Drug info - Nicotine...performance-enhancing drug for pilots?

[bcubed]

Remember reading about eight years ago in a mainstream flying mag that nicotine patches, used by pilots that smoked, led to improved performance in simulators. This was written up as sign of dependance. The unanswered question (almost as if they were afraid to find out) was would these patches improve performance for pilots who didn't smoke.

Well, here's a follow-up abstract (didn't join up for the full article) that suggests it indeed does improve performance. (From tobacco.org, a site that seems--upon very brief inspection--to be somehow affiliated with anti-public-smoking activism):

Stanford researchers study alcohol, nicotine, Donepezil effects on pilots Jump to full article: EurekAlert, 2003-07-14

Intro:
Researchers at Stanford University Medical Center and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System have found that pilots who take nicotine or an Alzheimer's disease drug called donepezil fly better than those in a control group, while those who have consumed alcohol are impaired when flying.
Martin Mumenthaler, PhD, a senior research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Medicine, analyzed results of previous trials done over a 10-year period on the effects of alcohol, nicotine and donepezil on pilots. The trials, conducted at the Stanford Aviation Safety Laboratory, focused on how the various drugs affected pilot skill in a flight simulator. Results appear in the July issue of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
In the nicotine trials, pilots were given either nicotine gum or a placebo before flying in a simulator that mimicked a single-engine propeller plane. . .
The findings have inspired additional research on nicotine and flying. Now that smoking is prohibited on most commercial flights, pilots who smoke have to endure without cigarettes. . .
The Aviation Safety Laboratory is now recruiting pilots who are smokers for a study on the effects of nicotine withdrawal on flight performance.

Interesting...comments?

[Kodi]

Yes, prior experiments have been done on this already. If anyone knows of or has read Mental Floss magazine, 3 or so years ago one of them had a huge article about how nicotine has been proven to help with alzheimers patients. Ill try to find the article somewhere.