A Smokeless Buzz: A rise in oral nicotine pouch use raises health concerns for high schoolers

*names changed to protect identities

Senior Phoebe Miller* fidgets in her chair during third hour. She can’t concentrate on the lesson and starts getting a splitting headache.

Without a second thought, she fishes through her backpack for that familiar circular plastic container. Pulling out a white pouch the size of a piece of gum, Miller pops it in her bottom lip and her headache melts away. What looks like just a stick of minty gum to her teacher and classmates is really a fix of nicotine sprinkled with artificial flavoring and preservatives. 

“In the past, if I wanted nicotine during class, I’d have to go to the bathroom,” Miller said. “Now with Zyn — and this is probably what makes them so bad — when I’m sitting in class and if I really want to have one, I can have one. It’s really easy to just reach in my backpack and sneak a ‘piece of gum.’”

Miller uses Zyn and other oral nicotine pouches along with at least 34 other East students, according to an Instagram poll of 200 students and community members. Out of the students who responded to the poll, 23% said that they use them during school. This mirrors a national trend of teen nicotine pouch use — with Partnership to End Addiction reporting in 2020 that 13% of 15-24-year-olds used oral nicotine pouches in the past 30 days, and with an increasing number of young people reporting use of the products. 

They’re discreet, they offer a constant nicotine buzz, they’re cheaper and contain no tobacco leaf — these are the reasons why Miller almost exclusively uses Zyn instead of Juuls and other types of disposable vapes now.

Zyn — a new product from big tobacco corporation Swedish Match — has been around for the past decade, but only recently blew up in popularity. Zyn usage has doubled each year since 2019, according to the American Cancer Society, and sales of nicotine pouch products increased from $126.06 million from August to December 2019 to $808.14 million from January to March 2022. 

But despite the mass appeal of these cheap and convenient nicotine pouches to high schoolers and young adults, some experts raise concerns about the perceived “safety” of the product. 

Vice President of the national anti-nicotine organization Truth Initiative Megan Jacobs asserts that Zyn and similar nicotine pouches are still dangerous in comparison to vaping, despite their lack of tobacco lead. The main misconception Jacobs points out is that some people think Zyn is a step to quit, but it’s actually not marketed as a nicotine replacement like nicotine patches or gum products are.

“Zyn or other oral nicotine pouches are [just as dangerous as] tobacco products,” Jacobs said. “They are produced by big tobacco companies and they’re marketed as a recreational kind of nicotine. They’re not regulated like a nicotine replacement product.”

Miller notes the recent popularity surge of Zyn in high schoolers, as she’s seen a significant increase in number of users at parties and on social media these past few months.

“It’s definitely a newer phenomenon and something I’ve started seeing at parties more as time has gone on,” Miller said. “With nicotine usage as a whole, you can tell there’s like developments and trends, and this is the new fad I guess. But it’s especially getting popular with college-age kids and also at parties I just see more people having them.”

Jacobs says that this is due to a few reasons, the first being advertising. Leading nicotine pouch brands spent nearly $25 million on ads between January 2019 and September 2021. Additionally, Zyn’s popularity in media and pop culture has skyrocketed in the past year. Tucker Carlson’s endorsement of the product on the “Full Send” podcast, Major League baseball players using nicotine pouches to avoid the league’s tobacco bans and trending TikTok videos with millions of likes joking about the iconic circular containers and dubbing the pouches “upper-decky lip pillows.”

“There’s a lot of hype that surrounds [Zyn] on TikTok and some other social media,” Zyn user and senior Mark Smith* said. “So I think the social part is a big part that comes with them.”

Smith just recently started using Zyn to kick a vaping habit he has had since middle school. However, he says that he’s found out that the pouches have worsened his nicotine cravings.

After finding out about Zyn from his older brother, Smith started using it to replace vaping, hoping it was a step toward quitting nicotine altogether. However, Smith wasn’t aware that using Zyn delivered more nicotine per use than his vape did. In fact, his 6-milligram Zyn has 100 times more nicotine than the 0.06-milligram puff of a vape.

“I thought it would help [me to quit], but it just turned out that they were probably worse in that they were way stronger,” Smith said. “They have more nicotine than my vape did and they’re a lot cheaper.”

Miller echoes this sentiment. She struggles with nicotine addiction and has attempted to quit several times. However, each time she tried to quit, she would eventually pick it back up a few months later if she was at a party and one of her friends brought out their vape.

Half a year ago, Miller was at a party when someone pulled out a Zyn container. She’d never heard of it before but was curious when she heard her friend say that these nicotine pouches were better than vaping — and healthier, too. 

“The first time you rip a Juul, you never feel like that again,” Miller said. “Each time you do it, you gradually lose the buzz. And then finally it gets to the point where you’re just addicted and not even getting the buzz anymore. With Zyns, you feel the same constant buzz the whole time it’s in your mouth. Every time.”

Despite their conceptions that pure nicotine is safer than tobacco products like vapes, nicotine — consumed in any amount — permanently alters your brain, according to a medical study co-researched by Truth Initiative.

“Nicotine chemically changes your brain,” Jacobs said. “It can make you susceptible to things like memory loss or having trouble concentrating, and more easily addicted to nicotine or other drugs including alcohol. And the younger you are when you start using nicotine products, the more likely it is that you’ll become addicted to vaping or cigarettes in the future.”

Despite this fact, students like sophomore Jake Brown* have started using Zyn two months ago to gradually quit vaping. He had more difficulty with aerobic exercises like running and realized that he needed to quit nicotine. However now that he doesn’t use his vape as much as he used to, he needs to satisfy his withdrawals somehow. That’s where Zyn comes in.

“I have a pretty high tolerance, so Zyns really just keep my withdrawals down,” Brown said.

The constant buzz and lack of lung damage may be attractive to high-school nicotine users, but it makes it harder to quit, according to Miller.

“I’m just mad that I’ve let myself get addicted again,” Miller said. “I feel like people just don’t realize that nicotine is an addictive chemical, and I feel like every single time I get back into it, I don’t remember that.”

Jacobs says that even though quitting is a hard process, Truth Initiative has free resources for young people who want to quit, including a free text line by texting DITCHVAPE to 88709, or resources at truthinitiative.org/thisisquitting.