Tobacco Water and Nanotechnology: Dr. Ardis on Nicotine as an Antidote

Table of Contents

1. What Dr. Ardis Says
2. The Spanish Microscope Experiment, Step by Step
3. What Graphene Oxide Is
4. What Breaks Down Graphene Oxide in the Laboratory
5. What the mRNA Vaccine Documents List
6. What Forms When a Liquid Dries on a Slide
7. Nicotine in Water: A Weak Base
8. What a Tobacco-Leaf Steep Contains
9. Safety Notes
10. Dr. Ardis’s Own Work
11. Key Research Papers
12. Connections
13. Featured Videos

1. What Dr. Ardis Says

Dr. Ardis set this out in a 2025 podcast appearance (Culture Apothecary) and in his book Moving Beyond the COVID-19 Lies: Restoring Health and Hope for Humanity. The question put to him was whether nicotine, if it is as powerful as he describes, could be a universal antidote for bioweapons or engineered diseases — whether, in effect, a cure for future pandemics already exists.

Dr. Ardis states that it could, and that the demonstration comes from a research institute in Spain called La Quinta Columna. He names a researcher scientist there whose name the podcast transcript renders as “Rafa Calvin” (the spelling is transcribed from audio and is given here as the transcript has it). He asks listeners to search online for the researcher’s name and the phrase “Nicotine destroys nanotech video.”

His account, in order:

1. The research group took the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, dried out the solution and looked at what was left. Dr. Ardis states that they found, and published, “all this nanotech and graphene oxide” inside the shots.
2. The researcher then dried dental anaesthetics over 30 days to see what remained on the slide. Dr. Ardis states that they found “thousands of microchips, nanotech,” and that the video shows the nanotechnology in the shots and injections, dental anaesthetics included.
3. The researcher then announced a test of Dr. Ardis’s own theory. He took organic tobacco leaf, boiled water, steeped the leaf in it for 10 minutes, and dropped that water — water carrying nicotine from the leaf — onto the slide while filming the nanochips under the microscope.
4. In the three-minute clip, Dr. Ardis states, “thousands of nanotech are just dissolved by the nicotine.” He describes the nicotine moving through the medium and “literally grabs the microchip and dissolves it, then goes to the next one, dissolves that one, goes to the next one.”
5. The clip, he says, went around a short-video platform with “hundreds of millions of views already.” He stresses that the conclusion is the research facility’s own, not his: La Quinta Columna, he says, presented the video as showing all the nanotechnology being dissolved by nicotine.
6. The group asked that the video be shared around the world. Dr. Ardis adds that there is no more important message or video for the whole world to see, and closes: “It could single-handedly protect all of humanity.”

The sections below take the materials and the chemistry in his account one at a time.

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2. The Spanish Microscope Experiment, Step by Step

The experiment Dr. Ardis describes has three stages, each using a technique common in any laboratory: drying a few drops of liquid on a glass slide and examining the residue under a light microscope.

• Stage one — injectable solutions. A vaccine solution is dried and the residue photographed. Dr. Ardis reports that the group described nanotechnology and graphene oxide in it.
• Stage two — dental anaesthetics. Local anaesthetic solutions used in dentistry are left to dry for 30 days. Dental local anaesthetics are usually a water solution of an anaesthetic salt (lidocaine or articaine hydrochloride, for example), often with a small amount of epinephrine, sodium chloride to match the body’s salt balance, and a sulfite antioxidant that protects the epinephrine. Dr. Ardis reports that the group described thousands of microchips and nanotechnology on these slides.
• Stage three — tobacco water. Organic tobacco leaf is steeped for 10 minutes in boiled water, and drops of that water are added to a prepared slide while the camera runs. Dr. Ardis reports that the structures dissolve one after another.

The video and the group’s write-ups are the primary source for this account. The specific study is not identified here in a peer-reviewed journal; related published work on each material and process is listed in the sections below. The group’s analyses were circulated through its own channels and broadcasts rather than through an indexed journal, which is why they do not appear in the Key Research Papers list.

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3. What Graphene Oxide Is

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms joined in a flat honeycomb pattern — one sheet of the same material that is stacked millions deep in pencil graphite. Graphene oxide is that sheet after strong chemical oxidation has studded it with oxygen-containing groups (hydroxyl, epoxide and carboxyl groups). Those groups make the sheets mix with water, which plain graphene does not, and give chemists handles for attaching other molecules.

Because of those properties, graphene oxide has been studied widely in biomedical research. A 2013 review in Accounts of Chemical Research by Chung and colleagues surveyed the work: precise biosensing that uses graphene’s ability to quench fluorescence, surfaces that support cell growth and differentiation, and graphene-assisted mass spectrometry. The authors single out graphene oxide for its easy handling in water, its surface that can be chemically decorated, and its fluorescence-quenching and Raman-enhancing behaviour, and they note the lack of accepted standards for classifying graphene derivatives. A 2012 interdisciplinary review by Sanchez and colleagues at Brown University in Chemical Research in Toxicology proposed a naming system for “graphene-family nanomaterials,” described how they interact with nucleic acids, lipid membranes and drug molecules, and reported that the limited cell studies then available found them either benign or toxic depending on layer number, sheet size, stiffness, surface chemistry and dose; for dry powders, inhalation was the likely route of human exposure.

In practical terms for the experiment Dr. Ardis describes: graphene oxide sheets are typically from tens of nanometres to several micrometres across and about one nanometre thick. A single sheet is not visible in an ordinary light microscope; stacked or folded aggregates can be. Identifying it is usually done by Raman spectroscopy (which reads the characteristic “D” and “G” bands of graphitic carbon), electron microscopy or X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, rather than by shape alone.

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4. What Breaks Down Graphene Oxide in the Laboratory

Dr. Ardis’s account turns on something dissolving structures on a slide. The published laboratory work on what breaks down graphene oxide has centred on enzymes and oxidising chemistry.

• Horseradish peroxidase, 2011. Kotchey and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh reported in ACS Nano that the plant enzyme horseradish peroxidase, with a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide (about 40 micromolar), oxidised graphene oxide and punched holes in its flat surface. The same enzyme did not oxidise chemically reduced graphene oxide over the same period. The group followed the process with Raman, infrared and electron-paramagnetic-resonance spectroscopy and with electron and atomic-force microscopy.
• Human myeloperoxidase, 2015. Kurapati and colleagues in Strasbourg reported in Small that myeloperoxidase, an enzyme from human neutrophils (a type of white blood cell), with low hydrogen peroxide, completely broke down well-dispersed graphene oxide samples but failed to degrade the most aggregated sample. They tied the difference to how water-loving, negatively charged and evenly dispersed the sheets were.

These studies describe oxidative breakdown that runs over hours to days and is followed by spectroscopy. Published work testing nicotine or a tobacco infusion against graphene oxide is not identified here.

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5. What the mRNA Vaccine Documents List

The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are licensed in the United States by the FDA and in the European Union on the advice of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Both agencies publish the full ingredient list in the product labelling, and the EMA publishes a public assessment report describing how each component was examined. These are the primary documents for what the vials are declared to contain:

• FDA product page and prescribing information, first licensed mRNA COVID-19 vaccine
• FDA product page and prescribing information, second licensed mRNA COVID-19 vaccine
• EMA European public assessment report, first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine
• EMA European public assessment report, second mRNA COVID-19 vaccine

Across both products the labelled ingredients fall into four groups:

1. The mRNA itself — the genetic instructions for the spike protein, with the modified nucleoside N1-methyl-pseudouridine.
2. Four lipids that make the lipid nanoparticle — an ionisable lipid (ALC-0315 in one product, SM-102 in the other), a PEG-lipid (ALC-0159 or PEG2000-DMG), the phospholipid DSPC, and cholesterol. These self-assemble around the mRNA into particles roughly 80–100 nanometres across.
3. Buffer salts — tromethamine and its hydrochloride in current formulations; earlier formulations of one product used phosphate-buffered saline (sodium chloride, potassium chloride and sodium and potassium phosphates); the other uses tromethamine with acetic acid and sodium acetate.
4. Sucrose, which protects the particles during freezing.

Graphene oxide is not among the ingredients either agency lists. Two published reviews describe the lipid nanoparticle platform itself: Schoenmaker and colleagues (2021, International Journal of Pharmaceutics) set out the structure of the mRNA–lipid nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccines, what each lipid does and why the products must be kept frozen; Hou, Zaks, Langer and Dong (2021, Nature Reviews Materials) review how lipid nanoparticles are designed to carry mRNA into cells. Lipid nanoparticles are the one deliberately “nano” component the labels declare.

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6. What Forms When a Liquid Dries on a Slide

Drying a drop of liquid on glass and looking at what remains is an old technique with a large physics literature. Its central finding is that the residue is never a simple copy of what was dissolved: the drying process itself builds rings, branches and crystals.

• The coffee-ring effect, 1997. Deegan, Nagel, Witten and colleagues showed in Nature why a dried coffee drop leaves a dark rim. The drop’s edge is pinned to the surface; liquid evaporates fastest there, so an outward flow carries dissolved and suspended material to the edge, where it piles up as a ring.
• Patterns from drying drops, 2014. Sefiane’s review in Advances in Colloid and Interface Science catalogues the deposits that drying drops leave — rings, multiple concentric rings, cracks, fractal branching and crystal arrays — and how evaporation rate, surface, temperature and composition decide which appears.
• Salt and protein, 2008. Yakhno, at the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod, watched drops of protein–salt–water solutions dry under optical and atomic-force microscopes. The sequence was a protein ring at the edge, protein structures forming a gel in the middle, and salt crystallising inside the shrinking gel. Drops of salt-free protein solution showed no visible protein structures.
• Mixed salts, 2020. Pathak, Christy, Sefiane and Gozuacik reported in Langmuir that magnesium chloride formed chains of crystals and potassium chloride formed dendritic (tree-branching) and rectangular crystals in drying drops containing protein, with the shapes changing as the ratio of salt to protein changed.
• Medicines on a slide, 2021. Carreón and colleagues dried drops of four medicines (methotrexate, ciprofloxacin, clonazepam and budesonide) with sodium chloride on a heated slide. Under the optical microscope they saw splatters, fern-like islands, crown shapes, needle-like crowns and dendritic, star-shaped crystals, distinct enough for each medicine that texture analysis could tell them apart.

The injectable solutions in Dr. Ardis’s account contain salts, sugars and lipids — the same classes of ingredient these papers dry. Over 30 days, as described for the dental anaesthetics, a residue can also take up moisture from the air and recrystallise. Salt and sugar crystals of this kind redissolve when water is added back to them.

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7. Nicotine in Water: A Weak Base

Nicotine is a small organic molecule built from two rings, a pyridine and a pyrrolidine, each with a nitrogen atom. In pure form it is a colourless-to-pale oily liquid that mixes freely with water. Benowitz, Hukkanen and Jacob’s 2009 review “Nicotine chemistry, metabolism, kinetics and biomarkers” sets out the basics: nicotine is a weak base — it can accept a hydrogen ion (a proton) from water. Its main pKa is about 8.0, meaning that at pH 8 half the nicotine is in the uncharged “free-base” form and half is protonated. In its ionised form, the review notes, nicotine does not rapidly cross membranes. It describes nicotine as a natural botanical insecticide in the tobacco leaf, making up about 1.5% of the weight of commercial cigarette tobacco and about 95% of its total alkaloids.

That acid–base balance matters for what nicotine does. In slightly acidic water most nicotine carries a positive charge and stays dissolved; as the pH rises, more is uncharged, and uncharged nicotine crosses skin and mucous membranes faster and evaporates more readily. Pankow, Duell and Peyton (2020) worked out how the free-base fraction of nicotine shifts between water-free liquids and watered solutions, showing that adding water itself changes the balance.

Chemically, nicotine is a base and a ligand for the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (see Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors). As a base it can raise the pH of the water it is in and pair with acids to form salts.

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8. What a Tobacco-Leaf Steep Contains

Because nicotine mixes freely with water, hot water pulls it out of tobacco leaf, along with other water-soluble leaf compounds: sugars, organic acids, polyphenols such as chlorogenic acid, and mineral salts — tobacco leaf is notably rich in potassium. A tobacco steep is therefore not pure nicotine in water but a dilute plant extract containing salts and sugars of its own.

The clearest published evidence that water strips nicotine from tobacco leaves comes from occupational medicine. In 1974 Gehlbach and colleagues described green-tobacco sickness in JAMA: nausea, vomiting, dizziness and weakness in workers harvesting tobacco by hand, traced to nicotine absorbed through the skin from wet leaves. A 1979 follow-up by the same group tested protective clothing as a way to reduce that absorption.

A published measurement of exactly how much nicotine a 10-minute household steep of organic tobacco leaf extracts is not identified here. The amount would depend on the leaf variety and its nicotine content (which varies several-fold between tobacco types), how finely it is cut, the ratio of leaf to water and the water’s temperature and pH.

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9. Safety Notes

• Tobacco water is a poison if swallowed or spilled on skin. Nicotine dissolved in water passes through skin and the gut. Green-tobacco sickness shows that even dew on wet leaves carries enough to make adults ill. A tobacco infusion should never be drunk, and should be kept, like any nicotine product, well out of reach of children and pets.
• Children and pets are at the highest risk. A small amount of nicotine can seriously poison a child or a dog. Keep patches, gum, pouches, liquids and tobacco locked away, and fold used patches sticky-side together before disposal. In the United States, Poison Control is 1-800-222-1222.
• Who should not use nicotine: pregnancy and breastfeeding, unstable or recent heart disease (recent heart attack, unstable angina, serious arrhythmia), uncontrolled high blood pressure, and anyone with a known sensitivity. People with diabetes, thyroid disease, stomach ulcers or a history of stroke should discuss it with a clinician first.
• The full list of contraindications and the dosing guidance that goes with them are on the Nicotine Patch Protocol page.

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10. Dr. Ardis’s Own Work

• Moving Beyond the COVID-19 Lies — the site’s page on his 2024 book, where his case for nicotine is set out at length.
• Dr. Bryan Ardis Hub — the wing’s main page, listing every page on his nicotine hypothesis and snake-venom theory.
• The Dr. Ardis Show — official site

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Key Research Papers

1. Chung C, Kim YK, Shin D, Ryoo SR, et al. (2013). Biomedical applications of graphene and graphene oxide. Acc Chem Res. — PubMed PMID: 23480658
2. Sanchez VC, Jachak A, Hurt RH, Kane AB (2012). Biological interactions of graphene-family nanomaterials: an interdisciplinary review. Chem Res Toxicol. — PubMed PMID: 21954945
3. Kotchey GP, Allen BL, Vedala H, Yanamala N, et al. (2011). The enzymatic oxidation of graphene oxide. ACS Nano. — PubMed PMID: 21344859
4. Kurapati R, Russier J, Squillaci MA, Treossi E, et al. (2015). Dispersibility-dependent biodegradation of graphene oxide by myeloperoxidase. Small. — PubMed PMID: 25959808
5. Schoenmaker L, Witzigmann D, Kulkarni JA, Verbeke R, et al. (2021). mRNA-lipid nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccines: Structure and stability. Int J Pharm. — PubMed PMID: 33839230
6. Hou X, Zaks T, Langer R, Dong Y (2021). Lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery. Nat Rev Mater. — PubMed PMID: 34394960
7. Deegan RD, Bakajin O, Dupont TF, Huber G, Nagel SR, Witten TA (1997). Capillary flow as the cause of ring stains from dried liquid drops. Nature 389:827–829. — doi:10.1038/39827
8. Sefiane K (2014). Patterns from drying drops. Adv Colloid Interface Sci. — PubMed PMID: 23746427
9. Yakhno T (2008). Salt-induced protein phase transitions in drying drops. J Colloid Interface Sci. — PubMed PMID: 18001759
10. Pathak B, Christy J, Sefiane K, Gozuacik D (2020). Complex pattern formation in solutions of protein and mixed salts using dehydrating sessile droplets. Langmuir. — PubMed PMID: 32787115
11. Carreón YJP, Díaz-Hernández O, Escalera Santos GJ, Cipriano-Urbano I, et al. (2021). Texture analysis of dried droplets for the quality control of medicines. Sensors (Basel). — PubMed PMID: 34208420
12. Benowitz NL, Hukkanen J, Jacob P 3rd (2009). Nicotine chemistry, metabolism, kinetics and biomarkers. Handb Exp Pharmacol. — PubMed PMID: 19184645
13. Pankow JF, Duell AK, Peyton DH (2020). Free-base nicotine fraction α(fb) in non-aqueous versus aqueous solutions: electronic cigarette fluids without versus with dilution with water. Chem Res Toxicol. — PubMed PMID: 32255343
14. Gehlbach SH, Williams WA, Perry LD, Woodall JS (1974). Green-tobacco sickness. An illness of tobacco harvesters. JAMA. — PubMed PMID: 4479133

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Graphene oxide biodegradation by peroxidases
2. PubMed: Drying-droplet patterns and salt crystallisation
3. PubMed: Free-base nicotine in water
4. PubMed: Green-tobacco sickness

Primary Documents

• FDA and EMA product documents for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — linked in section 5.
• Culture Apothecary, “Nicotine Is NOT the Villain” (2025) — the podcast in which Dr. Ardis gives the account in section 1 (37:28–39:41).

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Connections

• Dr. Bryan Ardis Hub — the wing’s main page: his nicotine hypothesis and snake-venom theory
• The Nicotine Hypothesis — his wider case for nicotine as an anti-inflammatory
• Cobra Venom and Nicotine — the receptor he says nicotine protects
• Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors — the receptor pharmacology behind his view
• Vaccine-Injury Recovery — his protocol for post-vaccination symptoms
• The Ardis Detox Layer — the supplements he pairs with nicotine
• Tobacco, Indigenous Medicine and Therapeutic Nicotine — the history of tobacco as medicine
• Nicotine Patch Protocol — dosing, placement and the full safety list
• From Pseudouridine to the COVID-19 Vaccines — how the mRNA vaccines and their lipid nanoparticles were developed
• Silver Nanoparticles: Quality and Particle Size — how nanoparticles are sized and characterised
• Genetic Susceptibility to Vaccine Adverse Reactions — why reactions differ between people

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