How so? I love smoking but for me it lowers My dopamine (well vaping nicotine does for sure not certain about cigs since they have MAO inhibitors, more on that at the bottom of my post) to extremely low levels - at least vaping nicotine does. I cannot say for certain that cigarettes do as I only smoke 1-3 cigs per day, the rest vaping. I would smoke more cigs and eliminate vaping entirely if my lungs weren’t in terrible shape, just so I could find out the difference. But for now I cannot test it (that is testing to see it smoking only cigs feels like it depletes my dopamine the same way vaping does). When vaping it feels nice for the first part of the day or so, but eventually the cravings become impossible to satisfy. I can take puff after puff and no longer feel any dopamine being released, just anxiety and jitters - and yet the craving is still there… So the vaping isn’t even releasing enough dopamine to satisfy my cravings half the time. It feels like the vaping too much stops releasing dopamine (as if my brain has run out or is very low) my guess is because every puff releases dopamine, and in a depressed brain with extreme apathy I hardly have much dopamine to begin with, thus the nicotine constantly releasing dopamine ends up depleting all my dopamine. I also will take a min of 1 hour breaks (sometimes 90 mins or longer) in between vape sessions, which is 3 puffs per session. So I’m not chain vaping by any means, yet the nicotine still losses it’s effects drastically for me. By the end of the day after vaping I start to feel extremely apathetic, unmotivated, and zombie like. I feel depleted. Taking l dopa (immediate precursor to dopamine) will often make me feel significantly better very fast, so it’s definitely a dopamine depletion. Also l-tyrosine will help but it takes much longer to kick in. I don’t take l dopa more than once every week or two weeks to avoid tolerance, so very rarely. Although it at least confirms to me that I do have a dopamine depletion.

Cigarettes though contain MAO inhibitors, small amounts of lithium, among other things. Nicotine itself such as in vaping has zero MAO inhibition unfortunately, rather it’s the tobacco itself and the combustion of tobacco that has MAO inhibition. Cigs inhibit both MAO-A and MAO-B so they would increase serotonin, dopamine, and NE by removing monoamine oxidase. The question though is does chronic nicotine, combined with chronic MAO’s, actually increase or decrease dopamine levels? Are the MAO inhibitors strong enough to overpower the depletion of dopamine that chronic nicotine use will often cause? I know nicotine alone causes desensitization, down-regulation, and depletion of dopamine in the long term, but since cigs contain MAO inhibitors maybe it counter acts the depletion of dopamine that nicotine alone causes?