Some cigarette brands contain higher amounts of super-addictive “freebase” nicotine than others, according to a new study by researchers at Oregon Health and Science University.

“We believe that this study is a major step forward in understanding how addictive nicotine is delivered by tobacco smoke,” said James F. Pankow, Ph.D., professor of environmental and biomolecular systems at OHSU’s OGI School of Science & Engineering in Hillsboro, Ore.

“We found big differences in the percentages of free-base nicotine among 11 commercial cigarette brands.”

They found that some brands contained 1 percent free-base nicotine in the first few puffs of the reference cigarette to 36 percent for a specialty U.S. brand. Marlboro contained about 10 percent free-base nicotine, Pankow said.

“Since scientists have shown that a drug becomes more addictive when it is delivered to the brain more rapidly,” Pankow continued, “free-base nicotine levels in cigarette smoke thus are at the heart of the controversy regarding the tobacco industry’s use of additives like ammonia and urea, as well as blending choices in cigarette design.”

Neal Benowitz, M.D., a nicotine addiction expert at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine, provided a scientific perspective of this study’s impact:

“The rate of absorption of nicotine from a tobacco product into the blood stream influences the addictiveness of the product, and the rate of absorption of nicotine from cigarette smoke is dependent on how much of the nicotine is in the free-base form. Free-base nicotine levels are determined by the pH (acid-base balance) of the smoke, which is difficult to measure accurately and which can be influenced by various additives. Pankow and colleagues have analyzed free-base nicotine and pH in a number of popular cigarette brands, using a novel method that is much more accurate than methods used previously. They found more than 10-fold variation in levels of free-base nicotine among American cigarette brands. This is the first research to make such observations and will certainly help to guide future research into differences in the addictiveness of different brands of cigarettes.”.

(via Telegraph)