FEATURE
ASK THE SCIENTIST
Richard Cunningham, PhD answers your frequently asked questions.
Nicotine –What is it? Where does it come from and
what effects does it have on the lives of vapers?
Nicotine is the addictive compound found
naturally in the tobacco plant which once hooked,
people keep coming back again for their nicotine
fix.
Nicotine is an alkaloid compound that is naturally
occurring in many plants such as cauliflower, potatoes,
and tomatoes, although in minute quantities. You
would have to eat an unfeasible large quantity to get
any physiological effect.
In one study performed by E F Domino et al in 1997,
it was found that someone would need to eat up to
263g of cauliflower to ingest around 1ug of nicotine –
that’s 0.001mg of nicotine, while the average stated
quantity of nicotine in a cigarette is 12mg.
The nicotine almost everyone is aware of is that
which is sourced from the tobacco plant, which is
indigenous to the Americas and has been used for
various purposes for over 2,000 years.
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The most commonly cultivated version of the plant
is N.Tabacum. While there is also the more potent
variety N.Rustica, at a content level of around one-to-
three percent and as high as nine percent respectively.
Generally the nicotine that is used with e-cigarettes
is extracted from N.Tabacum using various solvent
extraction processes, while there are some
methodologies developing for synthetic nicotine
production it is significantly more expensive to
produce.