It’s the Part of Cigarettes That Keeps You Hooked. Some Say We’ve Been Looking at It All Wrong.

Tucker Carlson is standing in a random field, looking to the sky. A helicopter buzzes into view. It’s hauling an ostentatiously large circular container. “Gentlemen, you’ve lost control!” Carlson exclaims, striding toward the object. Clad in flip-flops, jeans, and a puffer vest overtop a button-up, he’s giggling like a 5-year-old who’s just spotted his best friend on the playground. The circular object makes contact with the ground, and with the wit that once made him a formidable magazine journalist, Carlson announces: “The volume of nicotine in here could save the world.”

It was a giant tin of Zyn (the prop may or may not have actually contained nicotine), a gift to Carlson from the hosts of the Full Send Podcast, a roundtable discussion about girls, golf, money, politics, MMA, and more hosted by the bro collective known as the Nelk Boys, with over 2 million subscribers on YouTube. When Carlson sat for an episode of the pod, he had pulled a regular-size Zyn tin from his pocket, ready to evangelize. “It increases mental acuity, raises your testosterone level,” he told the podcast hosts in 2023, some months before they posted a video of the stunt in the field. “It’s been a massive life-enhancer. I’d really recommend it to you.”

Zyn, for its part, stated not long afterward that Carlson’s commentary lacked a scientific foundation. (Carlson countered that he was just joking and insulted Zyn for being associated with liberals. On the heels of the dustup, he launched his own nicotine pouch brand.) The horse had fully left the barn, though: If you wanted to bookmark the moment when the modern ascendance of nicotine was a foregone conclusion, you couldn’t do much better than Carlson’s hearty endorsement.

Smoking is at an all-time low, and yet nicotine, divorced from the cigarette, is having a moment. Over the last half-decade, biohackers, podcast hosts, gymgoers, and more have promoted a sanitized form of the chemical as a life-enhancing tool. Their delivery mechanism of choice is pouches of preportioned nicotine—Zyn and similar products—that tuck neatly under one’s lip and are becoming more widespread by the day. These products are especially popular among young men, the sort who never golf without a cold beer nearby, deploy phrases like “fat naturals,” and tend to obsess over building their wellness “stacks.” And despite Zyn’s public pushback on their being marketed as a health product, many of these guys discuss them as though they are one. Butter coffee–lover Dave Asprey writes that nicotine “can fine-tune your brain’s performance.” Joe Rogan, on his podcast, talks about the pouches he uses. Full Send co-founder Kyle Forgeard interviewed Sean Hannity last year, and they discussed their fondness of oral nicotine pouches. (“They’re pretty awesome,” Hannity said.) And who can forget RFK Jr., our Health and Human Services secretary, apparently popping in a lip pillow during his confirmation hearing?

Among Americans who are 18 and younger, nicotine pouches, over the past few years, have been “the only tobacco product where we’ve actually seen an increase in use,” says Brian King, an executive vice president at the nonprofit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Other data indicates that it’s young adult men between 16 and 24 who are driving the increase, and using it with a specific goal in mind. “Nicotine has now been promoted as this productivity or fitness product, rather than a recreational or addictive product,” says Andrea Villanti, deputy director of the Rutgers Institute for Nicotine and Tobacco Studies. Yes, really: a fitness product. Athletic Nicotine, founded in 2023 by a former quarterback for the Texas Tech Red Raiders, promotes its pouches as “sleek little win-wallets,” your key to “personal power,” with a flavor profile that “runs laps around the competition.”

This is not how pouches were, in the eyes of regulators, supposed to be used. In granting authorization to Zyn in 2025, the Food and Drug Administration justified its decision by saying that such products benefit adults who use cigarettes, helping them to wean off of smoking much in the same way that gum or lozenges do. (The FDA, by the way, never approves any tobacco products; it merely authorizes their sale. What’s more: A loophole of sorts allowed Zyn to market and sell pouches before the approval had even gone through.) Most nicotine gums or lozenges contain just 2 milligrams of nicotine. Pouches, on the other hand, can easily give you about as much exposure to nicotine as a cigarette.

The drop in smoking rates has been called “the most successful health campaign in modern history.” Now, the new worry among public health professionals is that a new crop of users is slowly getting addicted to nicotine in the name of wellness. The idea that nicotine has real health benefits? It’s a curious schtick, a questionable premise—and, it seems, not entirely wrong.

Nicotine is a chemical compound present in the tobacco plant. When ingested, it acts as a stimulant, triggering the release of dopamine from the brain’s reward circuit. It also binds to receptors in the brain usually modulated by acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that’s involved in attention, learning, and memory. That it’s involved in such functions is different from saying that it actively assists them. Nonetheless, this is the foundation for the wellness community’s claim that nicotine is a potent tool for better executive functioning. Having trouble studying for exams? Staying focused in the gym? Keeping your nerves in check when you’re facing a deadline for an online magazine? Ingest a few milligrams of nicotine. You’ll be alert, less anxious, and more productive—that is the hope.

What makes smoking so deadly is not the nicotine content, but rather the combustion that takes place after lighting a cigarette. It’s the burning of tobacco that creates tar, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and other carcinogens. But nicotine is the chemical that makes it difficult to quit. Big Tobacco has known about the addictive properties of nicotine for decades. In 1994, an FDA panel formally concluded that the nicotine inside cigarettes is what got people hooked. Nicotine is also, interestingly enough, the substance that makes cigarettes more palatable. Randomized controlled trials show that people assigned to low-nicotine cigarettes reduce the number of cigarettes they smoke compared with people smoking their usual brand.

“There’s been a lot of research in that area,” Villanti says. “Once the nicotine is out of the cigarette, it’s not satisfying, and people generally reduce their use.”

Cigarettes became big business following World War I, when smoking was as ubiquitous as shellshock. In 1924, Philip Morris, then headquartered in New York City, launched Marlboro as a cigarette specifically targeted at women, describing its new product as “Mild as May!” Over the years, tobacco companies employed advertisements that featured homemakers, athletes, lion tamers, sharpshooters, pilots, scientists, and other characters, with wording and images tailored to fit inconsistent messages. Tobacco was marketed as both sedative and stimulant. Some ads claimed cigarettes would steady your nerves. Others claimed cigarettes would give you a jolt of energy. Which is to say: Cigarettes themselves were once sold as a sort of all-purpose wellness product.

Then came 1952, when Reader’s Digest published “Cancer by the Carton.” It made public what researchers had been noticing about rising bronchogenic carcinoma rates, and upended what Americans knew about smoking. Doctors cited in the piece drew a connection between cigarette use and instances of lung cancer. Tobacco was now classified as a cancer-causing agent. Over time, spurred on by further medical evidence and public health campaigns, Americans smoked fewer and fewer cigarettes. In 2024, NEJM Evidence published a report showing that less than 10 percent of U.S. adults still smoke. Meanwhile, only 1.4 percent of all American teens smoke. It’s possible those numbers could go up, given that cigarettes, too, are in. (Exhibit A: Kylie Jenner lighting up on the cover of Vanity Fair this past spring. Exhibit B: Addison Rae smoking one with her foot.) Still, it’s hard to imagine cigarettes ever coming close to the level of widespread use they once enjoyed. They carry a literal stink on them, and aren’t allowed in all manner of public spaces. Meanwhile, that decky of Zyn is inconspicuous on an airplane.

Companies selling the nicotine pouches of today are reeling in buyers using that same elasticity of meaning once used to market cigarettes, says Robert Jackler, a physician and Stanford University School of Medicine professor who’s spent 20 years studying tobacco marketing. “Very few 40-year-olds wake up and say, ‘Hey, I think I’ll start smoking today,’ ” he says. (Not counting, of course, George Costanza.) But many 40-year-olds wake up and feel like they could use a little help concentrating at work. “It’s going to help you find your chance, your dream, your courage, your flow, your reason. These are all directly from Zyn ads,” says Jackler, lead author of a report published by the World Health Organization this May about nicotine’s resurgent popularity. “It’s promising that it’s the panacea for everything in your life if you use this nicotine pouch,” Jackler adds. On Theo Von’s podcast in 2023, about two months before he received his massive Zyn tin, Carlson even insisted that nicotine was “a male enhancer, if you know what I mean.” Bless up, but understand, my kings, that nicotine is a notorious vasoconstrictor.

“It is a psychoactive drug that alters mood and behavior,” says King, of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “And so although there may be some short-term benefits from using nicotine, those are far outweighed by the long-term risks of dependence, addiction, and impact on cardiovascular health.”

In other words, a short burst of cognitive enrichment is no reason to jeopardize overall well-being. “Nicotine increases heart rate, elevates blood pressure, and narrows blood vessels,” King adds. “This can damage the lining of the blood vessels and harden the arteries.” Blood and oxygen flow decrease as arteries become less pliable, increasing the risk of heart attack.

When I reached out to a few pouch-makers, it was Jason Winn who finally answered me.
An Ironman competitor with salt-sprayed California hair, he’s an unlikely flagbearer for nicotine use, but that’s exactly the point. As co-founder of Athletic Nicotine, he thinks pouches are great for—here comes the modern nicotine sales pitch—those “lock in” moments. Call it the Getting Shit Done element.

“Whether you’re a mom of three and you’re running around organizing tons of activities for the kids, stepping into a boardroom, jumping on a podcast or an interview, going for a walk, low-dose nicotine is a great performance tool,” he says. He uses it himself before a run or before he lifts. He also pops one when he’s coaching flag football for his son. And lest you think his mom example is way off, he tells me that 43 percent of his buyers—it’s a direct-to-consumer business—are women.

He’s quick to claim that the company doesn’t brand nicotine as a performance enhancer.
Taking Athletic Nicotine isn’t going to make you stronger or quicker or a better thinker. It’s more like a cup of coffee, he says, the boost you need to start your day. Winn points out that Athletic’s pouches don’t contain more than 6 milligrams of nicotine, and most buyers opt for the tins with 1.5- or 3-milligram pouches. (It’s true that cigarettes contain more like 10 to 15 milligrams—but you also absorb much less of the chemical when you smoke.) Joe Rogan says Winn’s pouches contain “the perfect amount.” It’s hard to listen to Winn’s sales pitch without thinking about the elasticity of meaning that tobacco companies used for so long. The pouches are good to amp you up if you’re a power player in the boardroom—or if you’re looking for that relaxing moment before you go on a nice, long walk. This marketing of nicotine to the general public is not something a doctor or scientist would endorse as sound health advice. But there are scientists who think that nicotine could be therapeutically useful for particular people—though it is statistically unlikely that you are a member of that group.

Murray E. Jarvik, best known for being the co-inventor of the nicotine patch, the same one used by people interested in quitting smoking, was convinced of the highly addictive nature of nicotine by 1970 (a message Big Tobacco tried fighting). Yet, in a 1991 article published in the British Journal of Addiction, one titled “Beneficial Effects of Nicotine,” he noted that nicotine could prove to be a “valuable pharmaceutical agent”—so long as it’s decoupled from tobacco.

The “principal virtue of nicotine,” wrote Jarvik, “is its ability to make people feel good … without impairing thinking or performance.” Translation: Nicotine improves your mood, without the side effects of, say, having a glass of wine. If you have a beer then play a game of pickup basketball, you will be off-kilter. A pouch will not knock you off balance. (Whether it can actively enhance performance is debatable, but in theory, at least, it doesn’t actively mess with it.)

Jarvik wasn’t the only one outside of Big Tobacco’s orbit who was curious about nicotine’s positive properties. Paul Newhouse, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine, was working as a postdoctoral fellow in 1984 at the National Institutes of Health when he began pondering what started as a simple question: What do nicotinic receptors do for cognitive functioning? At the time he was studying Alzheimer’s disease, searching for neurotransmitter molecules responsible for cognitive impairment. One of those was acetylcholine, the level of which seems to be changed in people with mild cognitive problems.
By that time, previous studies had already demonstrated that nicotine mimics acetylcholine by binding to the same brain receptors. Newhouse wanted to go one step further by testing what nicotine might do for cognitive functioning.

That thought eventually led him to conduct trials to determine if administering nicotine would help people with mild cognitive impairment. In 1988, Newhouse led a pilot study that involved six patients with Alzheimer’s, each of whom was given three different dosages (less than 1 microgram) of nicotine intravenously. The treatment appeared to generate slight improvements in patients’ levels of anxiety, and could even improve their performance on a cognitive test.

Over time, Newhouse wondered more about nicotine’s effects on cognition, and was interested enough to conduct further tests. He followed up his work in the 1980s with another study, the results of which were published in 2012 in the journal Neurology. Over the course of six months, he and his colleagues studied 74 subjects. Roughly half received patches with the drug to wear, and half received a placebo. Results showed mild improvements in attention, memory, and mental processing. This led to another trial, the MIND Study, which concluded last year. That study followed more than 300 patients with mild cognitive impairment from 2017 to 2025. Half wore nicotine patches; the other half were given a placebo. Overall, he says, the study didn’t show a large beneficial effect: Participants who wore nicotine patches didn’t fare any better than those in the placebo group.

“The MIND trial, I think, failed on several counts, and its reasons may have less to do with nicotine itself than just the mechanics of the trial,” Newhouse says. It certainly didn’t help that the study overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time many participants dropped out.

But nicotine has demonstrated mild usefulness in other conditions. It has been shown to help people with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. (Perhaps nicotine’s therapeutic effects are why a high percentage of people with schizophrenia are heavy smokers, suggests a University of Colorado press release.) There’s some evidence it helps with Parkinson’s. Journalist Hannah Singleton, writing in Slate last year, explained how nicotine gum lifted her brain fog. “Most mornings,” she wrote, “I pop a piece while I’m answering emails or getting ready to write.” The overall effects of nicotine appear to be only selectively beneficial, for a subset of people, but beneficial nonetheless.

More research is necessary to establish nicotine’s viability as a therapy for any of these conditions. But that seems to be where the potential promise of nicotine lies: for people who are dealing with a medical problem. It might have a small role to play in assisting cognitive performance, along with other treatments being developed for memory loss. It could also play a role in helping treat anxiety and depression. (Any smoker, former or current, can tell you: A cigarette can calm your nerves.)

“My concern about some of the folks who work in nicotine use is that they all have the same belief, which is that if it’s nicotine, it has to be bad,” says Newhouse. “I just don’t think the evidence supports that.”

Newhouse might, for an academic, have a relatively open-minded and optimistic view of nicotine, but even for him, the bottom line is bad news for Zyn fanatics. “I think nicotine can be helpful for some people under some circumstances,” he says. “Is nicotine a general cognitive enhancer? The answer to that is almost assuredly no.”

In fact, according to Newhouse, for people who are already functioning well, nicotine will likely not help your cognitive faculties. None of the studies he has conducted have tried to demonstrate that nicotine is some type of nootropic. Instead, he says, it’s more valuable to think of any positive effects of nicotine as happening on an inverted U-curve. Flogging your nicotinic receptors will impair your cognitive performance if you’re already functioning at the top of your attention.

If anything, you’re training your brain to require that nicotine hit in order to function at all. Even on that early, promising pilot study on Alzheimer’s patients, cognitive performance improved on a medium dose of nicotine—not the high one.

“I think, to a degree, the industry is trying to have people look in a very narrow way at nicotine,” says Jackler, “and portray it as a sheep when it’s really a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Maybe there’s a simple answer to why the purveyors of bro-science are keen to spout off about the supposed benefits of nicotine: Doing drugs feels good, but everyone knows drugs are not good for you. With nicotine—if you squint at the science, if you buy into the marketing—you can at least attempt to make the case that doing this drug is actually smart and rational.

But once you turn to nicotine for a boost—and whether it can provide that seems somewhat subjective—it’s all too easy to keep reaching for it, again and again. With each successive hit, the number of receptor sites in the brain to which nicotine binds increases, a phenomenon called upregulation. Your brain gets used to the presence of nicotine. Without it, dopamine levels drop, your attention lapses, and you get cranky. And then, at that point, it’s true: You really need nicotine to focus.