BY JAMIE DUCHARME
HEALTH
NOT SO LONG AGO, JUUL WAS SEEN AS THE NEW MARL-boro. Smoking wasn’t that cool anymore—rates had plummeted among U.S. adults and teens—but then came a sleek, addictive product with flashy advertising tactics that took off like wildfire. It soon became clear that e-cigarettes were hooking teens who otherwise wouldn’t have gone near nicotine.
Now, Juul is out and Zyn is in. It’s even more discreet than Juul, with no plumes of vapor. All a user has to do is tuck a small pouch of nicotine, additives, and flavorings under their lip for up to an hour. Over that time, the pouch releases a steady hit of nicotine—more than that in a cigarette, but delivered much more slowly. Like Juul, it contains no tobacco.
You’re not alone if you’re just hearing of Zyn, but it’s been for sale in the U.S. since 2014. Like other products that launched around that time, including Juul, it hit the market when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had few regulations for new tobacco and nicotine products. The agency retroactively required these brands and others to prove they benefit public health enough to stay on the market, and Zyn’s manufacturer has filed the necessary applications, but the FDA hasn’t reached a decision yet.
Without regulatory oversight, Zyn has become the latest product to lure people to a new and—at least seemingly—less dangerous way to consume nicotine. “It’s a parallel world with what happened with e-cigarettes,” says Maciej Goniewicz, a nicotine and tobacco-control researcher at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York.
Still, Zyn is nowhere close to as ubiquitous as Juul once was, according to the most recent available data. About 4.5% of U.S. adults vaped and 11.5% smoked in 2021, but only about 2% used smokeless tobacco products. And just 1.5% of U.S. teenagers said they currently used nicotine pouches in 2023. (For context, at the height of Juul’s popularity in 2019, 27.5% of U.S. high schoolers said they had vaped in the past month.) “It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison,” says Corey Henry, director of U.S. communications at Zyn’s parent company, Philip Morris International (PMI). “To be honest, it’s not even an apples-to-asteroids comparison.”
But oral nicotine products have picked up significant traction in recent years. The
