• By DEBRA LEMOINE
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Feb 9, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A person can become addicted to the nicotine in cigarettes and other tobacco products in as little as two months, but it can take as long as 10 years before the human brain ceases to crave the drug, according to an experimental psychologist who worked for Philip Morris in the early 1980s.

In his four years at Philip Morris, Victor DeNoble studied the effects of nicotine by experimenting on rats and dissecting human and monkey brains. DeNoble’s job, at the time, was to find a substance that was as addictive as nicotine but did not harm the heart like nicotine.

“My job was to create a cigarette that wouldn’t kill people,” DeNoble said.

DeNoble said he invented that cigarette. His employer decided not to develop it because it would have to admit that it lied for decades when it said tobacco wasn’t addictive and it would cost too much money to remove the 160 tobacco products already on the market, DeNoble said.

Rather than being hailed as the inventor of a “safe” cigarette, DeNoble was fired. His response was to steal top secret files that eventually became a part of the evidence that forced tobacco companies to admit that their products were addictive and deadly, DeNoble said.

In 1997, the tobacco companies settled lawsuits filed by various state governments, including Louisiana, for $370 billion.

Now a portion of that settlement money is routinely paid to DeNoble for tobacco prevention programs as he speaks to schools across the United States about the dangers of tobacco.

DeNoble spent last week in Louisiana speaking on college campuses from New Orleans to Natchitoches at tobacco preventative programs by the Communities of Color Network administered by Southern University’s Ag Center.

Among his experiments to test if nicotine is addictive, DeNoble hooked rats up to machines to receive nicotine directly to their brains.

One dose would paralyze the rats for 15 minutes, he said. After 15 days of daily doses of nicotine, the rats were no longer paralyzed by the drug.

“His brain got used to the nicotine,” DeNoble said.

Nicotine reaches the brain seven seconds after a person inhales a drag on a cigarette, DeNoble said. The brain is biologically designed to respond when it encounters such addictive drugs as nicotine.