“We must continue to exploit new opportunities to get cigarettes on screen and into the hands of smokers.” – Hamish Maxwell, president of Philip Morris, at a meeting in 1983
Late last year, during one of many daily doom scrolls, a post appeared in my Instagram Reels feed. It showed an iPhone-quality video of a group of young women sitting around an apartment. They seemed to be pregaming, dressed to go out, and were talking in what I could only assume was Swedish.
As the phone camera panned around the room, and each noticed it was on them, they pulled back their lips to show off little white packets tucked against their gums.
That video, now with 40 million views on TikTok, was my (and many others’) first introduction to nicotine pouches —- Big Tobacco’s newest great reinvention project.
Using nicotine is a timeless affair. A social and habitual practice transmitted through generations. Much to the benefit of Big Tobacco, a moniker for the corporations that control the global supply of nicotine goods, namely Altria, China National Tobacco, and British American Tobacco.
It’s a romantic habit, an easy chemical icebreaker, a sporadic one-off that many still indulge in. “I quit smoking, but I do smoke socially,” as Zoe, someone I met in the smokers’, put it.
It’s something so important, so ingrained in the Australian conscience, that we’ve named our break time after.
But over the last few decades, smoking has steadily decreased. Health, age, and informed anti-smoking advertising have shrunk the Australian smoking market to almost a third of what it was three decades ago.
So how has the tobacco industry responded?
In recent years, vaping has been one of big tobacco’s most successful reinvigoration strategies.
Cigarettes are sexy. Problematic, yes, but sexy. Think Bond, Obama, Cowboy Bebop. James Dean with his perfect teeth, deck rolled into the sleeve of his tight white T-shirt. And while vapes may not carry the same smoky cool, they bring a certain sparkly charm of their own.
Disposable vapes have flooded the Australian market, and reached ubiquity with many teenagers and young adults as the latest social smoking tool. Data from the National Drug Strategy Household survey, released a month ago, shows that use of e-cigarettes has almost tripled from 2019, with 18-24 year olds the age group most likely to use.
Dr Christina Watts, a researcher on the Generation Vape project, a government-funded initiative researching e-cigarette use in young adults, says this is no coincidence.
This increase in vaping “has been entirely industry led,” she says. “The tobacco and vaping industry has very purposefully marketed these products at young people.”
She explains that importers have exploited loopholes in Australian law to make low cost disposable vapes with incredibly high nicotine concentrations very accessible to consumers and retailers. And this accessibility has cultivated tobacco use in young adults and minors.
“Majority of 14-17 year olds in [our] study said that access to vapes is really easy,” she says. “Kids are getting them from local retailers. Some of their peers are buying them in bulk and then selling them onto their other peers.”
iGet, Elfbar, and even Juul have become generational household names. The new Marlboros, Chesterfields, Newports, Camels. Cheap, easy to find, sold in an absurdly wide range of flavours, and packaged without terrifying health labels.
And their appeal, like their predecessors, has been media-driven.
Not in classic media, like TV and film, where on-screen tobacco product placement has been illegal since 1992, but on newer frontiers, like social media.
Juul, an iconic e-cigarette brand part-owned by Altria, was one of the first to tap into social media platforms. Posts, influencer endorsements, and event photos showing the young, trendy, and fashionable with their product, carefully designed and reminiscent of the classic cigarette campaigns, were a huge factor in the company’s early success.
And “vapefluencers” today continue to push entertainment content streams with unboxings and reviews.
For Gen Z, vapes have quickly become an important part of their culture.
Nick, 26, is a government worker and smoker. “I think vaping has changed how it all happens now,” he says. “It’s made smoking more social… it’s ritualistic.” And many young adults feel that vaping is now universal.
But a wave of new legislation brought forward by the government has worked to combat this, and the changes are being felt.
Since the federal ban on vape importation on January 1st, lack of new supply has driven disposable vape prices to skyrocket from around twenty-to-thirty dollars, to as much as seventy, and they’ve begun to die out from the usual smoking arenas.
Once a cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous alternative to cigarettes, vaping has become much the same thing. An expensive habit.
Enter nicotine pouches.
Nicotine pouches are a form of smokeless, oral nicotine popular in Scandinavia. They come in little white packets, infused with a wide range of candy-like flavours.
Recently, nicotine pouch content has begun to pervade social media. Brands like Zyn, also owned by Altria, have popped up all over the influencing spectrum. From Frat-Tok to Joe Rogan, to candid videos of college girls popping them in at school.
And while most of these videos are not tagged as paid endorsements, it’s hard to imagine Big Tobacco has nothing to do with them, as loopholes in Australian advertising law allow tobacco companies to promote their products through social media.
Selling nicotine pouches is illegal in Australia, and has been since 1992. But consumers can still import the product for “personal use.” And using certain websites, you can bulk buy in the hundreds for around $7.60 per tin.
So are pouches the next big thing?
They seem to be from the outside; a product targeted at and optimised for the youth market. One that pairs the colour and flavours that draw consumers to vaping, with a subtle, easily concealable medium. One that has crossed the popular culture barrier just like cigarettes and vapes before it. Cheap and available for import with little if any restrictions.
But from talking to people, it seems consumers are still unsure. Some, like Nick, feel it misses the interactivity that makes vaping and smoking so permissible. That physical, shared rhythm that draws people in. In Nick’s words, “it just isn’t social.”
Others like Dr Watts are a little less sure. The near total lack of investigation and recent legislation on nicotine pouches in Australia means we can’t be sure about its potential growth or use, and only time and research will tell.
If there’s anything we do know, it’s that this is likely not the end. The nicotine industry will continue to innovate, as it always has, and push itself most where we place our aesthetic faith. From the timeless, classic silver screen to strange, psy-oppy, Swedish TikTok’s.
And the young, as they always have, will continue to consume.
