I quit quitting being a quitter... for now.

I will spend time with my family soon (later today). That means no cigarettes for a while. So I want to get my nicotine fix elsewhere: probably through a gum or lozenge medium. But I'm not a heavy smoker, so I don't want to try out a method and go completely insane for two days because of nic-overload. This is not a huge problem, right? I just have to figure out how many mg's of nicotine I inhale in a day, and try to approximate that with my alternative nicotine substance. Example: If I inhale about 10 mg nicotine in a day, and there is a 2 mg lozenge, I'll need about 5 of them a day, right?

Right. It's not a trick question. That's what I'll need. Hell, I can probably get away with fewer than that, since the lozenge or gum probably has more nicotine in it than one cigarette. But how do I know how much nicotine is in a cigarette? Wikipedia, depressingly, was useless in this capacity; they have a lot of information about cigarettes, and a lot of information about nicotine, but they barely even mention the fact that the one contains the other. Actual amounts are not mentioned.

So I headed over to ask.com, and posed my question. I got a link to a report to the Federal Trade Commission, which said that low-end tar cigarettes (notice: tar is not nicotine) have around .1 - .2 mg of nicotine, and high-end tar cigarettes have about 1.7 - 2 mg. So I'm assuming that I'm middle of the road, and I get about 1 mg of nicotine per cigarette. So I looked up lozenges (I'm not much of a gum chewer), and on the Commit website, it didn't ask me how much I smoked under the "Dosing" tab. It only asked whether I usually smoked within a half-hour of waking, and told me what to buy based on that. Nothing about how often I smoked, or which brand/strength, or whether I coupled it with other activities. "Smoke within 30 minutes of waking up? You need the heavy dose!" That's it.

So here we have a highly addictive substance, available over the counter, with little information about typical use and dosing, which we are allowing people to buy for self-medication. Am I the only one who thinks that this is incredibly dangerous? When the patch first came out, you needed a doctor's prescription to get it. Now, I don't even know if you have to be eighteen (or whether you should be) to buy quitting aids. I can't find information about appropriate dosing (size or timing) to counter my cigarette cravings. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to publish this information; someone already did a study about the nicotine in cigarettes (1206 varieties!). Why can't we examine real-world use of nicotine, and base the use of nicotine replacements on that? Stupid addiction.