NIH Radio
Study of nicotine as a gateway drug – 2
Narrator: This is NIH Health Matters. I’m Joe Balintfy. The idea of gateway drugs, for example nicotine use leading to cocaine addiction, has been controversial. But Dr. Nora Volkow an institute director at the NIH explains a recent study has looked at a biological mechanism showing that nicotine has a priming effect in the brains of mice.
Volkow: When they’re pretreated with nicotine, the animals conditioned much faster than the animals that had only been given cocaine. And conditioning is a process that we know is indispensible in the process of addiction. The person that's addicted gets conditioned to the drug and that drives wanting to take the drug.
Narrator: For more information on this study, visit www.drugabuse.gov. Health Matters is produced by the NIH, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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