While this article seems perfectly well-intentioned, many of its conclusions are based on myths and misconceptions. The idea that you can make smoking non-addictive by reducing or eliminating the nicotine in cigarettes is naive at best and ignorant at worst. It has been assumed by most people for a long time that tobacco addiction is all about nicotine, but that's probably never been true.
In point of fact, nicotine dependence has never been observed, or successfully induced, in any individual who never used tobacco. Dr. Paul Newhouse at Vanderbilt University, in the most extensive study that's been done on nicotine use by never-smokers, had his test subjects (who were all tobacco-naive) wear nicotine patches every day for six months. Not a single one of them displayed any symptoms of dependence or withdrawal upon the cessation of nicotine intake. Moreover, the FDA last year revised its guidelines on the use of pharmaceutical nicotine replacement products, finding that they had such a vanishingly low potential for abuse and dependence that there is no cause for concern in their long-term use by any healthy individual over age 12.
It makes no sense that nicotine in tobacco is the most addictive substance known to humankind, but nicotine without tobacco has little to no potential for addiction. If a tobacco addiction and a nicotine addiction were the same thing, the aforementioned NRTs wouldn't all have failure rates in excess of 90%.
The bottom line is, we don't fully understand why smoking is so addictive. In the late 19th century, the medical community reached a consensus that nicotine was the reason, and nobody really questioned that conclusion for over the next 100 years. But it seems increasingly clear that it was erroneous and inaccurate. The longer we continue to falsely conflate "smoking" and "nicotine," rather than doing new and better research, absent any preconceived notions, in order to better understand the mechanism whereby tobacco actually induces dependence and addiction, the longer it will be before we figure out how to end (or at least ameliorate) the epidemic of smoking-related disease and death.
