Possible Interaction: Cocaine and Nicotine

“Exposure to addictive drugs, such as alcohol, cocaine , methamphetamine, marijuana, and nicotine has been shown to alter FA.”

“In addition, nicotine pretreatment has been shown to increase the rate of cocaine self-administration in rats and to enhance cue-induced cocaine craving in humans.”

“Our findings indicate that nicotine pretreatment alters some of the positive subjective effects of cocaine in humans without affecting cocaine's effects on physiologic responses or pharmacokinetic profiles.”

“The addictive use of nicotine (NC) and cocaine (COC) continues to be a major public health problem, and their combined use has been reported, particularly during adolescence.”

“These observations have led to the hypothesis that a causal relationship exists between early exposure to nicotine and the later use of hard drugs such as cocaine.”

“Using male C57BL/6J mice, we tested the hypothesis that nicotine exposure in adolescence leads to increased intravenous self‐administration (IVSA) of cocaine in adulthood.”

“Levine et al. now show that nicotine alters the brain to make it more susceptible to cocaine ’s addicting effects, and suggest that interfering with this reprogramming may rein in cocaine abuse.”

“ Nicotine primed the response to cocaine by enhancing its ability to induce transcriptional activation of the FosB gene through inhibition of histone deacetylase, which caused global histone acetylation in the striatum.”

“The finding that nicotine enhances the brain’s response to cocaine may explain how smoking acts as a gateway drug for this addictive stimulant.”

“We found that pretreatment of mice with nicotine increased the response to cocaine , as assessed by addiction-related behaviors and synaptic plasticity in the striatum, a brain region critical for addiction-related reward.”

“The resemblance between the nicotine discriminative stimulus and those of the psychomotor stimulant drugs amphetamine and cocaine contributes to defining the nature of the addictive properties of nicotine.”

“Thirdly, the quantities of cocaine or heroine taken by dependant persons are higher than the quantity of nicotine per cigarette, which makes an anti nicotine vaccine the easier vaccine project.”

“The magnitude of reinforcing effects of nicotine was judged to be lower than that of cocaine and other abused drugs by the progressive ratio schedule method although persistent self-administration behavior for nicotine was maintained under the second-order schedule with conditioned stimulus in monkeys.”

“As a result, studies with nicotine have the potential to contribute to our understanding of the neurobiology of addiction which cannot easily be explored using drugs, such as cocaine and amphetamine, which invariably increase dopamine overflow in the forebrain.”

“Co-application of nicotine and cocaine (1.5 μM) depressed the maximum response on the nicotine concentration-response curve without changing the EC50 value, suggesting a non-competitive mechanism.”