Despite all the puns, memes, and infectious calls about not being pushed around by bureaucrats, ZYN pouches being dragged into the culture war was always pretty absurd.
Harm-reduction products should transcend the toxic, petty, time-wasting bickering that has turned many bright people into the worst version of themselves. If we can’t unite around a product that can save the lives of millions around the world, something is wrong.
And yet, that is the situation we find ourselves in.
Now that Philip Morris International has announced it’s building a new nicotine pouch factory in Colorado—creating thousands of jobs—it’s time to ask the question: Is ZYN Making America Great Again?
New ZYN factory will create thousands of jobs
The news that ZYN’s parent company, Philip Morris International (PMI), will invest $600 million into a new Colorado factory has been met with a muted response. However, it should be a cause of great celebration. That’s 5,000 construction jobs to build the facility and 500 local jobs once it’s ready to go.
However, in a world that refuses to admit how smoking alternative products have halved US adult smoking rates in less than two decades, even job creation is viewed suspiciously or outright ignored if it involves Big Tobacco expansion.
Sadly, in the minds of politicians and the media, the ZYN battle lines have been drawn with Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Tucker Carlson on one side and Democrats like Chuck Schumer on the other. There have even been claims that suggest ZYN is a gateway to right-wing politics, or even stranger, that the product is a symbol of “toxic masculinity”.
However, this framing is an oversimplification. Neither of the big US parties have been particularly supportive of pouches. Progress has happened in spite of their efforts, such as this new Swedish Match plant in Colorado.
US job creation
While the Biden administration has had its struggles, job creation is not one of them. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (reported by the Washington Post) suggests that 15 million new jobs have been created since 2020.
You can see how the Trump administration did by comparison. What’s more, per Politico, “In January, the White House said business formation has risen more in the previous three years than at any point in the two decades that the Census Bureau has tracked it.”
Of course, any comparison between Trump and Biden’s economies must acknowledge the impact of pandemic-related lockdown measures. Something else that must also be confronted is the quality of job creation. Successive governments have patted themselves on the back about job figures which were bolstered by job creation in the form of insecure, zero-hour contracts or “self-employed” driving jobs in the service industry.
Whatever has happened, it's fair to say that the promised regeneration of middle America under Donald Trump and later Joe Biden has not come to pass. As Trump limbers up for a likely second crack of the presidential whip, it remains to be seen if positive job figures can translate into material gain for his supporters in the areas that Americans have otherwise forgotten.
Good news for Colorado
Colorado has a fairly robust economy. It’s ranked 15th in GDP, 8th in GDP per capita, and 12th in per capita personal earnings. It’s also a full percentage point behind the US unemployment rate of 4.1%.
So, yeah, if we look at the news through the classic Make America Great Again lens, building a ZYN factory in America will mostly benefit an already well-to-do state. But in the context of tobacco control ghouls licking their lips at the idea of the smoking endgame, this new factory is important.
In 2023, the Cigarette & Tobacco Manufacturing industry employed about 12,000 people. The long-term future for these companies (and the jobs they provide) relies on following usage trends and pivoting into pouches, vapes, and other smoking alternatives. The new ZYN factory looks like a step in the right direction.
Emergence of pouches
PMI bet heavily on nicotine pouches in 2022 when it bought Swedish Match, which manufactures ZYN. And it makes sense.
The vaping market in the US is under attack. The FDA is slow and possibly corrupt beyond reason; I’ve read too many heart-wrenching stories of good vape shops, like Marc and Bernie’s in Michigan, going to the wall because of a hostile regulatory atmosphere.
These are small business owners getting trampled on by the government. It’s sick and wrong. Pouches could take off in this kind of environment, so there is a sense that this PMI venture will work in a way that countless Big Tobacco entries to the vaping space did not.
Another thing to think about is employment. While many vape shops are one-person businesses, others have employees. This bias against vaping is causing job losses. However, that’s not all that vanishes when vape shops are put out of business.
The vape shop owner is an interesting category of person. Most of them I’ve ever met are people who used to smoke; many are people who thought they’d never stop. If the media and health bodies don’t give citizens the truth, it falls upon individuals to look out for each other. I’m not going too far when I regard vape shop owners as the backbone of harm reduction.
The availability of smoking alternative products used to be complicated. No shops sold vape juice or machines, so you could only buy these products online. Entrepreneurs used their capital to start shops that made it easy for consumers to access vapes or pouches, ensuring we never needed to buy a pack of cigarettes. It’s fair to say these people have made greater contributions to reducing smoking-related death and illness than anyone in tobacco control.
The enemies of productivity
Tobacco control lobbying hurts small businesses. It also hoovers up public money and donations from health bodies and spends them on ludicrous campaigns and biased research. It creates jobs, too, but for its small circle of low-integrity academics and a few hangers-on.
These people are parasites. The only productive aspect of their lives is perhaps the taxes they pay. Otherwise, they have destroyed livelihoods and shortened lives via their policies, while simultaneously filling the public's head with misinformation about products that could help them live longer and enjoy retirement.
[Recent propaganda from the deranged minds at Expose Tobacco focuses largely on smoking rates in Black and LGBT communities. Yet, per the CDC, the LGBTQ+ smoking rate is 15%, with Black Americans just shy of 20%.
A report by the Appalachian Regional Commission from a few years ago suggests there are communities who are in even worse positions.
Smoking is especially pronounced in both Central (25.2 percent) and North Central Appalachia (22.8 percent). In Central Appalachia, every county has an adult smoking prevalence at least three percentage points higher than the national average; for many counties, it is much higher still.
Sadly for them, they are not the type of people that Expose Tobacco and their ilk care much about, so tobacco control is quiet on these issues. When their message does get out, it’s a small local health organisation that muddy the water and focuses on teen vaping or nicotine pouch use.
There are real health epidemics happening across the US. The opioid crisis is one of the most deadly and destructive. Can you imagine what might have been achieved if just a small portion of the resources devoted to tobacco control went towards that cause? If all the glossy posters and cringe-inducing social media campaigns “raising awareness” about vaping were funnelled into pragmatic areas like methadone clinics or job creation in those areas.
So yeah, the ZYN factory won’t “Make America Great Again ''. However, it will provide jobs in Colorado, and that’s a good thing. With more luck and a great adoption of pouches, maybe some of America’s more deprived areas will see the construction of other factories. But for now, we can only hope that citizens in those areas start getting good health information and access to products that can close dramatic health inequalities.
