nicotine --7/23/25

23 Jul 2025

nicotine --7/23/25

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Today's selection--from The Most Delicious Poison by Noah Whiteman. The history of nicotine.

“Nicotine is an even more potent natural insecticide than caffeine, protecting tobacco plants from herbivore attack. The first study on its use as an insecticide was published in 1916 by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“So potent is nicotine as a neurotoxin that a disease called green tobacco sickness once ran rampant in tobacco harvester workers. Symptoms include headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and prostration on the ground. In a study in North Carolina, researchers found that nicotine was present at high concentration in the morning dew on the tobacco leaves and was probably directly absorbed into the skin of the workers.

“More recently, scientists have developed so-called neonicotinoids, synthetic insecticides that use the nicotine molecule as foundation. These neonicotinoids are problematic because they can harm not just crop pests but also nontarget insects, like bees, that interact with the plants. What's more, bees can become ‘addicted’ to nectar containing these neonicotinoids, much like the bees that are more faithful to flowers with nicotine in their nectar. Ultimately, researchers have shown that for bumblebees, neonicotinoid exposure makes them poorer caretakers and nurses of the bees that they are rearing back at the nest.

“Yet, as you may have guessed, there are some herbivorous insects that have evolved to become specialized on tobacco plants. Among the most familiar to many people is probably the tobacco hornworm, which attacks tomato, tobacco, and sacred datura plants-all members of the Solana ceae family.

“Not only has the tobacco hornworm evolved mechanisms for coping with nicotine, but it also uses the toxin as a defense against predatory spiders. In Utah, Pavan Kumar and colleagues found that tobacco horn worms that attack coyote tobacco use an enzyme called CYP6B46 to transport the nicotine from their gut to the blood. From the blood, nicotine is released into the air through the caterpillar's spiracles, the breathing holes that dot the sides of its body. The volatile nicotine concentrations released by the spiracles are high enough to reduce spider attack rates.The researchers who discovered the smoker's breath of the tobacco hornworm coined the term defensive halitosis. Anybody who has kissed a smoker knows how unpleasant the experience can be, all things considered, and spiders apparently feel the same about their own close encounters of the tobacco hornworm kind!

Nicotiana suaveolens, sometimes used in central Australia as the active ingredient in pituri.

“If this weren't enough, the nicotine in the blood of the hornworm ends up harming the larvae of parasitoid wasps that hatch inside the bodies of the hornworms. In the breath and in the blood of tobacco hornworms, nicotine serves as a chemical defense from free-living enemies and the enemies within.

“Human use of tobacco began as early as 12,300 years ago, according to recent evidence unearthed from Utah, a few hours' drive north of where the tobacco hornworms that repelled the spiders were studied. Previously, the oldest evidence of tobacco use by Indigenous peoples of the Americas came from pipe residues dating to around 3,300 years ago. As scientists did with ‘Sid’ the Neanderthal, researchers can recover nicotine from the tar tar of human teeth discovered in the archaeological record. Tartar from both an Indigenous woman buried around 630 years ago and a man buried 420 years ago not far from where I live in what is now Oakland was positive for nicotine.

“The hair of a baby who died 2,400 years ago in the highlands of the Atacama Desert of Chile was also found to contain nicotine. Remarkably, the researchers determined that the nicotine came through the placenta rather than from the mother's milk because they were able to look at its deposition as the hair grew in utero. This passive consumer may have been born addicted to nicotine, although the researchers speculate that given the high levels of nicotine found in the mother, she may have miscarried. Such high levels also suggest that the mother was a tobacco shaman.

“Independently, tobacco in the form of pituri—a mixture of tobacco leaves and a specially prepared ash—has been used for millennia by Aboriginal Australians living primarily in central Australia. Pituri is still used today in Australia, especially as a quid, although it is also smoked. When chewed, the leaves are mixed with ash and rolled by the tongue into the buccal cavity between the cheek and gum to release the nicotine and related nornicotine.

“A variety of tobacco species, including members of the Nicotiana genus and, more importantly, the related plant Duboisia hopwoodii, from the Sola-naceae family, are used in pituri preparations.

“Pituri is traditionally used as a stimulant, as a trance-inducing drug as it was in the Americas, and to stave off hunger on long treks. There is even a report of pituri being used to poison prey, as noted in this 1899 account, although the veracity of the description has not been substantiated: "Leaves of the pituri plant (Duboisia Hopwoodii) are used to stupefy the emu. The plan ... is to make a decoction in some small waterhole at which the animal is accustomed to drink. After drinking the water the bird becomes stupefied, and easily falls a prey to the ... spear.’ Pituri was valuable in trade, was bartered across Aboriginal trade routes, and was a potent status symbol.

“Remarkably, humans employed nicotine completely independently in both Australia and the Americas for thousands of years for a variety of practical and spiritual purposes. This convergent cultural evolution occurs for many other psychoactive chemicals, including ethanol, cardiac glycosides, and, as we will soon see, alkaloids found in water lilies. Like the many distantly related animals (monarch butterflies and milkweed beetles, for example) that concurrently evolved to attack the same toxic plants, distantly related human societies do the same.”