Modern Puritans Take Aim at Zyn

"Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." -- H.L. Mencken

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Today, I learned of Zyn pouches, a nicotine product I'd never before heard of because, as John Stossel reports, the anti-smoking lobby wants to ban them, or at least make them harder to get.

And what is Zyn? They are little pouches people tuck into their lip to get a hit of nicotine, according to Stossel. Wikipedia elaborates further:

Unlike snus or dip, nicotine pouches do not contain tobacco or stem material, but remain addictive due to their nicotine content.

These pouches thus resemble other products -- like vaping pens, patches, and gum -- that deliver a dose of nicotine without also including the carcinogens present in tobacco.

One would think that people motivated by a concern for health would celebrate such innovations, and many surely do. It's just that perhaps such people aren't the driving force behind the prohibition of nicotine.

Opponents of selling the products focus on the addictiveness of nicotine and all but ignore the lower cancer risk and end up harming the people they claim to want to help:

Some states ban certain flavors and impose high taxes. This makes pouches about as expensive as cigarettes. That's dumb.

"It's not the nicotine that kills you. It's smoking," says Guy Bentley, director of consumer freedom at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, in my new video.

"You shouldn't treat a nicotine pouch the way we treat cigarettes. The more expensive you make the safer product, the more the most dangerous product will be sold."

After Minnesota imposed a 95 percent tax on vaping, smokers who would have quit didn't. Thousands of them.

The rest of the piece looks at other consequences of banning products, including the creation of black markets and the crime that go with them.

Stossel is correct about this, as far as it goes, but I would have liked to see him ask, By what right does the government ban commerce, even including cigarettes? A close second would be, By what right is the government picking my pocket to pay for the consequences of someone else choosing to smoke? The bans and restrictions on cigarettes, tobacco, and nicotine started off as a wrong committed in an effort to fix problems caused by the first wrong, and have clearly morphed into a way for puritans to order people around.

Controls breed controls, and bad premises drive out good.

None of this is to say that nicotine isn't without any hazard or that children -- who don't have the full legal rights of adults, anyway -- shouldn't be barred from buying addictive substances. But adults should be free to choose what to ingest -- and held to account for any consequences.

-- CAV