only players big enough to continue the game are those big tobacco companies? 

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