Fight or Flight..?

This might help....If you take nicotine into the body in tiny amounts - like through smoking, or sticking a nicotine patch on - it will make your heart beat faster than it should, which is both useless and dangerous. It will reduce blood flow to the skin and the extremities, which is bad for your circulation, and the combination of these two changes will raise your blood pressure. Obviously, this does not help anyone calm down at times of stress, when heart-rate and blood pressure are already climbing. Instead it makes a sudden heart attack or stroke more likely.
Nicotine also raises fat levels in your blood which is not only useless but also leads to clogged arteries, heart attacks and strokes. As if that were not enough, nicotine also inhibits the production of an enzyme in the body which normally breaks up blood clots, directly causing a higher incidence of thrombosis and strokes in smokers.
If you take nicotine into the body in any more than tiny amounts it will kill you stone dead because it is a very deadly poison indeed.

That's quite shocking...??