What Makes Smoking So Terribly Addictive

Researchers have explained how nicotine exploits the body's cellular machinery and promotes addiction. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nicotine activates receptors known as nAChRs and, remarkably, unlike most other drugs of abuse, it acts as a "pharmacological chaperone" to stabilize assembly of its receptors within the Endoplasmic Reticulum (ER) and increase their abundance at the cell surface (up-regulation). Up-regulation ...