Media Watch: Daily Mail’s Daily Moral Panic

The Daily Mail churns out a lot of drivel on nicotine pouches and everything else. Their latest article turns the moral panic up to 10 in a bid to keep people scared and scrolling. Let’s take a look.

The headline

The headline is funny. The scare quotes are doing a lot of heavy lifting here by claiming nicotine pouches are invisible. What they mean is discrete because they don’t produce smoke like cigarettes or vapour like vapes.

Little lip pillows

I read a fair bit about nicotine pouches, but I’ve never seen this phrase anywhere. It’s kind of alliterative, and it’s fun to say. But it’s a bit too cutesy for my liking.

Little lip pillows sound more like an aftercare product for people who get lip fillers, which would be on brand for the Mail and its readers.

The children

Part of this article looks at the adoption of nicotine pouches across different regions, including Australia. Of course, the Mail gives ample space to the airing of accusatory comments that nicotine pouch manufacturers target children. These statements are not accurate and are never supported by any arguments. We’re just meant to accept them at face value.

Of course, opening the definition of “children” is just part of an attention-grabbing game. By definition, someone can count as a child if they are under 18 years of age. However, the Mail uses two ADULTS (aged 18 and 20) who have used nicotine pouches to strike fear into the hearts of their readers.

If child use is so endemic, why not find a source from that demographic? It should be very easy. Unless…

Questionable sources

The article also finds support for its thesis from as biased a source as possible. Becky Freeman, a University of Sydney lecturer on public health, is a well-known and well-funded opponent of alternative nicotine products.

We’ve laughed at her shaky interpretation of Greek mythology before, but she is intimately bound to the tobacco control industrial complex, which is concerning. Look at this paper she wrote from last year and go to the conflict of interests section, aka Acknowledgments.

Lots of familiar names there. I’m not saying that these conflicts of interest make what she says invalid. It’s just that presenting her as some concerned academic who just wants our children to be healthy is inaccurate. Her funding relies on hyping up a problem, which she does very successfully, thanks partly to lazy news organisations like the Mail.

The Mail also calls upon University of Wollongong chemical toxicologist Jody Morgan. She has published many papers exploring e-liquids, most recently one that looked at the use of cooling agents WS-3 and WS-23 in disposable cigarettes and e-liquids.

These compounds are FDA-approved and used widely across the cosmetics and food industries. Other research has found these compounds have no adverse effects. As you can see from the table above, the concentration of WS-23 is minor, but who knows what Morgan’s future research might unearth?

Final thoughts

The Daily Mail is a business, and clicks are what keep the lights on. But they seemed to have abandoned any form of balance when dealing with nicotine alternative products. The sources they use and the language and rhetoric around novel products are filling people’s heads with misinformation.

A quick glance at the comments section for this article lays bare how much work needs to be done to rid the public’s mind of lies and misunderstandings about smoking alternative products.

Patients coming into the respiratory ward with pouches dangling from their mouths? This obviously never happened.

Then why are mouth cancer rates lower in Sweden? If people use nicotine pouches and not cigarettes, mouth cancer rates will plummet.

The last one is perhaps the most illustrative of what we are talking about. Derbydave, currently smokes roll-up cigarettes. He does have a pack of Nordic Spirit. However, he’s cautious about trying them because of the misinformation published by the likes of the Daily Mail. That’s disgusting.