Cigarette smoking in the United States has plummeted over the decades, reaching an 80-year low in 2024.
But nicotine, the highly addictive stimulant found in tobacco, has turned into a weird new trend, with wellness influencers now pushing it as a way to prepare for a hard workout — or even boost productivity at work, as Stat News reports.
Even the shadowy defense contractor Palantir is now offering its employees nicotine pouches in its vending machines. Startups like Lucy Nicotine and Sesh are marketing to users as a way to remain alert or awake longer. That’s despite the known health hazards of the stimulant, from its extremely addictive nature to higher blood pressure, which could put users at risk of heart attacks and strokes. Many of these products are also not authorized for sale by the Food and Drug Administration.
As experts told Stat, the recreational use of nicotine pouches and gum, which were originally designed to help people quit smoking, could result in young people getting addicted in the first place, with the health risks greatly outweighing the benefits.
Besides, nicotine’s ability to boost productivity could be considerably overblown. Nicotine is “very unlikely to help the cognitive function of someone who is functioning at their normal capacity,” Vanderbilt University psychiatry and pharmacology professor Paul Newhouse told Stat.
That’s not stopping brands on social media, where they’re advertising nicotine products as enhancing productivity and performance. It’s become a particular trend among tech workers, with tins of Zyn oral nicotine pouches becoming a common sight on the desks of startup employees. In the case of Palantir, flavored packs of oral nicotine pouches were made available for free to employees and guests over the age of 21.
“They were very productive, so I thought maybe there’s something here,” AI-powered healthcare company CEO Alex Cohen told the Wall Street Journal in December, referring to his firm’s software engineers. “Then, I accidentally got addicted.”
Indeed, Silicon Valley’s flirting with nicotine may soon turn into a wave of people who have no history of smoking getting hooked.
“Individuals will often switch nicotine products,” the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention cofounder Michael Fiore told the WSJ. “I suspect most of these tech workers aren’t users, so it could be causing addiction in a population that’s not currently using it.”
While smoking’s long-term health effects are well known, newer styles of nicotine products could still be harmful, even beyond higher blood pressure. Particularly when it comes to oral nicotine pouches, the health implications are still actively being investigated, meaning that there’s still a lot we don’t know.
Beyond anecdotal effects like a sharpened mind or improved concentration, the jury is also still out on whether nicotine can actually deliver on these fronts — or whether the brain is simply becoming addicted to a steady drip of dopamine.
“I want to be clear, we can’t make any productivity claims,” Maxwell Cunningham, founder of nicotine startup Sesh, told the WSJ. “But I do think it’s really interesting to see the types of people and industries that are using our product.”
More on nicotine: Horrendous Things Happen When You Quit Zyn Cold Turkey
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