Nicotine Is Back—and America’s Better for It

Not with fruit bowls or kombucha taps this time, but with a small, quietly humming fridge filled with nicotine pouches. The new corporate perk. In parts of Silicon Valley and Austin, startups are now offering them openly to staff—sometimes free, sometimes subsidized—alongside espresso machines and standing desks. They appear in break rooms, stocked like LaCroix once was, pitched not as indulgence but as “focus support.”

The reaction, from some, I’m sure, is horror. Nicotine? In 2026? Haven’t we spent decades purging it from society, scrubbing it from films, banishing it from bars, demonizing it in school assemblies? And yet here it is again, passed around not in alleys but in open-plan offices.

Which raises an awkward question. Is it possible that nicotine has been unfairly vilified? It has.

Remove the smoke, the tar, the yellowed fingers, and the coughing fits, and nicotine itself looks like a surprisingly modest molecule. It isn’t heroin. It isn’t alcohol. It doesn’t destroy ambition or dissolve discipline. Nicotine sharpens. It tightens attention. It turns a can’t-do attitude into a let’s-get-on-with-it impatience.

For centuries, nicotine was treated as a tool—sometimes indulgent, often medicinal. Indigenous cultures used tobacco ritually and sparingly. European physicians prescribed it for concentration, digestion, and even melancholy. Coffeehouses paired it naturally with caffeine, the two forming a kind of gentleman’s handshake designed to keep thoughts moving.

The problem was never nicotine alone. The problem was what we did with it. Industrial cigarettes turned a cognitive aid into a delivery system for combustion, addiction, and mass illness. We blamed the molecule for the method. Then we spent the next half-century treating nuance as collateral damage, in the name of public health. And nuance matters.

Nicotine, isolated and dosed responsibly, behaves less like a vice and more like a mental aid. It increases acetylcholine and dopamine signaling. It improves reaction time. It enhances working memory. Some studies even suggest it may modestly boost testosterone—an eyebrow-raising detail in a country where testosterone levels have plummeted for decades.

American men today have dramatically lower testosterone than their grandfathers did at the same age. Energy’s down. Drive is dulled. Focus is fractured. We snack constantly, scroll endlessly, and wonder why motivation feels like a muscle that has atrophied. Against that backdrop, nicotine’s reappearance is almost logical.

I enjoy Zyn. I don’t romanticize it, and don’t pretend it’s saintly. It’s addictive, but so is caffeine, sugar and pornography. The difference is that nicotine doesn’t seduce you into staying still. It gives you a lift.

Compare it to the modern alternatives. Ultra-processed snacks engineered to hijack appetite. Energy drinks bloated with synthetic sweetness and chemical poisons. Mindless grazing disguised as “fuel.” Nicotine pouches, by contrast, don’t expand waistlines or spike insulin. They don’t demand another handful. 

But any pleasure must be punished. Any stimulant must be suspect. We live in a culture that champions chronic snacking, casual drinking, and pharmaceutical dependence while recoiling at a substance that dares to increase productivity.

There’s something faintly comic about watching the wellness class rediscover what previous generations already knew. The same culture that banned smoking now micro-doses nicotine in minimalist packaging and calls it self-care. The sin returns, cleansed and rebranded.

This isn’t an argument for excess. Nicotine can still form habits. It deserves respect, not reverence. But respect cuts both ways. Treating it as a moral contaminant rather than a helpful tool has produced neither healthier citizens nor clearer thinkers. In an age of psychedelic retreats and ceremonial ayahuasca, nicotine is quaint. A modest aid for a modest purpose. No calories. No cosmic revelations. Just a spark.