This comes up a lot—Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn’t particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.
IME there is a real effect where nicotine acts as a gateway drug to tobacco or vaping
in general this whole post seems to make this mistake of saying ‘a common second order effect of this thing is doing it in a way that will get you addicted—so don’t do that’ which is just such an obvious failure mode that to call it a chesterton fence is generous
This comes up a lot—Gwern has a decent research overview on arguments why nicotine by itself isn’t particularly addictive (spoiler: MAOIs in tobacco) and there also decades of trying and mostly failing to get animals hooked on nicotine alone. As far as I can tell, society has just conflated nicotine and smoking and blamed the former for addiction to the latter.
n=1, but I personally do not feel any pull towards using patches not lozenges and ironically often forget about them.
IME there is a real effect where nicotine acts as a gateway drug to tobacco or vaping
in general this whole post seems to make this mistake of saying ‘a common second order effect of this thing is doing it in a way that will get you addicted—so don’t do that’ which is just such an obvious failure mode that to call it a chesterton fence is generous