The Quiet Comeback of Nicotine
I notice it the way you notice a song before you can name it.
First it’s on screen—cigarettes returning to the center of the frame like an old language Hollywood never fully forgot. In *Sinners*, the smoking isn’t just a prop; it’s character work. The cigarette becomes punctuation. Mood. Masculinity. A little halo of danger that reads as style. And that’s the part that lands on me hardest: not the smoke itself, but what it signals—that cigarettes are drifting back toward pop-culture cool.
Then I see it in real life, quieter.
A small round can on a conference table. A quick tuck behind the lip. No smoke. No ash. No dramatic exhale. Nobody steps outside. Nobody apologizes. The ritual is so discreet it almost passes as manners.
That’s the shift. Nicotine is learning how to look acceptable again—whether it’s burning at the edge of a movie star’s mouth or dissolving silently behind a coworker’s smile.
When New York’s governor proposed taxing nicotine pouches like Zyn under the state’s tobacco product definition, the policy fight was predictable: is this harm reduction, or is it just the next on-ramp into dependence? The budget logic is tidy—fold pouches into the existing wholesale tax structure and earmark the money for health care funding. But the cultural logic is messier, and it’s the mess that worries me.
Because a nicotine product that can blend into everyday life is a nicotine product that can spread.
The company behind Zyn pushed back by pointing to the FDA’s marketing authorization for certain nicotine pouches—language that gets repeated like a charm. But the FDA’s standard here is not “safe.” It’s population health—whether the benefits to adult smokers who completely switch outweigh the risks. That nuance doesn’t survive contact with real life, where “authorized” starts sounding like “approved,” and “approved” starts sounding like “fine.”
And that’s where nicotine’s new respectability becomes dangerous..
The new face of nicotine isn’t smoke—it’s convenience
Combustible cigarettes have carried stigma for a while. They smell. They linger. They announce themselves. Pouches don’t. They can be used at work, at dinner, in a lecture hall, on a plane. They can be paired with coffee, with studying, with stress, with celebration. They can become an all-day habit without the built-in friction that smoking used to require.
That friction mattered.
When a drug becomes easier to use, it becomes easier to normalize. When it becomes easier to normalize, it becomes easier to recruit the next user—not necessarily through a pitch, but through presence. A can on the table. A casual offer. A “it’s not even tobacco.” A vibe.
And while pouches are marketed as a modern alternative, cigarettes are still the baseline threat—and they’re the most cinematic, which is exactly why their comeback in culture matters. If cigarettes become stylish again, they don’t just sell nicotine. They sell *identity*.
Here’s what that “cool” is sitting on top of:
CDC estimates: smoking and secondhand smoke exposure contribute to over 480,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
U.S. prevalence: in recent CDC reporting, tens of millions of adults still smoke (around one in nine in 2022 figures).
Disease burden: smoking harms nearly every organ; millions live with smoking-related disease.
Global burden (WHO estimates): tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year worldwide, including non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke.
Those numbers aren’t there to scare anyone into virtue. They’re there to remind us what we’re aestheticizing when we aestheticize cigarettes: a mass-casualty consumer product with a genius for reinvention.
Nicotine is not a “clean” habit—it’s a dependency engine
Even if we set the cigarette aside for a moment and talk purely about nicotine: it’s highly addictive. That’s not a scare line—it’s the central feature. Addiction isn’t just craving. It’s tolerance. It’s withdrawal. It’s the quiet narrowing of your day around a chemical “normal.”
And nicotine isn’t socially neutral. It changes the body in ways that matter over time—especially when “over time” becomes daily. We have strong evidence that nicotine stimulates the nervous system in ways that can raise heart rate and blood pressure in the short term, and that matters more—not less—when you’re using it constantly. We also know nicotine exposure is especially risky for youth and pregnant people—adolescents because the brain is still developing, and pregnancy because nicotine can harm fetal development.
Even aside from the bigger picture, people report unpleasant side effects with oral nicotine products—nausea, hiccups, gum irritation—small signals that “smoke-free” does not mean consequence-free.
So when I hear a government official call this “a distinction without a difference,” I understand the point. Yes, combustion is a major driver of smoking’s catastrophic harm. But addiction is the driver of smoking’s market. If we normalize nicotine again—especially in forms that are easy, discreet, flavored, and socially portable—we create the conditions for a bigger, steadier nicotine economy.
And the nicotine economy does not exist to shrink itself.
The hard truth: “less harmful than cigarettes” can still be harmful to society, and two things can be true at once: For an adult who currently smokes, switching completely away from cigarettes may reduce exposure to many of the worst toxins created by burning tobacco. For the broader public—especially young people and never-smokers—mainstreaming pouches can widen the funnel into lifelong nicotine dependence. Public health isn’t only about the risk of a single product in a lab. It’s about what happens when a product becomes fashionable, ambient, and everywhere.
That’s what I mean by “dangerous acceptability”. It’s not the old image of someone coughing in an alley. It’s a product that can sit next to your phone like lip balm. It’s a drug that can hide inside professionalism. It’s a cigarette framed like poetry on a movie screen.
What I want instead
If nicotine pouches are going to exist in public life, they should be treated like what they are: addictive nicotine delivery products with unknown long-term pouch-specific outcomes and known nicotine-related risks.
That means:
Policy that doesn’t let “smoke-free” marketing turn into “risk-free” assumptions.
Strong youth protections and enforcement, because nicotine exposure during adolescence is a direct public health threat.
Clear consumer education: FDA authorization is not a safety stamp—it’s a population-level calculus that depends on *complete switching* among adult smokers.
Investments in cessation support, not just new product categories.
I don’t need nicotine to look cool again. I need us to remember that the easiest addictions are the ones that don’t interrupt your life at first. They move in like convenience—then later you realize convenience has a grip.
And by the time it’s normal, it’s harder to name as a problem.