Nicotine, the active ingredient in cigarettes, is also a drug. Perhaps it acts at a much lesser extent than heroin, cocaine or even marijuana for that matter, but it is an addictive drug nevertheless. Considering the number of people who smoke around the world, it can be said that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs in the world.

The most common way of consuming nicotine is definitely through cigarettes, but there are other ways of going on with this substance abuse – people can use tobacco directly into their mouths (tobacco is the natural substance that contains the chemical nicotine) or use it through various other forms like nicotine patches, nicotine gum, nicotine lozenges and nicotine injections.

Actually speaking, nicotine does not have many harmful health effects. In the ordinary cigarette, the other ingredients such as tar, carbon monoxide and benzene are much more devastating to human health than nicotine is. But still nicotine is dangerous because it causes the drug addiction that makes people light up a cigarette. That is the reason why medical experts suggest nicotine addicts to use pure nicotine in other ways than the potentially harmful cigarette.

A very prolonged consumption of nicotine can increase the rate of beating of the heart, increase the blood pressure and increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. People who smoke often are also know to have yellow teeth and bad breath. However, these effects are due to other ingredients of the cigarette, notably tar, and not nicotine itself. This holds true even for the various cancers that cigarette smoking produces.

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