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Those cigarettes may be driving you to drink more.

A new study done on rats shows that nicotine can actually reduce blood alcohol concentrations and thus lead to heavier drinking.

"Since the desired effect of alcohol is significantly diminished by nicotine, particularly among heavy or binge drinkers such as college students, this may encourage drinkers to drink more to achieve the pleasurable or desired effect," said Wei-Jung Chen, an associate professor of neuroscience and experimental therapies at the Texas A&M Health Science Center in College Station, Texas, and lead author of the study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

The notion that there's cross tolerance for certain drugs - where a decrease in the reward from one drug seems to facilitate the use of another to achieve the same effects - has been debated for more than 50 years.

But only two previous studies have looked at the interactions between nicotine and alcohol, so that little is known about how nicotine influences the metabolizing of alcohol, said Scott Parnell, the report's co-author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of North Carolina.

For the new study, Chen and Parnell and colleagues administered a range of nicotine doses adjusted for body weight along with an alcohol dose delivered either directly into the stomachs or the abdominal cavities of female rats. The blood alcohol content was measured against the nicotine doses as various times.

Chen said it was clear that the presence of nicotine significantly reduced peak blood alcohol content, but this was only observed when the booze went into the stomach, not when it was injected into the abdomen.