I stumbled on to an interesting article today. It's a Washington Times article from 2002, Nightmare of crack nicotine. What is crack nicotine?
...Farmers have been using nicotine sulfate insecticide since the early 1800s. To make it, all you do is boil tobacco leaves in water with a little sulfuric acid (the same acid as in a car battery).
If you mix the resultant nicotine sulfate extract with a common alkali like lime, then add a solvent such as ether, pure nicotine alkaloid - or free base "crack" nicotine - will float to the top dissolved in the solvent which is then evaporated off. A trivially simple procedure that anyone with a high school chemistry course can perform, it is the same process as making free-base cocaine from cocaine hydrochloride powder.
What is important about crack nicotine is that it is easy to make, highly addictive, and much cheaper than cigarettes.
There is an average of 2 milligrams of nicotine in one high nicotine cigarette. Total state and city taxes in New York City are now about $3 for a pack of 20 - a tax of 7.5 cents per milligram, or $75,000 per kilo of nicotine in cigarettes.
Three drums of nicotine sulfate extract would yield one drum, or 200 kilos, of crack nicotine. This could be manufactured at an average cost (ingredients, equipment, Third World labor) of less than $500. The tax-avoidance value ($75,000 a kilo) is 30,000 times that: $15 million for one drum of crack nicotine. That is a 3 million percent profit.
The article states that the taxes on 1 mg on nicotine is 7.5 cents, but the actual cost to the user for 1 mg of nicotine is 11.2 cents. Meanwhile, the much more potent "crack" nicotine can be manufactured for $2.50 per kilo.
What does all this mean? Well, the potential for an underground economy for nicotine is very real. In fact, it may already be in action. So, while law makers are driving cigarette prices higher and higher they may unintentionally be creating a far worse situation.
Nicotine is the most addictive drug on the planet, and not only is crack nicotine more addictive than cigarettes, it is far more dangerous.
Nicotine acts by stimulating the nicotinic cholinergic receptors located throughout the brain and body. If these receptors are mildly stimulated, such as via smoking tobacco leaves, there will be a sensation of heightened alertness, an improved capacity to focus and block out extraneous stimuli. Just as the high of crack cocaine is experienced more intensely by the addict than snorting coke powder, so will the high of crack nicotine be more intensely pleasurable to the tobacco addict than smoking tobacco leaves. But if the nicotinic cholinergic receptors are stimulated too strongly, one's brain and body will go into fatal convulsions.
I may have quit smoking, but I will never stop being an advocate of smokers' rights. If we keep driving up the prices on cigarettes we are going to send millions of users underground, with potentially deadly consequences. It is not the responsibility of smokers to carry everyone else on their shoulders.