Nicotine during rat youth primes brain for harder drugs
From Atlanta, at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
The addictive ingredient in those cigarettes in the schoolyard could prep the brain for reliance on illicit drugs, say researchers working with adolescent rats.
Previous studies have suggested that teenagers who smoke cigarettes are more likely to progress to drugs such as marijuana or cocaine than are teens who never smoke. However, researchers haven’t directly tested whether cigarettes themselves might be responsible for this effect.