Nicotine better for you than you thought

Wired is running a great a story about the promise of nicotine. Yes, that's right - the much maligned substance is in the midst of a research renaissance, and for good reason:

Nicotine acts on the acetylcholine receptors in the brain, stimulating and regulating the release of a slew of brain chemicals, including seratonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. Not surprisingly, the first scientific work that identified these chemicals and how they affect the body came out of nicotine research -- much of it performed by tobacco companies.

Now drugs derived from nicotine and the research on nicotine receptors are in clinical trials for everything from helping to heal wounds, to depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, anger management and anxiety.

"Nicotine is highly stigmatized -- and for good reason, because the delivery system is so deadly," says Don deBethizy, CEO of Targacept. "But the drug itself and the research generated by studying its effects on the brain both show great promise for helping us improve our physical and mental health."

A range of interesting studies going back to the early '80s are pointing to the notion that nicotine has all sorts of interesting properties. For instance:

In 2000, Stanford researchers who set out to prove that nicotine damages blood vessels found just the opposite: it prompts the growth of new blood vessels. "It may be the reason smokers' cancers are so aggressive, says Dr. Scott Harkonen, CEO of drugmaker CoMentis. "But it also raises the question: where would you want to promote new blood-vessel growth?"

The answer, it turns out, was found in diabetes patients, who too often lose a lower extremity to amputation after a wound becomes gangrenous -- a result of poor blood circulation. Rates of amputations have steadily increased, Harkonen says, and nicotine could be a key to reversing that trend. Now CoMentis is in Phase II studies for "a gel that contains nicotine that's applied directly to the wound site," says Harkonen.

Interesting indeed. Who could have ever suspected that a highly stigmatized substance like this could ever have medicinal properties? Why, it's just so outlandish - all this time we've been told that this substance is just bad news, but here comes science to inform us of practically the exact opposite. It's just crazy! Why, next those irascible scientists are going to be telling us that marijuana of all things has medicinal properties, and then just you watch - the whole culture is going to fall over into a heaping morass of confusion and moral decay! Or something.