In defense of the tobacco executives working 80-hour weeks to feed our Zyn addiction

I was having lunch at The Capital Grille last Tuesday with a senior aide to the Senate Finance Committee when I witnessed the future of American productivity. Halfway through his bone-in ribeye, the twenty-four-year-old paused, retrieved a small plastic puck from his tailored trousers, and wedged a tiny white fleece pillow of 6-milligram wintergreen nicotine into his upper lip. Within three minutes, his pupils dilated to the size of dinner plates, his resting heart rate visibly doubled, and he seamlessly explained the optimal strategy for defunding the Department of Education without breaking eye contact.

It was a masterclass in focus. Yet, if you listen to the public health establishment and the hand-wringing coastal media, this young man is a victim. The nanny state is currently in a state of absolute hysteria over the soaring popularity of Zyn, the smokeless nicotine pouches that have taken the nation by storm. Because Philip Morris International and other tobacco giants are now scrambling to build massive new manufacturing plants to keep up with the insatiable demand, the usual suspects are screaming about corporate greed and youth addiction.

The Food and Drug Administration recently unleashed a barrage of warning letters to retailers for daring to sell flavored Zyn products to underage buyers. It is the classic reflex of a bloated bureaucracy: attack the point of sale. But if a sixteen-year-old is industrious enough to bypass federal age restrictions just to secure a tin of Black Cherry pouches, perhaps we should be recruiting them into the intelligence community rather than punishing the gas station attendant who facilitated the transaction. We claim to want a driven, entrepreneurial youth, yet we criminalize the very grit required to obtain restricted stimulants.

Let's be honest. We spent the last decade complaining that America doesn't make things anymore, that our industrial base has hollowed out, and that we have lost our competitive edge. Now, Philip Morris is pouring upwards of $600 million into a massive new manufacturing facility in Colorado, specifically designed to churn out enough nicotine pouches to satisfy the skyrocketing global appetite. In any other sector, a $600 million domestic investment would be heralded by the White House with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Instead, because the product happens to create an inescapable lifelong chemical dependency, the project is treated like a toxic waste dump. It is a stunning double standard.

The hysteria reached a fever pitch last week when health experts warned that influencers on podcasts and social media are actively promoting Zyn as a cognitive enhancer and a wellness product. So-called medical professionals are rushing to cable news to declare that there are no actual health benefits to resting a highly alkaline salt pouch against your gums until the tissue goes numb. But this fundamentally misunderstands the optics of the situation. Whether or not the pouch is technically curing diseases is irrelevant; what matters is the messaging. If a young entrepreneur feels like a titan of industry because he has a peppermint pouch tucked under his lip, who are we to strip him of that placebo?

The real victims in this entire saga are the supply chain managers at Swedish Match—the subsidiary that manufactures Zyn—who are currently working eighty-hour weeks just to ensure the nation's fraternities and junior investment bankers do not experience withdrawal symptoms. Imagine the sheer logistical nightmare of trying to keep up with a consumer base that literally begins shaking if their local convenience store runs out of the Cool Mint flavor. These executives are moving mountains to prevent a widespread collapse of white-collar productivity, and they are being vilified for it.

I have always believed that you cannot fully understand a policy issue until you have experienced it firsthand. So, during a closed-door meeting on K Street yesterday afternoon, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I purchased a tin of the 6-milligram Citrus pouches and, following the instructions of a nearby lobbyist, placed three of them into my upper lip simultaneously.

Within moments, the room began to spin. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead, my digestive tract initiated a sequence of events I can only describe as hostile, and I experienced a brief but vivid hallucination in which I could see the individual sound waves of my own heartbeat. I was forced to excuse myself, lie down on the floor of a marble restroom for forty-five minutes, and seriously contemplate my own mortality.

It was, without question, one of the most agonizing physiological experiences of my adult life. And yet, as I lay there pressed against the cold tile, waiting for the room to stop pitching like a ship in a storm, I felt a profound sense of patriotic pride. I knew that somewhere in a boardroom, a Philip Morris executive was looking at a rising stock chart, knowing they had successfully commodified that exact feeling. Say what you will about the side effects, but you simply have to respect the hustle.