Eerie indeed. Time to rethink my free will.
It’s interesting, that study was 10 years ago. I haven’t heard of non-nicotine compounds becoming a part of the therapy since then. But what also happened in those 10 years was nicotine vaporizers took off, and a lot of people traded smoking for those. Wonder what the study would have found if it had nicotine puffs in addition to de-nic tobacco and sham puffs.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-010-1810-2
The major finding here is that abstinent smokers preferred smoking denicotinized cigarettes over pushing a button to receive nicotine intravenously; i.e. ”keeping up denic”.