Nicotine Trivia
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48 free Nicotine trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Nicotine is one of the most-used drugs on Earth, and one of the most misunderstood. This nicotine trivia quiz covers the science and the story: the German chemists who first isolated it in 1828, the French ambassador it was named after, how it reaches the brain in seconds, why it is a stimulant at low doses and a sedative at high ones, and how much of it hides in a cigarette, a tomato or a bottle of vape liquid. The questions also cover the products and the rules: nicotine gum, patches and varenicline, snus and nicotine pouches, e-cigarettes from Herbert Gilbert's 1963 patent to Hon Lik, and nicotine's long career as an insecticide that gave rise to the neonicotinoids and their bee problem. Difficulty runs from easy (which plant family tobacco belongs to) to expert (which cytochrome P450 enzyme does most of the metabolising). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on nicotine, tobacco, nicotine replacement therapy and related topics, and each question links to its source. It suits science students, pub quizzers and anyone who has ever tried to quit. Try our Caffeine and Human Body quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nicotine is an alkaloid found mainly in which group of plants?
Nightshades
Nightshades are a family of chemical specialists: tobacco's relatives include deadly nightshade, which yields atropine, yet the same family also gives us the potato and the aubergine.
Q 02Besides tobacco, which common salad ingredient naturally contains trace amounts of nicotine?
Tomato
Tomato plants are close cousins of tobacco, so they make a little nicotine too. The dose is tiny: a kilogram of fresh tomatoes holds only a few millionths of a gram.
Q 03Tobacco leaves are loaded with nicotine, but in which part of the plant is it actually made?
The roots
The roots make it and the sap carries it up to the leaves. Graft another plant's shoot onto tobacco roots and its leaves fill with nicotine, while a tobacco shoot on foreign roots gets none.
Q 04Smokers are markedly less likely to develop which brain disease, a puzzle some researchers credit to nicotine?
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease is rarer among smokers, and nicotine may shield the brain cells it destroys. A rival view is that people in its earliest, hidden stage simply find quitting easier.
Q 05In 1994, seven tobacco company chiefs told the US Congress under oath that they believed nicotine was what?
Not addictive
Not addictive, each of the seven said in turn. Four years later the four biggest firms agreed to pay 46 states some $206 billion towards the cost of treating sick smokers.
Q 06The body's 'nicotinic' receptors are named after nicotine, but which natural messenger are they built to detect?
Acetylcholine
Acetylcholine is the body's own key to these receptors. They took nicotine's name because it binds to them but not to the other acetylcholine receptors, which are named after a mushroom toxin, muscarine.
Q 07How quickly does inhaled nicotine reach the brain?
10-20 seconds
10-20 seconds is all it takes, which is faster than an injection into a vein. That speed is a big part of why a cigarette hooks people so much more readily than a slow-release patch.
Q 08About how long does the body take to clear half a dose of nicotine?
Around two hours
Around two hours is the usual figure, so blood levels sink quickly between cigarettes. The body turns most of the drug into a by-product that lingers for the best part of a day.
Q 09Which breakdown product of nicotine do blood, urine and saliva tests look for as proof of tobacco use?
Cotinine
Cotinine outlasts nicotine in the body by many hours, so it also shows up in non-smokers who have breathed other people's smoke. Its name is simply an anagram of 'nicotine'.
Q 10Which cigarette flavouring slows the body's breakdown of nicotine, keeping it in the blood longer?
Menthol
Menthol partly blocks CYP2A6, the enzyme that clears most nicotine. In a crossover study the same smokers broke the drug down more slowly on menthol cigarettes than on plain ones.
Q 11Nicotine is a stimulant, yet smokers commonly say that a cigarette brings them which effect?
Relaxation
Relaxation and alertness from one drug is known as Nesbitt's paradox. One explanation is that the calm is mostly relief, as the cigarette ends the irritability that has built up since the last one.
Q 12Which B vitamin got a new name in the 1940s because 'nicotinic acid' sounded too much like nicotine?
Niacin
Niacin was coined from the first syllables of 'nicotinic acid' after a scare that linked vitamin-enriched bread to tobacco. Chemists had originally made the vitamin by oxidising nicotine.
Q 13Nicotine's release of which neurotransmitter in the mesolimbic pathway drives its reinforcing effect?
Dopamine
Q 21Nicotine gum is contraindicated for people with disease of which part of the body?
The temporomandibular joint
The temporomandibular joint is the hinge of the jaw, and the steady chewing can aggravate a disorder there. Users are told to chew slowly and then 'park' the gum against the cheek.
Q 22The quit-smoking drug varenicline was developed from analogues of which plant alkaloid?
Cytisine
Cytisine comes from laburnum seeds and has been sold in Bulgaria as the quit-smoking pill Tabex since 1964. Decades later, Pfizer's chemists took it as their starting point.
Q 23Under which brand name did Pfizer launch varenicline in the United States in 2006?
Chantix
Dopamine is the brain's reward signal. Paradoxically, nicotine is a weak reinforcer in animal tests next to other addictive drugs, and users feel little euphoria, yet the habit is famously hard to break.
Q 14A landmark 1988 US Surgeon General's report said nicotine addiction works like addiction to heroin and which other drug?
Cocaine
Cocaine was the other comparison. It was a sharp turn from the famous 1964 report on smoking, which had classed cigarettes as a habit and stopped short of calling them an addiction.
Q 15Nicotine hooks smokers, but which other part of cigarette smoke did researcher Michael Russell say they 'die from'?
Tar
Tar carries most of the cancer-causing chemicals in smoke. 'People smoke for nicotine, but they die from the tar,' Russell said, and nicotine itself is still not classed as a carcinogen.
Q 16Nicotine withdrawal symptoms typically peak within what period?
One to three days
One to three days in is when the irritability, anxiety and cravings are usually at their worst. They then fade over a few weeks, a far shorter ordeal than withdrawal from some other drugs.
Q 17Many smokers gain weight after quitting, partly because nicotine had been suppressing what?
Their appetite
Their appetite: nicotine switches on neurons in the hypothalamus that tell the body it has eaten enough. It also makes the body burn slightly more energy, so quitting removes both brakes at once.
Q 18Which nicotine replacement product was the first to win US approval, in 1984?
Gum
Gum came first, in 1984, but only on prescription, and the patch followed in 1991. It took until 1996 for regulators to accept the makers' case that cigarettes, after all, needed no prescription.
Q 19Nicotine gum grew out of the observation that which workers swapped cigarettes for chewing tobacco on duty?
Submarine crews
Submarine crews could not light up on patrol, and Swedish researchers noticed how easily they switched to chewing tobacco. That prompted the chemist Ove Fernö to put nicotine into a gum.
Q 20Unusually for a plant drug, nicotine contains no oxygen: it is built from carbon, hydrogen and which other element?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen completes the formula, C10H14N2. In the body one of those nitrogen atoms picks up a positive charge, and that charged form is what lets nicotine grip the brain receptors behind addiction so tightly.
Chantix is the American name, while the same pill is Champix elsewhere. It only partly switches on the brain's nicotine receptors, easing cravings while blunting the reward from any cigarette smoked.
Q 24Nicotine is named after Nicotiana tabacum, which in turn honours a French ambassador to which country?
Portugal
Portugal is where Jean Nicot met the plant, while serving in Lisbon around 1560. He is said to have recommended its powdered leaf to the queen mother, Catherine de' Medici, as a headache remedy.
Q 25Jean Nicot, who gave nicotine its name, also compiled one of the first French examples of which kind of book?
Dictionary
Dictionary: his Thresor de la langue françoyse, printed in 1606, is counted among the first dictionaries of French. He compiled it in retirement on the estate he was given for his service at court.
Q 26Smoking tobacco was once believed in Europe to ward off which disease in particular?
The plague
The plague was the great fear of the age. During London's epidemic of 1665 tobacco was taken as a preventive, and it was later said that not one of the city's tobacconists had died.
Q 27Which TV detective slaps on several nicotine patches to think and calls a hard case 'a three-patch problem'?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes, in the BBC's Sherlock, swapped Conan Doyle's 'three pipe problem' for patches. The original Holmes, facing one, asked Watson not to speak to him for fifty minutes while he smoked.
Q 28Which 1999 film stars Russell Crowe as Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco scientist who went public about nicotine?
The Insider
The Insider dramatises Wigand's interview with 60 Minutes. He said his old employer, Brown & Williamson, had added chemicals such as ammonia to cigarettes to boost the nicotine they delivered.
Q 29Which US vape brand, shaped like a USB stick, came to dominate the country's e-cigarette sales in 2017 and 2018?
Juul
Juul's edge was its liquid: by using nicotine salts it delivered a cigarette-sized dose without the harsh throat hit of earlier vapes. Its popularity with teenagers soon alarmed regulators.
Q 30Which Elizabethan courtier is often credited with making pipe smoking fashionable in England?
Walter Raleigh
Walter Raleigh probably did not bring tobacco to England himself, whatever the legend says. What he did do, as a favourite at court, was play a large part in spreading the habit among the English.