Richard Crosby 20 November 2025

 

The Observer Sensemaker is a podcast that produces concise, daily shows about big news stories. The latest edition is a tight sub-10-minute on nicotine pouches, titled Why are nicotine pouches more popular than ever?

The title is strange because it evokes an imaginary past in which nicotine pouches were deeply popular and have since experienced a resurgence. Instead, we are dealing with a relatively new product that is disrupting the existing smoking market by taking former and would-be smokers and turning them onto a far healthier product. This dynamic is, unsurprisingly, totally omitted from these sense-making endeavours.

Anyway, let’s take a look.

Does the Observer make sense of nicotine pouches? 

Read enough articles on nicotine pouches, and you’ll notice the desperation among the authors to make this into something it’s not. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the sound of straining, as these ostensibly serious people take the fight to Big Tobacco or whatever they think they’re doing.

Often it’s little things, such as the contribution of Professor Barbara Sahakian of Clinical Neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, who states that “Well nicotine itself is highly addictive. It’s one of the most addictive drugs that we know about.” 

Now, people love to compare nicotine to opioids, alcohol, and cocaine, often making claims that the substance is equally or more addictive than the “big three”. But no one is overdosing from nicotine, isolating their loved ones, getting into bar fights, or breaking and entering into homes to sate their habit. Once you remove combustible tobacco from the equation, the long-term harms aren’t even in the ballpark of lethal. 

Prof Sahakian’s exaggerations don’t stop there. Later in the podcast, she claims that nicotine is “powerful stimulant”, presumably in league with meth. Crazy. It’s, at best, a mild stimulant, like coffee. 

Finally, Prof Sahakian pulls out the old canard, claiming that we just don’t know what nicotine does to young minds. In the not-so-distant past, teen smoking was around 50%. As Charles A Gardner often says, if nicotine had really grave impacts on young minds, we’d see it today. 

A little more sense

Andy McGregor is the Director of Policy Research at the Scottish Centre for Social Research. His contributions are more grounded, as he suggests that “whilst research has shown that young people’s use of nicotine pouches is still low proportionally, it has been ticking up, especially among young boys.” While McGregor opines that some youths access pouches via corner shops, he points out that one of the more common ways to access the product is peer-to-peer via schools. 

This acquisition pathway demonstrates why strict over-18 bans won’t stop youth access. As we’ve seen with plenty of other substances, bans won’t magically eliminate either youth use or youths’ desire to experiment, despite what the government would have you believe. However, sensible regulations are a good start, which is why everyone should get behind the 20IsPlenty campaign.

Common perspective

The podcast also has a section where Prof Sahakian compares the level of nicotine in a pouch versus what users might get from a cigarette. As we so often see, these public health voices are out here fretting about nicotine levels to the point that they just blow past all the harm of combustible tobacco. 

Then, of course, we get the usual WHO-approved lines like the tobacco industry is getting a  “whole generation of young people addicted to nicotine”. That’s the word “whole” meaning “all of; entire”.

Another common talking point that Sahakian dredges up is the classic “because they were meant to just help people who were cigarette smokers come off of smoking.” 

This sentiment reveals the naivety of tobacco control and its apparatchiks and various mouthpieces. While that is how governments or health bodies might have seen vapes or pouches, it’s not really for them to tell anyone how to consume nicotine. \

The fact is, nicotine has been part of the human experience for 100s of years. It has many, many benefits, and we’ve found a way to unlock them without the health downsides. Sure, smoking cessation is one utility of these harm reduction products, but it’s one of several.