Quantitative analysis of nicotine content in commercially available brands of cigarettes

Cigarette smoking continues to plague the modern generation with severe health problems, mostly arising from nicotine. With some leading cigarette brands reportedly increasing the nicotine content on an annual basis, the need for a highly selective extraction and quantification method of nicotine from cigarette tobacco appears critically important. We have developed a method for quantitative analysis of nicotine in cigarettes which is simple yet highly selective for nicotine. We found the nicotine content in three leading cigarette brands viz Marlboro Golden Yellow, Sonoma regular and Camel regular to be 1.7, 1.31 and 0.61 mg per cigarette respectively