I know the obvious reason would be that companies want to hook their customers to the addictive element of the product, but I imagine a lot of people would still purchase a non-addictive (or at least less-addictive) alternative.
Wouldnāt nicotine-free tobacco have all of the health risks, without any of the stimulant benefits?
It sounds like trying to deal with alcoholics who poison themselves drinking denatured alcohol, by removing the alcohol from denatured alcohol and just selling the poison additives to them directly.
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Or drinking non-alcoholic beer. Or decaf coffee.
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Of course, non-alcoholic beer and decaf coffees are unlikely to give you lung, esophageal, or mouth cancers.
I canāt imagine there being many people that would want to inhale smoke into their lungs without getting anything out of it. I have never been a smoker but the few times I have smoked tobacco the nicotine rush was incredible. I can imagine how easy it would be to get addicted to this.
Without any ārewardā or benefit whatās the point of purposefully inhaling smoke into your lungs?
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The burnable leaf would have to survive the extraction process (and I cannot imagine this happening, or think of an analogous process from which a comparable mateiral to shreded tobacco leaf comes out the other end), or alternately someone would have to find/breed/engineer one without nicotinoids in it (and thatās a lot of work)? Thatās what i can come up with for why not. Impractical.
Itās much more important to get rid of the products of combustion, which are the really nasty carcinogens and probably the source of the second, possibly more massively addictive chemical, the MAOI.
The current best research says nicotine isolate is not terribly addictive; when people who have never smoked wear patches or chew the gum or drink hangover cures, withdrawal is light or even unnoticed. It appears the bigger issue is the combination of the MAOI and nicotine, with the MAOI being the greater contributor, since people who take MAOIs for other conditions have issues withdrawing from those, too. (This study is small, but is consistent with observed behavior on controlled populations of smokers - usually people with schizophrenia living in group homes; thereās a massive link between schizophrenia and smoking as a form of self-medication. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC19495/)
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See, I had a different result. Iād never smoked a puff in my life, and when I was 40 I decided to smoke a cigarette just to find out why anyone would do it twice. It was a filtered Camel, and I smoked it down almost to the filter, and other than mild lightheadedness at the end, I could discern no noticeable effect whatsoever. I still donāt get it.
Maybe thereās a stronger brand I should have tried.
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Well, cigar smokers donāt even inhale generally. Iām not sure all (tobacco) pipe smokers do either. Not to say they donāt get the nicotine buzz from itā¦?
Drinking beer is fun. Drinking coffee is nice. Smoking a cigar is fun. I would do all of these things occasionally with their non-intoxicating versions. (Although NA beer is not tasty, and decaf is less tasty)
Thereās hebal cigarettes. They donāt have tobacco in them generally. And thereās also brands like Djarum clove cigarettes that have a lot less tobacco in them (1/3 tobacco 2/3 cloves and they practically taste like candy/bubblegum/christmas depending on context)
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Serious question ā did you actually inhale?
Thereās also of course the very real possibility that youāre just not sensitive to nicotine or need a much higher amount to āfeelā anything than a typical person. Iām definitely that way with many drugs (recreational and otherwise). Itās part of the reason that I donāt do drugs ā itās way too hard for me to gauge how much I actually need so I end up overdoing it and suffering because of it.
Iām not trying to be the fun police and I agree that activities like smoking cigars, drinking beer, and coffee can be fun. I just donāt see the point in nicotine free cigarettes. So, to @anon75430791ās points about smoking cigars and not inhaling, whatās to stop you from just smoking a regular nicotine cigarette and not inhaling if youāre doing it truly for the āfunā aspect of it? I certainly did this more than once when trying to look cool as a youngling.
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Heh. Yes, I did. I rather expected to dissolve into a fit of coughing, but somehow I didnāt even feel that urge very strongly. I expect I would have felt differently when I was a 140 lb teenager, but after 40 years of L.A. smog, engine exhaust, paint fumes, and god knows how many secondhand contaminants, maybe my lungs are too fucked already to notice.
Iāve never been drunk either, mostly because Iāve never found an alcoholic drink that tastes good enough for me to finish more than one. Again, when I was a scrawny teenager, one strong drink might have given me a buzz I could notice (maybe?), but now that I weigh well in excess of two bills, I canāt be bothered to drink enough to feel it.
No biggie, though. I never felt like I was missing anything.
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I think with cigars and pipes, you do take the smoke into the mouth (and can absorb the nicotine that way); you just donāt inhale all the way into the lungs.
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Is there anyone who actually smokes just for the flavor?
Iāve seen people enjoy rum raisin and coffee-flavored ice cream without the drug benefits but to my knowledge Ben & Jerry never tried to bring āTotally Tobacco!ā to market.
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(Shudder)
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At the same time, Iāve never seen ice cream flavored cigarettes.
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Itās anecdotal, but a recurring ājokeā is that smoking (was, see UK law) an informal symptom of long term mental health issues generally - due to needing something to do while mostly homebound (domestically or institutionally.)
More generally, here in the UK perspective, it was the smoke allergy and second-hand smoke effects that were drivers for the indoors ban. _(Especially including a famous beloved entertainer dying painfully of lung cancer despite never smoking, but because of the pubs and clubs he worked in all his life.)_
Iām not sure that much of if any of that is due to the nicotine content, and while the US certainly doesnāt have the same laws as we do, the same public health effects would certainly still exist, and be a practical issue. (This from the perspective of looking at why this would not be a good thing, of course - as the OP alludes, non-addictive is a positive for instance, and the are possible uses in quitting smoking, and the muscle/action habit is the same. 
)
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Why? Because the tobacco industryās mission statement includes this: āā¦ weāre in the nicotine delivery business.ā
Thatās their entire raison dāetre.
I wouldnāt bet against a clever solvent extraction prior to drying; but even if that problem were solvable the excercise wouldnāt be any less perverse. Tobacco is sort of an oddball in that the drug part(while crazy addictive) is markedly less dangerous than the delivery mechanism. People drinking non-alcoholic beer or mocktails are skipping the relatively dangerous ingredient. Somebody using de-nicotinized tobacco is getting most of the cancer without the perks.
You might as well go hunting for drug-free dirty needles.
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Lots of people vape liquids with no nicotine, so itās a thing. I donāt understand why they do it, though.
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