Collage by Natalie Moreno
Looking back on the biggest stories of the year.
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Most younger users of nicotine pouches like ZYN already smoke cigarettes, according to a recent study. But I can’t tell you how many non-smokers I talked to in 2023 who’d just tried it for the first time. Most were guys I know from the internet: There’s a direct connection between the amount of time a person spends indoors and their desire for smoke-free stimulants. And their reports of their first encounters were uniform: “That was a lot.” Advertisem*nt
Like smoking, ZYN can at once feel countercultural and comically corporate. Philip Morris International bought Swedish Match, the creator of ZYN, for $16 billion in 2022, and nicotine pouches are a central component of the company’s plan for sales to be majority smokeless by 2025. Surely, their massive Big Tobacco distribution network has helped ZYN become such a thing, but the product’s seeming everywhereness in regular life is hardly due to their marketing department. I’ve seen cardboard signs in gas stations, but—thanks to regulations on advertising nicotine—that’s it. Instead, ZYN feels like the latest step in a trend that’s been going on for at least a decade, and almost entirely online. Advertisem*nt
Every once in a while, nicotine will have an odd media moment, like when nicotine gum aficionado Tucker Carlson declared that nicotine “frees your mind.” This summer, a New York Times trend piece about Hestia Cigarettes placed their “viral” cigs at a Celine fashion show, a cool lit mag reading, and a party for an aspiring crypto-city builder backed by Peter Thiel. Obviously, people have been smoking outside book readings forever, but it’s equally obvious that using nicotine has become some kind of new form of cultural signifier lately, too. Sometimes, that signifier feels vaguely right-wing-coded (Carlson, Thiel), but for something so widely used as nicotine pouches and smoking in general, it’s clearly not actually that: If anything, it’s edgy without being too edgy.For a lot of people, popping ZYNs in 2023 was a slightly more sensible summer of Four Loko. I know I did my share. But I should point out that I didn’t take any while writing this article. When I want a little boost like that, I’ve been doing snus instead. Snus is a lot harder to find where I live—it’s foreign and less popular. I’m just trying to stay ahead of the curve.
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