Elsevier

Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Volume 81, Issue 2, 1 February 2006, Pages 197-204
Drug and Alcohol Dependence

Nicotine increases alcohol self-administration in non-dependent male smokers

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2005.06.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

Alcohol and tobacco are commonly co-administered, yet little is known about the effects of acute nicotine administration on alcohol consumption in humans. This study sought to determine how nicotine delivered by tobacco smoke influences alcohol intake in humans using a double-blind placebo controlled repeated measures design.

Methods

During two randomized 120 min sessions 15 male occasional smokers smoked four nicotine-containing or four denicotinized cigarettes at 30 min intervals. Throughout the session, subjects could earn units of their preferred alcoholic beverage and glasses of water using a progressive-ratio (PR) task.

Results

Wilcoxon signed-rank tests indicated that nicotine increased alcohol self-administration in a significant proportion of participants (P  0.03) without affecting water consumption (P  0.16). A two-way ANOVA supported this observation further, and, compared to denicotinized cigarettes, the nicotine-containing cigarettes increased PR breakpoints for alcohol but not water, as reflected by a Cigarette × Beverage interaction (P  0.055).

Conclusions

The present data suggest that acute nicotine administration increases alcohol consumption in at least a subset of smokers.

Introduction

The two most commonly abused substances in the general population, alcohol and nicotine, are frequently co-administered (e.g., Batel et al., 1995). The prevalence of tobacco smoking in alcoholics is thought to be as high as 90%, compared to less than 30% in the general population (e.g., Sobell et al., 1990, Romberger and Grant, 2004). Similarly, smokers are 50% more likely to drink regularly than adult non-smokers (Kozlowski and Ferrence, 1990). Some evidence suggests that these associations reflect an ability of ethanol and nicotine administration to increase motivation to obtain the other substance. In smokers, acute alcohol administration is consistently reported to increase cigarette self-administration (Griffiths et al., 1976, Mello et al., 1980, Keenan et al., 1990). In comparison, the converse association is less well understood. There are several reports that, in rodents, chronic or repeated nicotine administration increases alcohol consumption (Smith et al., 1999, Le et al., 2000, Le et al., 2003, Clark et al., 2001, Soderpalm et al., 2000), but this effect has not been uniformly replicated, and decreased alcohol self-administration has also been reported (Sharpe and Samson, 2002). Similarly, acute nicotine administration has been reported to increase (Gauvin et al., 1993), decrease (Nadal et al., 1998), and have no effect on alcohol intake (Nadal and Samson, 1999). Such inconsistent findings may be related to differences in doses, administration regimens, or rodent strains (Le, 2002). The contribution of these factors to the co-administration of nicotine and alcohol in humans remains unknown; to our knowledge, the effect of nicotine on alcohol self-administration in humans has yet to be determined. In a previous investigation acute cigarette smoking was found to increase alcohol related responding in male social drinkers (Perkins et al., 2000). However, because this study did not have a placebo smoking condition it was not possible to determine the extent to which the findings resulted from a pharmacological effect of nicotine.

In the present study, we sought to determine how nicotine delivered by tobacco smoke influences alcohol administration in humans using a double-blind placebo controlled repeated measures procedure, in which cigarettes made of nicotine-containing or denicotinized tobacco were smoked throughout the course of a drinking session. Since nicotine withdrawal may affect alcohol craving and consumption in dependent smokers (Palfai et al., 2000; see also Cooney et al., 2003, Colby et al., 2004), the present protocol examined non-dependent occasional smokers to avoid this potential confound.

Section snippets

Participants

Fifteen non-dependent male ‘occasional’ smokers (80% Caucasian) between the ages of 18 and 30 (mean = 22.3 ± 1.8) were recruited from the community through advertisements placed in local community newspapers and on university websites. All were medically healthy, free from current or previous mental illness including past or present substance use disorders (including nicotine dependence) as determined by a semi-structured clinical interview using DSM-IV criteria (First et al., 1995), and all scored

Alcohol and water self-administration

Because the behavioural PR data increase geometrically, the data were screened for normality. Using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov method, it was determined that each PR distribution was satisfactorily normal (P > 0.05) and this was confirmed through an inspection of the skewness and kurtosis of each variable (all absolute values < 2). To screen for outliers, Z-scores were calculated on the relative difference scores for PR responding in the two conditions (nicotine–denicotinized) and no outliers were

Discussion

In this study, nicotine administration via tobacco smoke increased alcohol consumption in a significant majority of the participants. While these findings are consistent with data demonstrating increased overall levels of alcohol consumption among smokers (e.g., Batel et al., 1995), to our knowledge this is the first placebo-controlled study to demonstration that nicotine acutely increases alcohol ingestion in humans.

Although the present study did not directly assess the mechanisms underlying

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an operating grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to R.O.P. and M.L. M.L. is the recipient of a salary award from the Fonds de la Recherche en Santé du Québec.

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