...or at least what my 10 years experience with nicotine would indicate.

It stimulates mental activity when you're dosed up, but it has a corresponding valley on the other side of that. Then you need more nicotine. If you want to get off the drug, then you go into that valley of diminished mental activity and decreased functional intelligence and memory for a year or so, depending on the level of addiction, while your brain rebuilds its normal regulatory mechanisms.

My general hindsight on that personally isn't that I was more or less intelligent on nicotine, but that the nicotine high made it much easier to maintain a "full of shit" state - making poorly thought out statements with ease, while the reflective states that might have led to more effective self-awareness were mostly lost in the roller-coaster of the addiction.

are smokers. Some say that it's a method of self-medication; the nicotine helps them focus better and think more clearly. I don't know if there's anything to it, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

...and in many cases I would say its not. In the original comparison to heroin - it certainly destroys lives, but it originated from a painkiller that had (and has) some valid applications.

And that doesn't necessarily mean I think it should only be doled out by Pharma.

They've been selling snus in Europe for many years and now Marlboro and Camel are making them. The cancer rate of people who use them is low. I guess if it is determined that nicotine is useful in this way, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma would both stand to make some profits.

Organic Cigarettes, a little Vodka... voila, low cost effective medicine.