Acute nicotine reinforcement requires ability to discriminate the stimulus effects of nicotine.

This review of research on behavioral discrimination of nicotine and how it informs public health policy for reducing risk of tobacco dependence is adapted from Kenneth A. Perkins's American Psychological Association Division 28 (Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse) 2020 Med Associates Brady/Schuster Award Lecture. The author's initial programmatic clinical research on nicotine is introduced, especially efforts to develop and validate a novel method of acute nicotine dosing. After the public health rationale for characterizing the discriminative stimulus effects of nicotine in humans are described, details from two separate programs of research on nicotine discrimination in humans are presented. The first, conducted with nicotine dosing by nasal spray, documented that humans could discriminate nicotine administered rapidly, examined nicotine's neuropharmacological specificity, identified discrimination threshold dose in smokers and nonsmokers, and explored other conditions that might alter ability to discriminate its effects. The second, more recent program focused on threshold doses for discrimination of nicotine by cigarette smoking, a program that was very difficult to do until the past decade, and how nicotine's self-reported "reward" and preference via choice behavior relate to its discriminability. Differences due to menthol and degree of tobacco dependence were also examined. For each of these two programs, the main findings of selected studies are noted, followed by very recent work on nicotine discrimination and choice that informs Food and Drug Administration's efforts to formulate public policy to improve health and reduce the nearly half million American deaths per year due to persistent tobacco use. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).