Yeah, the doco didn't really get into the different types of tobacco and their flavours. More so, it discussed tobacco use generally and the addictive power of nicotine as being behind the reason why people smoked. I found it fascinating that apart from the tribes in south america, it was the English that popularised tobacco and smoked pipes en masse in those early days. Cigarettes only appeared about 100 years ago.
It was a really well done documentary and I enjoyed watching it. Thanks.
I was drawing a distinction between tobacco usage and nicotine. Too often I think it's easy to conflate nicotine and all of tobacco's properties; nicotine is seen as being the
sole culprit of that "addictive power." I disagree.
For instance, in the documentary (@ 9:33) when Brian Cox met with Professor David
Nutt, the Director of Brain Science at Imperial College, London, the professor showed a graph on his computer about
nicotine consumption as it relates to highs and lows of dopamine. The professor pointed at the "
nicotine and mood" graph and said, "...when people are smoking, the more happy they are--is associated with having more dopamine." In essence, smoking is nicotine and nicotine is smoking as it pertains to effects on mood. I don't know whether the graph was really about smoking or he was really talking about nicotine (the two were used synonymously). That kind of reductive, simplistic way of looking at nicotine, IMO, is part and parcel why we have people that think vaping is no different than smoking. After all, we vape nicotine, right?
Immediately after the "nicotine and mood" graph, the professor showed a computer graphic of brain imaging and said, "...and what smoking does is block one of the enzymes in the brain that some anti-depressants block." I don't know enough about monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI), but I know that enough research has been done on tobacco and tobacco smoke to conclude that there are other alkaloids responsible for these MAOIs. I don't know, maybe nicotine does as well, but even still, one thing I know for certain is that nicotine in tobacco is not acting alone and that should be stated, and not as a simple aside. In tobacco, nicotine may be the mastermind, but it is rollin' with a crew.
Oh, and when Professor Nutt began his introduction to the interview, he said, "we inhale this burning leaf, which contains nicotine and
other things." If you watch the video and listen closely, when he says "other things," it was basically a mumble.