Author: David An, ASH Policy Fellow
July 27, 2026
Zyn is sold as tobacco-free. The claim is accurate, and it is also very effective marketing. A nicotine pouch contains no tobacco, but what it does contain is nicotine, the
ingredient that creates dependence and keeps people coming back. Moving a product out of the tobacco category does not move it out of the addiction business.
The brand is owned by Philip Morris International, which acquired Swedish Match for roughly 16 billion dollars in a deal completed in 2023. PMI is one of the companies ASH tracks in state lobbyist registrations every year. The pouch is a new product, but the company selling it has been in this market for a very long time.
Tobacco-free is a marketing term, not a health finding.
Nicotine pouches are small, permeable bags of nicotine, flavoring, and filler that the user tucks between the lip and gum. The nicotine is usually synthetic or extracted, and that is what allows the tobacco-free label. It does not change what nicotine does in the body. Nicotine is addictive, it affects the adolescent brain while it is still developing, and dependence brings tolerance and withdrawal.
In January 2025 the FDA authorized 20 Zyn products. It’s worth being clear about what that decision meant, because the tobacco industry has not been. The agency concluded that the products were appropriate for the protection of public health, a standard that weighs whether adults who already smoke might switch to something less harmful. It’s a comparison, not a safety rating. Since then, the authorization has been used by the industry in marketing and in argument as though the FDA had declared these products safe. It’s crucial to understand that the FDA did not—they noted nicotine products as being less harmful than something combustible like cigarettes, but still harmful themselves.
The switching argument depends on people actually switching.
The public health case for pouches is substitution: adults who smoke move to something less harmful, and overall harm goes down. This logic holds only if the pouch completely replaces the cigarette.
For young people, it usually does not. A Truth Initiative study published in Preventive Medicine Reports, surveying 15 to 24 year olds, found that 73 percent of those currently using oral nicotine pouches also currently smoked cigarettes, and 49 percent also currently used e-cigarettes. Eighty-one percent had smoked cigarettes at some point. Among high school students, co-use of pouches and e-cigarettes almost doubled from 2023 to 2024.
Youth use of pouches rose quickly and then settled. It also roughly doubled among high school students between 2023 and 2024. In 2025, about 1.7 percent of middle and high school students, around 460,000 young people, reported current use, which was close to the year before.
To speak honestly, these numbers are lower than the vaping numbers that alarmed everyone five years ago. The concern is the pattern rather than the total. For most young users, a pouch is not taking the place of anything. Instead, it’s added on top of what they already use, which increases the amount of nicotine they take in rather than reducing it. Dual use is not a step toward quitting, and for an impressionable teenager it usually means picking up a second dependence rather than ending the first. The researchers behind that study reached the same conclusion, warning that using pouches alongside other products “could heighten nicotine addiction and dependence among young people.”
The marketing is not aimed at people trying to quit.
Zyn grew through social media, largely through young men who became known as “Zynfluencers.” Researchers who analyzed #Zyn content on TikTok found that the videos are overwhelmingly positive or comedic, are posted mostly by young white men, and rarely mention cessation, addiction, or dependence at all. That is the part worth sitting with. An addictive product is circulating as a running joke and a lifestyle marker, with the consequences edited out of the frame.
The paid advertising works along the same lines. The top six nicotine pouch brands spent $11.2 million on advertising in 2019, and content analyses found those ads built around ease of use, flavor variety, and claims of being spit-free and smoke-free. A separate review of direct-mail advertising found the same claims, including the promise that the product contains no tobacco leaf. Other research has documented pouch marketing aimed specifically at women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ consumers, using the same kind of youthful imagery that made JUUL’s Instagram strategy so effective. Unit sales rose 305 percent between 2016 and 2020, and the vocabulary came out of wellness culture rather than tobacco advertising. Nicotine gets described as something that sharpens concentration or steadies the nerves, and is often compared to caffeine or sold near supplements. ASH’s own World No Tobacco Day webinar this year traced this exact shift, with nicotine repositioned as a product for focus and energy.
That pitch is not built for a 45-year-old who has smoked for decades and wants to stop. It’s built for someone who hasn’t really used nicotine at all. The same is true of the product design. Flavors, small discreet tins, no smoke and no smell, and the ability to use one in a classroom or a meeting without anyone noticing are all features that dramatically lower the barrier to starting. They do very little for someone trying to finish.
The evidence is thinner than the confidence around it.
The honest version of the science is more complicated than either side usually admits. Chemical analyses generally find fewer harmful substances in pouches than in cigarettes, and in some analyses of Zyn, most of the compounds tested, including nitrosamines, came in below the level at which they can be measured. Claiming that pouches are as dangerous as smoking is not supported by the evidence, but we do not need to make that claim.
A product being less harmful than cigarettes is a very low bar. Broader analyses across nicotine pouch manufacturers have identified 186 chemical components besides nicotine, eight of them classified as hazardous under European rules, and three of them, methyl eugenol, benzophenone, and beta-myrcene, listed by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as possibly carcinogenic to humans. Chromium and formaldehyde have been measured at levels that can be quantified. These products have only been widely available for a few years, so nobody can say yet what daily use starting at fifteen does to a person over a lifetime.
The real question is not whether a pouch is safer than a cigarette; it’s whether we should accept a nicotine product being marketed to people who would otherwise use nothing at all, on the strength of a favorable comparison to the deadliest consumer product ever sold.
What should happen
Tobacco-free has carried this product a long way. It has lifted nicotine out from under a word that carries a century of evidence and stigma, and handed it to a generation that did not live through the worst of it.
The steps from here are not complicated. Restrict the flavors and the marketing that make these products appealing to young people. Enforce the youth access rules that already exist. Require independent, long-term research instead of accepting studies funded by the companies doing the selling. And stop letting a claim about tobacco answer a question about nicotine.
At ASH, we have spent decades watching this industry engineer new ways to sell the same addiction. This is just the current one, and it deserves the same scrutiny we gave the last.
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Sources
- ASH, Tobacco Companies Tracked.
- FDA, FDA Authorizes Marketing of 20 ZYN Nicotine Pouch Products.
- Preventive Medicine Reports, Patterns of Oral Nicotine Pouch Use Among U.S. Adolescents and Young Adults.
- JAMA Network Open, Nicotine Pouch and E-Cigarette Use and Co-Use Among US Youths in 2023 and 2024.
- USC Keck School of Medicine, Use of Nicotine Pouches Increases Significantly Among U.S. Teens.
- FDA, Results From the Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey.
- Substance Use & Misuse, Exploring #Zyn-Related Video Content Posted by Zynfluencers on TikTok.
- JMIR, Tobacco Derived Nicotine Pouches: A Content Analysis of Brands and Marketing Messages on Internet and Traditional Media.
- Tobacco Control, Oral Nicotine Marketing Claims in Direct-Mail Advertising.
- Tobacco Control, ‘No-Barriers’ Tobacco Product? Selling Smokeless Tobacco to Women, People of Colour and the LGBTQ+ Community in the USA.
- Tobacco Control, Characterising JUUL-Related Posts on Instagram.
- JAMA, Nicotine Pouch Unit Sales in the US, 2016-2020.
- ASH, World No Tobacco Day 2026: Unmasking the Appeal.
- BMC Chemistry, Harmful and Potentially Harmful Constituents (HPHCs) in Two Novel Nicotine Pouch Products.
- Frontiers in Public Health, Nicotine Pouches: A Narrative Review of the Existing Literature.