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Comment by jdross | Hacker News Reader

“While the pouches are considered a tobacco product, they don’t contain any tobacco, and are instead made from the plant fiber cellulose”

It’s just Zyn, which doesn’t seem that dramatically different than coffee. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink coffee or use nicotine

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Nicotine is addictive, much more so than coffee

it's like 25x more addicting than coffee, not sure how OP misses that

Probably not the case for some modern pure nicotine products (gum, patches). Vaping is harder to say due to lack of data and clear cases of addiction in young people, but pure nicotine is definitely a different animal than the classical delivery forms. See my response to GP.

I wonder if the issue with vapes isn't the sweeteners they put in them. I sometimes vape a specific liquid, which has never given me any cravings. I'll just stop after my bottle is done for multiple months until I remember to buy some more. I never carry my vape with me when I leave home (not to the office, not for multi-week holidays, nothing). It's not difficult to go without, I don't even think about it when I don't have it.

But the other day I ended up vaping some melon-flavored liquid. When it was empty, I was going crazy for a few hours, I absolutely had to have more. And it didn't even have more nicotine than what I usually vape. It was just the sweet taste that had me wanting more, exactly like back in my college days when I was eating Snickers bars like no tomorrow. Now that was a habit that was tough to break. And most people I see vaping out in the street seem to be vaping those ultra-sweet smelling liquids.

An interesting thought, I myself have met at least a couple people that tried to break an addiction by switching to vape products that were essentially just flavour (no nicotine, no THC; THC vapes are common and legal in Canada) and somehow stayed just as addicted to the flavour / oral stimulation. So that sounds at least plausible to me.

> which has never given me any cravings

I've seen multiple friends that could give up an addiction: until after a while and then they couldn't.

For many people, addictions are not that addictive until they are.

Be careful generalizing from your own experiences. Try and learn from the mistakes your (often older) peers have been taught the hardest way.

I've seen it with drinking, vaping, smoking, meth, bad partner, gambling; my friends that weren't hooked, could take it or leave it, and then one day they find they are hooked.

Take care.

they miss it because they're an industry plant, mate.

bots are very active on HN and are very effective

Utter nonsense. I have replaced my ADHD prescription with nicotine patches, and in my experience I have had worse withdrawals, and greater desire to consume caffeine than either dermal nicotine or dexamfetamine. And I’m only a cup a day kinda guy, and I used to be a heavy smoker for years, so I know how dangerous the stuff can be.

If we’re talking about smoking or vaping, or nicotine pouches, sure, but mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.

Utter nonsense

Got something other than anecdata? Because a web search returns a list of contrary sources as long as my arm.

But, hell, if we are trading stories, I dipped snuff for 30 years and I’ve consumed coffee since middle school. I can go days without coffee, even if I might not be happy about it. Quitting tobacco, OTOH, that was tough, with multiple starts and stops until success.

Tobacco is not pure nicotine. If you can’t even get your basics straight, I’m not sure on what level we can even have a discussion about it.

Here’s from someone that knows what they’re talking about: https://gwern.net/nicotine

> mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.

Then surely you have some evidence, especially that caffeine is more addictive, rather than "hand-waving it away" via personal anecdote?

Nicotine is depending on how you measure the 3rd or 4th most addictive substance on the planet. It's up there with Heroine, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Meth.

If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.

What dimension of “addictive” are you anchoring on? Capture rate? Withdrawal severity? Reinforcement strength? Relapse rate after quitting? Nicotine dominates on some of those and not others.

Pretty clear from the responses to OP that most people are quite unaware there is almost two decades of decent research on pure nicotine now, and that, outside of vaping (where hard evidence is mostly lacking, due to the novelty), the purer stuff probably really isn't all that addictive, in the grand scheme of things. In many cases it is hard to even say it is much different than caffeine.

It's a reasonable mistake, I'd say. We spent those decades conflating "nicotine" with "smoking" and, through herculean efforts, managed to get the smoking rate down to 12-14% (in Germany it's still 22.7%!). Now, tobacco companies have come through with genuinely less harmful, genuinely less addictive products, but because of their previous wild duplicity, nobody really "believes" it. They think that nicotine must cause cancer. "Fool me once," for sure.

Whether nicotine is addictive is a completely different question than whether it causes cancer

Can you point to said research because everything I can find from any kind of authoritative source is that form doesn't matter and nicotine is strongly addictive in all of them.

There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/20...

The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.

There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.

Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes

Plenty of the sources I linked at https://gwern.net/nicotine are scientific and high-quality, that is not just some lazy list or junk compilation.

Nothing wrong with still being cautious about pure nicotine products though, and I definitely would be cautious about vaping.

It is really not so clear at all this is the case for pure nicotine products. See https://gwern.net/nicotine#habit-formation, and https://gwern.net/nicotine#dependence for a starter / some brief counter-evidence.

Anecdotally, I found I developed a dependence on nicotine pouches very quickly. It was also very easy to exceed the nicotine equivalent of a pack of cigarettes daily without even noticing.

But it was also easy to quit by substituting nicotine-free pouches, and withdrawal symptoms only lasted like 3 days.

bullshit. i've been smoking cigars for 5 years now. sometimes 2 or 3 a day and have zero issues stopping or going without a smoke for months. i was surprised as i was never smoker, but it is what it is. nicotine addiction is not nicotine addiction but cigarette addiction. cigars are pure tobacco. nothing else. cigarettes have over thousand ingredients in them. cigars also have higher nicotine dose than cigarettes and as i have said, zero issues.

know thy enemy.

It is bullshit. Stopping nicotine is like 2 days of mild discomfort. Stopping caffeine is absolute hell.

as i said, nictoine is a non-factor. as for caffeine, i quit multiple times. once the headaches are gone, which takes a week or two, followed by another week, or few, of feeling lethargic, it is back to normal(ie. give it a month altogether). so it's not too bad. it might be also easier to wean off slowly by decreasing caffeine consumption over longer period than quitting cold turkey to avoid the negative effects altogether.

Coffee doesn’t give you mouth cancer

Do nicotine pouches give you mouth cancer?

I don't think zyn has been studied enough to be conclusive, but it does have some negative effects similar to dip I suppose? Dip on the other hand is described as using something like 'fiberglass' that cuts your mouth so your gums can absorb the nicotine quicker, of course the tobacco industry denies this. I've only tried dip once, and it was like a kick to the face. I'll stick to casual cigar smoking (its been 4 years though!).

Does nicotine?

No, //cancer stems from the carcinogens in the burning / heating of tobacco//. Nicotine is not cancerous in itself any more than caffeine.

I'm not a doctor though so while I might sound sure it's based on what I've read on the topic over the many years.

Edit : rightly corrected its not just heating and burning, its tobacco and others in general. But nicotine itself is not cancerous.

Chewing tobacco causes cancer

But not because of the nicotine.

Cancer also stems from non-heated tobacco because the plant itself contains carcinogens that are pressed into the skin in the mouth for example, often including lesions and such

Cancer no, but nicotine is implicated in heart disease and other cardiovascular issues.

Is that because it's a stimulant, or is there some other known mechanism? It seems like most (maybe all) stimulants I've read about are correlated with cardiovascular issues.

I think one theory is that nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. Though whether, in its pure form, it is a particularly significant one, i.e. any worse than caffeine, is really not so clear.

These kind of synthetic nicotine products aren't carcinogenic. They were originally developed as a safer replacement for the traditional Swedish practice of stuffing a bag of tobacco in your mouth, although after acquisition by Phillip Morris they've become common among people who never used tobacco in the first place. (As the article gestures towards, they are "tobacco products" under US law because of their nicotine content, even though they contain no tobacco leaf.)

they are horrendously addicting though which is the huge difference between nicotine and caffeine. Even though I love caffeine I can go days without it no problem (besides being slightly more tired). Habitual nicotine users tend to need to re-up every hour or so

I quit zyns a year ago and still crave them daily. Sooooo good and addictive and they don’t have that “it’s killing you” imperative to quit like cigarettes do

I'm not sure it is actually all that clear that pure nicotine products really are so addictive as people believe. E.g. most studies claiming such addictiveness may simply be because those that get addicted to patches / gum were already addicted to cigarettes (or other classic tobacco product) prior. See e.g. Gwern's notes on the topic.

https://gwern.net/nicotine#habit-formation

https://gwern.net/nicotine#dependence

Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be, which I don't think is credible at all. It's very common for addicts to falsely believe that they're not addicted and could quit whenever they want.

> Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be

This is an incredible and outright lie.

Actually try reading the page I linked, there are plenty of links to scientific studies, scientific reviews, and high-quality resources, as well as lots of careful notes about serious confounds in the usual studies. This includes in exactly the sections I linked.

By all means still be cautious and not careless about using the stuff, that is a perfectly sane position. But I think it is very clear that e.g. patches and gum are highly unlikely to have anything even approaching the risk profile of classic tobacco products.

According to several reputable sources (cancer societies around the world), it isn't known if this is a risk yet. What are you being this on?

I'm not encouraging anyone to use these things, but we should only make claims that are based on evidence.

Given the long-term, widespread usage of coffee, is there something specific they're waiting on? Or is that an "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" thing?

Your final statement doesn't really add value without knowing that, unless you agree that we shouldn't assume other people are actually people, and not lizards in people suits until they prove, definitively, otherwise.

My mistake. I interpreted their comment to be implying that nicotine pouches do. I'm not referring to evidence for the safety of coffee, but of nicotine pouches.

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