Smokers who have trouble quitting because they long for the act of smoking rather than the nicotine addiction that captures most many soon have another aid to help them kick the habit--a newly developed, low-nicotine cigarette.
Bitten by the smoking bug, seniors Jessica Rosario and Brian Barrera lounged outside on the Flowers Building steps last week to take a short afternoon smoking break.
Two obvious culprits for why they've become "steady smokers" are nearly immediately found: the nicotine and the habit of smoking itself. Rosario, who has been smoking steadily for two years, has recently switched from light cigarettes to ultralights which contain less nicotine, in the hopes of quitting before she graduates from Duke. "But now I smoke more than I used to, just to feel the same effects as before," she confessed.
Barrera considers himself "more of a realist" when it comes to quitting smoking. "It's not the nicotine, it's just the habit," he said. Barrera began as a social smoker a couple years ago and now smokes regularly.
Rosario and Barrera are only two of the 50 million people in the United States who continue to smoke, despite the heavy anti-smoking public service announcement campaigns.
Nonetheless, researchers like Dr. Jed Rose, Director of the Nicotine Research Center, are trying their best to fight this smoking trend.
"The U.S. has been on the vanguard of acknowledging the health effects of smoking, but that public health message has yet to permeate," Rose said.
Nestled in a tiny office off East Campus in Erwin Square, Rose and his colleagues have been working on ways to help smokers quit smoking for years. Most well-known for his work on inventing the nicotine patch, Rose is now involved in a smoking cessation treatment project that involves weaning smokers off nicotine without forcing them to immediately break the habit of smoking cigarettes.
In a study using cigarettes containing less nicotine, Rose found that people were able to quit smoking in four weeks without the withdrawal symptoms common to smokers trying to quit.
Although Rose admits that De-Nics--the brand name of the modified cigarette--"do not taste quite like conventional cigarettes," they are successfully similar enough to get smokers to switch onto them. De-Nics, designed by the smallest major cigarette vendor, Vector Group Ltd., are made of genetically modified tobacco with nicotine levels ranging from 0.6 mg to mere trace amounts. Conventional cigarettes contain about 1 mg of nicotine each.
The smoking cessation treatment study is not only interested in De-Nics as a stand alone technique, Rose said, but also as a compliment to medications that can reduce the nicotine cravings.
"By addressing both the behavioral and pharmacological drug aspects of smoking, combination treatments can be even more effective," he said.
In spite of the Nicotine Research Center's promising research, Rose has found himself unable to secure the same kind of funding as he used to in the past.
Since he came to Duke in 1989 to become director of the NRC from the University of California at Los Angeles through the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Rose has been jointly funded by the School of Medicine and the VA. Over the next few months, however, the NRC will fall exclusively under Duke and no longer be associated with the VA.
Rose said the reason for the shift in association was because none of the grants funded by the VA for current NRC research were renewed. Dr. Ross McKinney, vice dean of research for the School of Medicine, noted that it is the normal natural history of research to move between funding sources over time.
"In general the VA system is re-focusing and re-prioritizing their research, and Duke will be flexible in response to those changes," he wrote in an e-mail.
The VA is more interested in funding veteran-specific research whereas the NRC smoking cessation project involves larger populations of participants that are not necessarily veterans, Rose explained. Rose was also quick to point out that the VA funding decisions are not made locally, but in Washington, D.C.
"The local VA administration has always been extremely supportive of our work," he said. "Washington has set as a priority the studying of VA patients. For the kind of large-scale trials we are involved in, we've not been able to recruit enough VA patients to do the kinds of studies that we do."
Larry Freeman, a former administrative officer in the VA's research division and currently the administrative director of the Human Vaccine Institute, also noted that the funding atmosphere in Washington is changing funding levels for research but he is optimistic about Rose's future funding.
"He's been funded well and I think he'll continue to be funded well--with or without the VA," Freeman said.
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