Can nicotine help smokers quit? The answer, the result of more than a decade of experiments with 4,000 smokers in a half-dozen countries, is yes. Nicotine, the poison found only in tobacco, can indeed help smokers kick their habit. Mixed with chemicals in a chewing gum base, and sold under their trade name Nicorette, it is the first drug approved by the FDA as both a safe and effective aid in smoking-cessation programs.

The gum, which in the United States contains two milligrams of nicotine, has been available in drugstores here, by prescription, since March. Sold in 13 other countries as a prescription medicine in varying strengths, and in Switzerland as an over-the-counter product, nicotine gum has been used by 1.2 million smokers since 1978.

Cigarette smoking is now officially identified as an addiction or dependence by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychologist Lynn T. Kozlowsky of Canada's Addiction Research Foundation. Nicorette is the only pharmaceutical product that has produced substantial evidence of helping smokers stop.

The cigarette habit, perhaps the most tenacious of all drug addictions, traps the smoker in a triangle: one side is social, linked with work, play, meals; one side is emotional, deeply involved with love, hate, fear, stress; both are locked into, and reinforced by the often irresistible need for nicotine.

Nicorette gum can help smokers quit by breaking open one side of the triangle, providing smokeless nicotine that is quickly absorbed into the blood via the mucous membrane of the mouth. Thus, smokers can get their drug without inhaling tar and its cancer-causing chemicals, without breathing in carbon dioxide (thought to be involved in cardiovascular disease), and without ingesting other poison gases that attack the lungs.

Since nicotine is a powerful poison—60 mg. in the blood can kill an adult by paralyzing breathing—how can it be safe in a chewing gum? The answer is that it's delivered in such tiny doses.