Today, Explained - Living in Zyn

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer accidentally started a culture war over Zyn. Semafor’s Dave Weigel explains. And Vox health reporter Keren Landman, MD, compares the nicotine pouch to cigarettes and vapes. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Kim Eggleston, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a new threat to American children. Uh, Sean, it's not that new. Oh, uh, okay. There is a threat to American children. It's a new tobacco product. Well, the product has nicotine, which comes from tobacco leaf, but there's no tobacco leaf in this product. Oh. Okay.

There is a threat to American children. It's a new nicotine product. Not new. Maybe you've heard of it, or even seen it behind the counter at your local gas station. It's called Zyn. It's called Zyn. Z-Y-N. Zyn. And it's got politicians on edge. Definitely some politicians. We're going to Zynvestigate the culture war over these nicotine pouches on Today Explained.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. What do you think today explained us? I don't know. Ram Asforam here with David Weigel, who does not write about nicotine products for Semaphore. He writes about national politics in the United States, but he recently wrote about the intersection of the two. So we started with the essentials. What is Zyn?

Zyn has been around for 10 years, the brand itself. You have seen in your local gas station or wherever you pick up tobacco products or nicotine products, you see cigarettes, you see stuff to chew, you see gum, and you see these pouches, which are little containers of nicotine, 2 grams, 3 grams, 6 grams, that you put above your upper lip or below your lower lip, put in your mouth, and they dissolve. This has been around for a while. There's lots of nicknames for people who have discovered this product and see it as just an incredible way to enhance your mind, to connect with your nervous system, to get energized middle of the day without the calories of coffee or the cancer risk of cigarettes. I mean, it's got both of those. It had a pretty good reputation in the nicotine enjoyer community.

And then Chuck Schumer came in. And why is it that Chuck Schumer came in? Why is this something that he's taken on? Schumer has done this many times. I mean, before he was Senate Majority Leader, he was a congressman from New York with a very good sense of what would get attention and what people might think was a threat to their children. Senator Chuck Schumer is taking on an energy drink backed by popular YouTube stars.

And the problem here is that the product has so much caffeine in it that it puts Red Bull to shame. A U.S. senator is calling for the ban of a synthetic drug used by young people for a cocaine-like high. These are very dangerous drugs and they call them bath salts, but they're not. It's sort of everyone's winking at each other. They ought to be abolished. Senator Schumer says somehow this industrial chemical safely used in shoes and yoga mats found its way into food product. We want it banned in all foods. They want to keep putting it in yoga mats and shoes. Not too many people eat those, so that's okay. Schumer has been here before warning about the risk of flavored cigarettes,

of clothed cigarettes, flavored vapes, just ways in which nicotine might be marketed to minors. And that's what he thought might be happening with Zin. Kids know what Zin is. Their parents don't. There are also Zinfluencers who have made nicotine pouches a part of their online personalities. These things get you laser focused, right? You're buzzing off your mind. Freaking buttery smooth Zimbabwe. The potential is limitless. You need a cut. Maybe just you're trying to lose weight or something. Papa Zimbabwe. Or just, you know, if you want to enjoy one. Let's go, baby.

The company is not paying them to do this. They can't control exactly how enthusiastic people are about their products. But that was Schumer's idea here is that, hey, there's a new product. You might not even be aware of it, but your kid certainly is. So today I'm delivering a warning to parents because these nicotine pouches seem to lock their sights on young kids, teenagers and even lower, and then use the social media to hook them. Schumer didn't come out the gate and say, there's this product, I'm going to ban it. He said that you should be worried about this. And just by saying that people, parents especially,

should be worried, he woke up a lot of angry people. Who's angry? The members of the nation of Zimbabwe. Little Zimbabwe? Which is one term I discovered as I reached out to people who either use Zin or just believe that it should be available as a product. What's up, boys? You can call me King of Zimbabwe or Tucker Carlson's cousin. Hundreds of millions of these are sold across the country according to their stats. But it's a large group of people who take

this nicotine product a couple times a day. And I met some. I mean, the ones that I met who were more enthusiastic for the product, more angry generally, were in the conservative movement. But they'll point to people who do not care about politics, people who just are, you know, a contractor who's got a job where you need a pep of energy in the middle of the day, or you used to smoke and you missed the kick, you're just going to take this no-harm nicotine pouch, you're not even spitting it into a spittoon or something gross. But let's call it like a blue-collar nicotine habit, I could say. And that's how a lot of the fans of Zend who love it for not just the product and the nicotine for a cultural reason, that's one thing they'll say about it is that, hey, all we're trying to do here is enjoy a drug, yes, a controlled substance,

sure, but one that just gives you some energy. And it's been around for hundreds of years, nicotine. Why are we having our rights restricted while the government, Chuck Schumer in particular, are trying to make it easier to buy marijuana? And when it comes to flavors, OK, no, it's not advertised to minors, but you can go into a dispensary and buy flavored marijuana edible products. Why can't you buy a flavored nicotine product? That's kind of why it became a burgeoning culture war issue. And is Schumer being met with opposition in Washington itself? Is Marjorie Taylor Greene like, you know, is she zinning? She has not talked a lot about her own zin habits. She talks about her CrossFit, less about what else she might take.

My apologies. Looks like the average troll in my Twitter feed, so I don't really care. But you bring up a good point that the first reaction to Schumer came from some of the more media savvy members of the Republican conference in the House, a little bit in the Senate, most of the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene saying that this is leading to a Zinn-surrection. But also, I thought more significantly, Richard Hudson, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Now, this is the group that is tasked with keeping a Republican majority in place. He immediately posed with a pack of Zinn in hunting gear, talking about how he was going to protect this stuff.

And Republicans like Hudson said, OK, Democrats just stumbled into a very stupid cultural war issue for them. If Schumer is so worried about teenagers, why don't you close the border? One hundred and ten thousand per year of Americans, our fellow citizens and many of them teenagers are dying of fentanyl overdoses. That was sort of the Republican response to Schumer. And Democrats, are they uniformly behind this? No, they're not uniformly at all. The first Democrat to comment on it was John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, who was stopped in the hallway and said, I'm going to err on the side of more freedom and personal choices of those kinds of things.

And I made that same argument when I wanted to legalize marijuana. And I think there's bigger issues to address than that product. And other Democrats didn't really jump on board. And that itself is significant. When there have been crackdowns on nicotine and advertising nicotine in the past, the recent past, really, starting in the 80s and the 90s, it was popular. You didn't have that many Republicans saying, we're on board with wanting Philip Morris to make more money selling tobacco products.

This was more unpopular. And I think there are cross currents I don't think Democrats are even aware of. Marijuana is left coded. Broadly speaking, it's a left-wing thing. And broadly speaking, nicotine is a right-wing thing. And Chuck Schumer supports the left-wing substance. And the left-wing substance makes you kind of lazy and dumb and passive. And the right-wing substance makes you more alert. They hate nicotine. They love THC. They're promoting weed to your children, but they're not letting you use tobacco or even non-tobacco nicotine delivery devices, which don't cause cancer. Why do they hate nicotine? I mean, they didn't really connect it to the Panera lemonade thing, but there's more, there's a lot of outrage about that right now, about the idea of people having

too much of a energizing drug coursing through their veins. And the people I talked to said, yeah, we're for this and Democrats are against it because they hate the idea of people being independent and energized and breaking free of their cultural programming. That was their take, one that I really think surprised Schumer. Hmm. I mean, does Chuck Schumer have a case here that kids are out there committing, you know, venial zins? He didn't make that strong of a case. Not that I'm judging every Chuck Schumer press conference. His theory is that, yes, if you

advertise a product with flavors, it's going to appeal to kids. It's going to look cool to kids. They're going to use it. I don't think that's crazy. I think that that's true of many products. That's true of a lot of sugary things that are bad for you. Even though you can't walk into a dispensary without an ID, you can drive through L.A. and see billboards advertising what sounds like really good tasting edibles. Right. So this is this is an issue that the government does have the power to regulate because one of the first things Barack Obama did as president was sign legislation, giving the FDA more power to regulate the nicotine industry, to investigate how it advertises, that has led to different waves of crackdowns and different waves of popular nicotine products. And this has gone in two directions, right? This has gone in the Mike Bloomberg direction. Ten years ago, if you were at CPAC, a conservative conference, you could see Sarah Palin hold a giant Big Gulp full of soda as a protest against Mike Bloomberg trying to regulate caffeine products and sugary drinks in New York. Today,

you can see people saying, you're not going to take my Zin away from me as a different kind of protest. One is a more libertarian, the government should not be telling anyone what they should consume. And the other is a little more, I'd say, a little more traditionally conservative. The government, if it has any role whatsoever, it's in making society a little bit better collectively through police power. So why is it focused on nicotine and not weed? Is there a chance that this Schumer request that the FDA do something about this goes anywhere or is this going to be DOA at the FDA? So the FDA might act on what Schumer did. Certainly, there's not going to be legislation about this. I do think there was enough of a public backlash, enough of a sense that you

are irritating not just conservatives, but maybe some independent voters who don't care about politics but want to be left alone when it comes to their nicotine products. I think that might put some fear in Democrats before they issue legislation. And certainly that was the tone I got when I talked to conservatives who were working in this space, that Democrats should have learned in 2016 when the Obama administration was cracking down on flavored vapes, they should have learned from 2020 when Trump almost did. Trump's FDA was thinking about it. It's actually a reason why Scott Gottlieb,

who's now a very well-known sort of COVID expert, why he left the FDA. They think, look, we've proven if you mess with nicotine users, not guys who are blowing smoke everywhere and getting a room full of it, but people who just want to be left alone with their nicotine, you're going to pay a political price. That was a response from the last couple attempts

to regulate any of these products. You can read David Weigel at Semaphore.com. When we're back on Today Explained, there will be a doctor in the house. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier

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ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained. Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, a member of the FDIC, and terms and conditions do apply. Come to where the flavor is. Come to Zen Country. Today, Explained is back and we're joined by Dr. Karen Landman, health writer at Vox. Karen, you're writing about Zin. We are talking about Zin. What would you call that? That's like...

Zinergy, I think. Zinergy, definitely Zinergy or Zinbiosis. Very nice. We spoke to David Weigel about the politics of Zin, the nation of Zimbabwe, but we wanted to come to you for some of the science. How do these nicotine pouches work when you wedge one in the upper or lower deccy of your mouthpiece? The way this works is basically there's this little pouch made of this permeable membrane. And that can be like an organic cellulose compounds and it might be made of something else. But basically, it's just something through which the nicotine can leach out and get absorbed into the tissue of your gum or the tissue of your lip when you hold it sort of tucked up in there for minutes to an hour or so.

From there, it causes all the effects that nicotine causes. It often makes people feel a little bit of a buzz, a little bit more energetic, a little bit more focused, and like kind of like a really big cup of coffee will do it also raise your blood pressure a little bit of a buzz, a little bit more energetic, a little bit more focused, and kind of like a really big cup of coffee will do it also. Raise your blood pressure a little bit, raise your heart rate a little bit, and just kind of make you feel a little bit high. So people like it for that reason. Obviously, this is a sort of modern cigarette alternative. How does it compare to a cigarette? How much nicotine is in a cigarette versus a Zin pouch or a similar

product from another leading supplier? A cigarette delivers about a milligram of nicotine, even though it contains a lot more of it. The amount that you actually end up taking in when you're smoking a cigarette is about a milligram of nicotine. These pouches, depending on the brand and the formulation, contain anywhere between one milligram per pouch to like 12 milligrams per pouch. Holy smokes. But of course, we should point out here that unlike smoking half a pack of cigarettes, when you drop a Zin pouch or some other pouch into your mouth, into your upper or lower deck, whatever it might be, you're not getting all those chemicals and all that smoke and all that tobacco? Yeah, that's kind of the point.

I will say a lot of what we know about nicotine, we know from studies of tobacco, and it's really sometimes hard for people to disentangle the concept of nicotine without tobacco in their minds. But that's really what we are talking about when we're talking about a nicotine pouch. We're talking about one of the most active, most addictive ingredients, the most addictive ingredient in tobacco without the rest of tobacco. And that's really, really important for talking about its health effects and for talking about its addictive potential. I think we've kind of touched on how a nicotine pouch compares to ye olde cigarette, Karen, but how do these pouches smoke from a vape, that smoke delivers the nicotine much more quickly in sort of a large dose to the tiny little capillaries in your lungs.

And so it gets absorbed into your bloodstream a lot more quickly. So your bloodstream level of nicotine goes from like zero to 60 when you take a hit off a vape, where it increases much more slowly when you are using a nicotine pouch. And when it comes to creating addiction, that actually makes pouches have a relatively lower addictive potential than vapes do, theoretically. Okay. So, what I'm getting from you is not as addictive as vapes, not as unhealthy as cigarettes, but they're going to make you feel energized and a little awake. And maybe you'll have some sort of zesty, fruity, who knows what sensation in your mouth there. What's the downside, Garrett? Yeah, what could be bad, right? It actually sounds great. I feel really weird

saying this because so much public health communication around this starts by saying no tobacco product is safe, especially for youth. I want to make a caveat here. Nicotine pouches have really only been used by large numbers of people for a few years, right? They only came on the market in Europe in like around 2009. Slow rollout, narrow markets in the United States in 2014, and then like more expanded rollout in 2019, right? So, it's really only been a few years that we've seen these used in the U.S. broadly, before that in Europe. The point is, we don't have tons and tons of long-term data about nicotine pouches, either about their effects on health or about how easy it is to get addicted to them.

So that's a really important caveat here because, you know, we have a lot of examples of things that we thought were fine early on because we didn't have long-term data on them. And then later we learned, oh, there are these things that we didn't really predict. So I think that's really important to keep in mind. But that said, you know, the main health effects that cigarettes seem to have, namely cancer causing direct damage to the lung tissue from the smoke and brain effects. These things do not seem to happen when it comes to nicotine pouches. It seems like there's a fair concern out there that this is going to be a very attractive product to young people. There are untold reasons why you might not want your teenager addicted to Zin or any other nicotine pouches. Do we have any idea how many young people are using this product, Karen? So the latest data we have suggests about one and a half percent of youth have used a nicotine pouch sometime in the last month.

And that's really a relatively small number compared to the number that vape, the number that smoke cigarettes, although those have also been on the downturn lately. So, I mean, it's a relatively recent product in the United States, and I think it's reasonable to expect that, especially after all of this media coverage, we're going to see more kids trying this more and that percentage go up. Are you saying, Kara, that there's a chance that by alerting the media to the Zin danger out there, Chuck Schumer maybe just got more people to try this product? You said that, not me. Why are you saying that? You know, I mean, I think there is something to media coverage of a moral panic perhaps contributing to awareness and use. But I also think that this is something that's already happening on the TikToks, and that's where the youth are really paying attention. Is this starting to feel cyclical to you, Karen, that every, I don't know, other leap year or so, there's some moral panic over the tobacco product du jour? It feels like seven, six years ago,

maybe eight, we were scared about Juul, and now we're scared about Zyn, and surely there'll be some new technological development in a few years. And then maybe a few years after that, Chuck Schumer will be scared about that if he's still around, which he probably will be. It is a very familiar pattern here, right? Like the, won't somebody please think of the children kind of tone to all of this. And I get it. Like, there is some reason to be concerned that getting people hooked on something while their brain is not done developing is bad for their brains. It's bad for, you know, their likelihood of getting addicted to things, period. It's bad for brain

development. I mean, I want to be clear, the data on that is not rock solid. You know, these are hard things to prove because so many other things affect the way people's brains developed. And sometimes the thing that makes a kid able or likely to cram their mouth full of nicotine pouches is itself the thing that's going to make them likely to do other risky things, right? But anyway, I guess there's enough other data out there from animals and from laboratory science to suggest that we shouldn't, like kids should not be getting addicted to stuff. It's not great for them to get addicted to stuff. It teaches them something that they then go on to apply in other negative ways in their lives.

But at the same time, the way we talk about these things affects what kids do and don't want to do, right? And if we talk about them like they are agents of destruction and like they're bad, that makes it a rebellion to use it. And it just has a really different impact on the way these things figure into youth culture and into culture as a whole. I also do want to say, when we're talking about harms, what are we should also be thinking about adults and the people who are really having a tough time coming off of a cigarette addiction and are, you know, are having trouble getting a prescription for the drugs that help them do that or using the lozenges or the gums that are FDA approved for helping them do that. And Zinn hasn't been studied the way nicotine gum

and nicotine lozenges have been studied, but they could help people do some of the same stuff those products help people do, namely quit cigarettes. And that is ultimately a good thing. That is harm reduction, baby. So there are some people that these products will really help, you know, creating a moral panic around them.

And as much as it might reduce access to these things for the people who could actually really have true health benefits from them, I think we need to think about how we're communicating and talking about these things. Dr. Karen Landman, Vox.com. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi. We were edited by Amina Alsadi. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Kim Eggleston. Thanks, Kim. We were mixed by Patrick Boyd this time around at Today Explained.