If you’ve so much as walked through a convenience store lately, you’ve probably seen all the different types of tobacco products that are on the market these days. There are regular cigarettes, light cigarettes, and menthol cigarettes. Cigars and cigarillos. Electronic cigarettes and vaping devices. Even hookahs are being used for non-marijuana smoking. If you were thinking about starting – which you definitely should not – it would be hard to know where to begin. Here’s one that you might not have heard of, though – nicotine salts.
Nicotine salt sounds like something you might snort or inject, the way you do other crystalized drugs like meth and MDMA. Actually, nicotine salts still come in a liquid form, and you’ve probably even heard of the most popular brand that sells them – JUUL. Here’s what they are. In tobacco leaves, nicotine occurs in two forms, deprotonated and monoprotonated. For our purposes here, it’s the deprotonated nicotine that’s important. It’s a bit of a complicated explanation, but essentially a base chemical, or one that is negatively charged, like ammonia, will take a neutron from a positively charged nicotine carboxylic acid salt and become neutral, making it deprotonated or “free.” Free nicotine is more volatile and more potent, because it crosses the blood-brain barrier more quickly.
It was actually the cigarette maker Phillip Morris that first thought to add ammonia to its tobacco products. Nicotine is a base, and when its molecules take on a positive charge, they become what are known as ions, which are less likely to vaporize and don’t move across membranes in the body very effectively. Phillip Morris realized that turning nicotine into a deprotonated or free form would make it more potent and more addictive, which would lead to them selling more cigarettes. Today, all nicotine is 100% deprotonated, or stripped of all its neutrons. As it turns out, this also makes it more soluble, or able to be dissolved.
So, if tobacco companies spent all that time and money researching how to “improve” nicotine, why would the popularity of the salts make a comeback? Now, on to vaping. Vape liquids are available at different nicotine strengths, but generally not anything above 24 mg (cigarettes have 8.4 mg). Nicotine is acidic, and therefore hard on the throat, so having too much of it in a product would make it painful for the user. The JUUL salt pods, however, have around 59 mg of nicotine and are relatively smooth to smoke. The manufacturers used benzoic acid to bond to the nicotine when making their patented salt formula, which turned out to allow maximum concentration of nicotine in the blood. It also lowered the pH value of the vapor, which is what makes it smooth.
You should keep in mind that these higher concentrations of nicotine make products like JUUL even more addictive. Also, the effects of benzoic acid are still being tested, and we don’t know what their long-term harm might be.
If you or a loved one need help with quitting drugs or alcohol, consider Asana Recovery. We offer medical detox, along with both residential and outpatient programs, and you’ll be supervised by a highly trained staff of medical professionals, counselors, and therapists. Call us any time at (949) 438-4504 to get started.
