Legal action and new technologies are pointing towards a future where cigarettes may be far less addictive than they are today, the Boston Globe reported July 30.

If passed, Congressional legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight of tobacco products could lead to regulations requiring less-harmful cigarettes, such as reduced-nicotine products that could lower the potential for addiction. Meanwhile, a biotechnology firm in North Carolina is already growing low-nicotine tobacco.

Gregory N. Connolly of the Harvard School of Public Health predicted that FDA oversight of tobacco could lead to widespread sale of nonaddictive cigarettes within two decades. The theory goes that public health will improve if smokers consume less cigarettes because they're not addicted.

"The main harm from nicotine is the addiction part. The main health concerns come from the other parts of the smoke -- not to say that nicotine is totally benign," said researcher Neal L. Benowitz of the University of California at San Francisco.

Smokers typically ingest 1 to 2 milligrams of nicotine per cigarette, about one-tenth of the total nicotine in each cigarette. Researchers like Benowitz want to see ingestion reduced to less than one-tenth of a gram of nicotine per cigarette.

Some experiments have shown that smokers who replaced their regular cigarettes with reduced-nicotine versions didn't smoke more than they did before, and many quit smoking. Other studies, however, found that smokers rejected the "reduced-risk" versions, and plans have been dropped by Vector Tobacco to market a low-nicotine cigarette as a smoking-cessation device.

Siegel said that nicotine should be entirely eliminated from cigarettes. "To reduce [nicotine] actually would be harmful," he said. "That person is going to compensate by smoking more. The only benefit of reducing nicotine is to completely take it out." Others, however, say that nicotine levels should be maintained but other harmful chemicals removed from cigarettes.