If anyone should be able to understand the dynamic of consumers leaving behind a product for something less toxic, it’s CNN. After all, that’s why the media giant has been haemorrhaging users to social media platforms such as X over the last few years.
However, just like with their gradual slide into obsolescence, big news organisations are in total denial about what is happening with smoking alternative products like vapes and nicotine pouches. Take this recent article by the aforementioned CNN, titled “For young users, tobacco packets like Zyn are a nicotine trend that just won’t quit”.
Let’s ignore the clumsy wording of the title for a moment and get down to brass tacks. ZYN is not a tobacco product. It’s kind of the whole point of it. To misunderstand that right out of the gates is a big part of why CNN is no longer considered a trusted news source by American and international citizens.
The relentless negative news stories about pouches and vaping and the elevation of anything that can be manipulated into fear about these smoking alternatives are curious. An incredible amount of money is sloshing around from people like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg through a labyrinth of opaque NGOs and health organisations. It would be naive to think this money isn’t having an effect on editorial policy, even if it’s difficult to prove definitely.
What we can say for sure is that there has been a real uptick in what seems to be glorified press releases for anti-nicotine bodies masquerading as news articles.
In the CNN article above, the founder and director of Stanford University’s Tobacco Prevention Toolkit, Dr. Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, gets the kid gloves treatment. She is allowed to witter on unchallenged, making bizarre statements like, "Teens don’t understand that this is nicotine,” about products that have the words “nicotine pouches” emblazoned on their tins.
The author of the piece is also happy to pump out industrial-scale misinformation throughout the article. For example, she claims that nicotine could have a “profound effect” on the teenage brain “which may harm their ability to pay attention, learn and remember things.” As Charles Gardner often reminds us, US smoking prevalence was over 40% in the 1970s. If nicotine was so destructive to the mind, where is all the smoking-related brain damage from those generations?
Sadly, it gets worse. The author invokes some voodoo mathematics to suggest that a 6mg nicotine pouch is equivalent to smoking three packs of cigarettes! For reference, a single cigarette contains somewhere between 10 to 12mg of nicotine. I’m no mathematician, but six does not equal 600.
The author’s statement is a shocking error that should never have made it past an editor. However, as we know, health professionals and newspapers are free to print these kinds of lies without consequences. Well, aside from shredding their credibility and trust with the reader.
Sadly, what is not acknowledged — and is rarely ever acknowledged in these articles — is that these novel products are the driver of America’s first smoke-free generation. As CDC figures revealed late last year, American youth are not that interested in cigarettes: only between 1.1% and 1.7% of US youth smoke. That is the context in which nicotine pouches must be understood.
If your side hustle is extracting money from school boards to warn kids about the ills of smoking, then those numbers are concerning from a personal standpoint. For everyone else, it’s great news.
Smoking is lethal; pouches and vapes are not. If CNN wants to regain the trust and readership they have lost over the last few years, it should stop with what amounts to native advertisements for grifters like the Tobacco Prevention Toolkit.
Tobacco has been prevented. It’s over. No one from that generation is smoking anymore. Nicotine use isn’t even in the top 10 problems affecting youths in American schools. It’s time to stop diverting resources and attention away from things that matter.
