GM Tobacco in Cigarettes Cuts Nicotine Content by 97%

Source from:  NYT 10/31/2011

When a truck recently delivered 45,000 cartons of cigarettes to a research company in North Carolina , it was a turning point in the government's war on smoking. These were no ordinary cigarettes, but experimental ones, made of genetically altered tobacco to lower the nicotine content by 97 percent while preserving all the other tastes and smells and rituals for smokers of conventional cigarettes. The National Institutes of Health bought nine million of these cigarettes, marked "for research purposes only," from the 22nd Century Group as part of a broadening scientific effort to find ways to regulate cigarettes so that they are nonaddictive. Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the N.I.H., which oversees the work, called the delivery crucial for the new federal research projects. These include last month's award of $2.5 million for the first year of a planned five-year series of studies into threshold levels of nicotine addiction and the possible impact of a sharp reduction in nicotine on smoking and public health. One study of the test cigarettes will follow about 500 smokers over six months to determine whether they are more likely to quit if they switch to those cigarettes quickly or gradually. The research, led by Dorothy K. Hatsukami, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, and Eric C. Donny , associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, will use about 1.5 million of the recently acquired cigarettes. Enditem