Although the primary reason that most people smoke is as a delivery system for nicotine, there isn't a wealth of understanding or information around how much nicotine is in a cigarette. Nicotine is a complicated and rather interesting topic, especially when you consider how demonised this substance has become by the general public (never mind the fact that cigarettes actually contain a wide variety of worse toxins, including ammonia, tar, carbon monoxide, and many others). It's true that nicotine is incredibly addictive (often cited as being as addictive as cocaine or heroin), but it's also true that nicotine does not pose any known significant threat to your physical health.
Many smokers wonder how much nicotine is in a cigarette, especially when they decide to try vaping instead and want to translate the amount of nicotine they're getting from smoking into an equivalent amount when they vape. However, this is a question without a clear answer, partly because cigarette manufacturers generally have various options with different amounts of nicotine. Your favourite cigarette may contain anywhere from 7mg to 15mg of nicotine – but that's not the number that matters, anyway.
How much nicotine are you absorbing when you smoke?
The real question is not how much nicotine a cigarette contains, but rather how much of that nicotine you're actually consuming. You exhale a large portion of this nicotine after you inhale, for starters. Also, a lot of it simply burns away between puffs. On top of that, you take more or fewer puffs of each cigarette and hold your hits in for more or less time than the next person. That means that, again, we will arrive at an imperfect average, but we can still make an educated guess.
On average, you probably consume somewhere around 1mg of nicotine per cigarette that you smoke. It may not seem like much, but it's more than enough to satisfy your craving. Of course, this number varies from person to person and from cigarette brand to cigarette brand.
Nicotine absorption and human factors
As mentioned, not everyone absorbs nicotine at the same rate or in the same way. Even if everyone did absorb nicotine at the same rate, its effects would still be different for different people – for example, the same amount of nicotine might affect a smaller person differently than a larger person, an older person differently than a younger person, or a healthy person differently than a person with certain health conditions.
All of these factors make it easy to see why it's so hard to determine how much nicotine you absorb when you smoke. However, we can use what we do know to give you a starting point for choosing the right vape juice for you, as that's likely why you're trying to figure out nicotine amounts. In general, if you smoke more than a pack a day, look for an e-liquid that contains around 2.4% nicotine; if you smoke less, 1.2% should do the trick.
