Anyone walking through Brown’s campus may smell wafts of cigarette smoke — a sign of the prevalence of cigarette use on college campuses. At Brown, students might be seen smoking a cigarette in between classes or on the weekends at parties.
But what is the science behind the phenomenon of cigarette use in college students?
Jasjit Ahluwalia, a professor of behavioral and social sciences and medicine, noted that some college students approach smoking casually, treating “nicotine sort of like caffeine.”
He said that nicotine is a recreational drug for many smokers who might enjoy a specific aspect of smoking a cigarette or the habit of having one at a set time in the day.
“Some ex-smokers will say, ‘Oh my God, if I smelled it, it brings back memories, and I want to smoke again,’” Ahluwalia said.
But when smoking becomes too frequent in or crucial to an individual’s life, it can be a sign that that person is smoking as a way of “masking or self-treating” underlying mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, according to Ahluwalia.
When a person smokes, nicotine enters the body and binds to nicotinic receptors located primarily in the brain, Ahluwalia explained. This binding causes neurons in the brain’s ventral tegmental area to release noradrenergic, or “feel-good,” neurotransmitters. Some of these chemicals include dopamine and serotonin.
Because cigarettes affect serotonin, they are “ultimately doing the same thing” physiologically as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants, or SSRIs, Ahluwalia said. Cigarette use does have some potential health benefits, Ahluwalia noted. Researchers have found that smoking cigarettes may increase individuals’ awareness, improve efficiency with repetitive tasks, potentially slow or treat the onset of dementia and combat gastrointestinal diseases like Crohn’s Disease or inflammatory bowel disease.
But Suzanne Colby, the deputy director of Brown’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies and a professor of behavioral and social sciences, pointed out that the drawbacks of nicotine addiction counteract the potential upsides of the drug.
Nicotine’s “main role in tobacco products is to cause addiction,” she said in an interview with The Herald.
When one experiences withdrawal, focusing becomes more difficult, diminishing concentration and efficiency. Furthermore, addiction exacerbates anxiety and depression, which Colby said is concerning for college-age students, who “have a higher prevalence of mental health challenges … than the general population.”
When an individual consumes more nicotine, more nicotinic receptors are created in the brain so that the body can process more of the drug, Colby explained. This upregulation builds an irreversible tolerance to nicotine, and even after an individual stops smoking, those receptors remain in the brain.
Addiction also begins “really quickly,” Colby said. Fewer than 100 cigarettes can be enough to trigger the process, and “people tend to start smoking at younger ages.”
“We’ve definitely made a lot of progress” on youth cigarette use, Colby said, noting there has not been “an uptick” in usage in younger populations. But she also raised concerns about “an attempt to re-glamorize or re-popularize smoking.”
“There’s so much on social media, and it’s just a new landscape of influence on young people to have things like ‘cig-fluencers’ online,” she said.
According to Colby, normalized smoking in television and movies, nicotine product advertisements and social media might prompt younger audiences to try a cigarette for the first time.
“There’s something called generational forgetting, where a younger generation will kind of forget what it was like to have so many people who smoked and so many people who were ill from smoking and so many people who died from smoking,” Colby said. “Because of that generational forgetting, they might be lured into starting smoking.”
Smoking among college-age students is at an all-time low, Colby said.
Associate Dean for Research Jennifer Tidey, who is also a professor of behavioral and social sciences and psychiatry and human behavior, noted that smoking is “decreasing steadily.” She also said that college students tend to smoke “intermittently,” as opposed to “pack-a-day smokers.”
According to The Herald’s First-Year Poll, 15% of incoming students in the class of 2029 used nicotine before coming to Brown.
“If you don’t use nicotine, don’t start,” Alhuwalia said. “If you smoke cigarettes or other combustible tobacco, the single best thing you can do is to quit” or switch to “nicotine pouches as your first choice and e-cigarettes as your second choice.”
