Brownstone Institute
Informational No Man’s Land
From the Brownstone Institute
One of the remarkable features of these Covid years is the amount of misleading and downright false information emitted by “official” sources, most notably public health authorities, government-appointed regulators, and mainstream media. A part of me hankers after the times when I could trust my government and media in a time of crisis. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’d prefer to live uncomfortably in the truth than comfortably in a fantasy built for me by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.
As somone who turned on a daily basis to the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for updates on the Covid outbreak in February and March 2020, I was especially shocked and disappointed by the abysmal failure of authoritative bodies to impartially report the evidence bearing on masking, vaccinations, lockdowns, PCR testing, and other aspects of pandemic policy. My whole faith in the political, media, and scientific establishment, limited as it was, was shaken to the core.
We have been betrayed by the people charged with sharing the best available data and information with us in a time of crisis. We have been lied to and deceived about matters of life and death, such as the risk-benefit tradeoffs of the Covid vaccines, not only by the pharmaceutical industry, but by the people who occupy leading positions of public authority in our society.
Our politicians have sold us “solutions” to Covid that were far, far worse than the disease, and have generally refused to admit to their mistakes, even when they saw the comparative success of regimes like Sweden and Florida that went a very different direction.
Among the more egregious falsehoods that were either stated or implied by official authorities, and uncritically echoed by mainstream media, are the following:
- The notion that community masking was supported by strong scientific evidence. It never was (here is the latest Cochrane review of evidence for mask efficacy).
- The idea that it was critical that young and healthy people get vaccinated, if not for themselves, then for the sake of “granny and granddad.” This idea was empirically baseless, since we did not have any good evidence to show that these vaccines prevented transmission at the time these claims were made.
- The idea that toddlers and young children and teenagers with no serious health issues could benefit from receiving a Covid vaccine. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that children’s risk from Covid is significant enough to warrant their exposure to a vaccine that has sparked a significant number of adverse events and whose long-term risks to children are still not well understood.
- The idea that sheltering in place for months on end would effectively stop a respiratory virus from spreading through the community, rather than just deferring the inevitable and inflicting enormous social and human costs in the meantime. This was a dangerous and revolutionary proposition that had no strong empirical evidence to support it.
- The idea that a person who tested positive in a PCR test, but had absolutely no clinical symptoms of Covid-related disease, should count as a Covid “case” or that the death of such a person was a “Covid” death.
I could go on, and talk about the use of a handful of cases of infant hospitalisation to push vaccines on children, the unnecessary and counterproductive closure of schools, the US government’s active role in encouraging private social media companies, behind the scenes, to censor their critics, or the infamous Hancock files, which uncover the UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s plan to “scare the pants off everyone” with his announcement of the next “variant” of Covid-19.
Thoughtful citizens who notice these betrayals now have strong grounds for distrusting “official” sources to tell them the truth, or present the facts in a non-manipulative, impartial manner. For me, and many others, the old idea that you could depend on your government to inform you of the latest science or tell you the threat level of a disease is now dead in the water.
Put simply, we now live in an informational No Man’s Land, in which every man must fend for himself, to the best of his ability, without the backing of an impressive Official Source to do his thinking for him.
We each have to scrape together whatever information we can from unofficial sources that have gotten important things right and are not defending the indefensible: coerced vaccination, vaccine-based segregation, involuntary population-wide lockdowns, etc.
It puts many of us in the peculiar position of placing more weight on the words and recommendations of individual journalists and scientists whose character and intellect we trust, than the pronouncements of national governments, official regulators, or international bodies like the World Health Organisation.
Living in an informational No Man’s Land is demanding because you can’t just skip over to the CDC website to resolve your doubts. And it is uncomfortable because you do not enjoy anything like the level of faith the average citizen has in “Science” and “Officialdom.” You are sort of at sea, and you cling to whatever bits of information and insight you can scavenge from sources that are not living off the proceeds of vaccine sales or paid by governments to launch sophisticated campaigns of psychological warfare against their own citizens.
The painful truth is that official “experts” and government ministers have played god with our lives and repeatedly given dangerous and scientifically baseless advice.
Under these circumstances, those who do their own independent research, rather than uncritically swallowing whatever “official authorities” tell them, are not the “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists” they are being made out to be, but citizens who actually understand the predicament they find themselves in, and have the courage to think for themselves, even when it draws down ridicule, censorship, and alienation from “respectable” society.
Reposted from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
A walk through a dozen convenience stores in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says a lot about how US nicotine policy actually works. Only about one in eight nicotine-pouch products for sale is legal. The rest are unauthorized—but they’re not all the same. Some are brightly branded, with uncertain ingredients, not approved by any Western regulator, and clearly aimed at impulse buyers. Others—like Sweden’s NOAT—are the opposite: muted, well-made, adult-oriented, and already approved for sale in Europe.
Yet in the United States, NOAT has been told to stop selling. In September 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the company a warning letter for offering nicotine pouches without marketing authorization. That might make sense if the products were dangerous, but they appear to be among the safest on the market: mild flavors, low nicotine levels, and recyclable paper packaging. In Europe, regulators consider them acceptable. In America, they’re banned. The decision looks, at best, strange—and possibly arbitrary.
What the Market Shows
My October 2025 audit was straightforward. I visited twelve stores and recorded every distinct pouch product visible for sale at the counter. If the item matched one of the twenty ZYN products that the FDA authorized in January, it was counted as legal. Everything else was counted as illegal.
Two of the stores told me they had recently received FDA letters and had already removed most illegal stock. The other ten stores were still dominated by unauthorized products—more than 93 percent of what was on display. Across all twelve locations, about 12 percent of products were legal ZYN, and about 88 percent were not.
The illegal share wasn’t uniform. Many of the unauthorized products were clearly high-nicotine imports with flashy names like Loop, Velo, and Zimo. These products may be fine, but some are probably high in contaminants, and a few often with very high nicotine levels. Others were subdued, plainly meant for adult users. NOAT was a good example of that second group: simple packaging, oat-based filler, restrained flavoring, and branding that makes no effort to look “cool.” It’s the kind of product any regulator serious about harm reduction would welcome.
Enforcement Works
To the FDA’s credit, enforcement does make a difference. The two stores that received official letters quickly pulled their illegal stock. That mirrors the agency’s broader efforts this year: new import alerts to detain unauthorized tobacco products at the border (see also Import Alert 98-06), and hundreds of warning letters to retailers, importers, and distributors.
But effective enforcement can’t solve a supply problem. The list of legal nicotine-pouch products is still extremely short—only a narrow range of ZYN items. Adults who want more variety, or stores that want to meet that demand, inevitably turn to gray-market suppliers. The more limited the legal catalog, the more the illegal market thrives.
Why the NOAT Decision Appears Bizarre
The FDA’s own actions make the situation hard to explain. In January 2025, it authorized twenty ZYN products after finding that they contained far fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes and could help adult smokers switch. That was progress. But nine months later, the FDA has approved nothing else—while sending a warning letter to NOAT, arguably the least youth-oriented pouch line in the world.
The outcome is bad for legal sellers and public health. ZYN is legal; a handful of clearly risky, high-nicotine imports continue to circulate; and a mild, adult-market brand that meets European safety and labeling rules is banned. Officially, NOAT’s problem is procedural—it lacks a marketing order. But in practical terms, the FDA is punishing the very design choices it claims to value: simplicity, low appeal to minors, and clean ingredients.
This approach also ignores the differences in actual risk. Studies consistently show that nicotine pouches have far fewer toxins than cigarettes and far less variability than many vapes. The biggest pouch concerns are uneven nicotine levels and occasional traces of tobacco-specific nitrosamines, depending on manufacturing quality. The serious contamination issues—heavy metals and inconsistent dosage—belong mostly to disposable vapes, particularly the flood of unregulated imports from China. Treating all “unauthorized” products as equally bad blurs those distinctions and undermines proportional enforcement.
A Better Balance: Enforce Upstream, Widen the Legal Path
My small Montgomery County survey suggests a simple formula for improvement.
First, keep enforcement targeted and focused on suppliers, not just clerks. Warning letters clearly change behavior at the store level, but the biggest impact will come from auditing distributors and importers, and stopping bad shipments before they reach retail shelves.
Second, make compliance easy. A single-page list of authorized nicotine-pouch products—currently the twenty approved ZYN items—should be posted in every store and attached to distributor invoices. Point-of-sale systems can block barcodes for anything not on the list, and retailers could affirm, once a year, that they stock only approved items.
Third, widen the legal lane. The FDA launched a pilot program in September 2025 to speed review of new pouch applications. That program should spell out exactly what evidence is needed—chemical data, toxicology, nicotine release rates, and behavioral studies—and make timely decisions. If products like NOAT meet those standards, they should be authorized quickly. Legal competition among adult-oriented brands will crowd out the sketchy imports far faster than enforcement alone.
The Bottom Line
Enforcement matters, and the data show it works—where it happens. But the legal market is too narrow to protect consumers or encourage innovation. The current regime leaves a few ZYN products as lonely legal islands in a sea of gray-market pouches that range from sensible to reckless.
The FDA’s treatment of NOAT stands out as a case study in inconsistency: a quiet, adult-focused brand approved in Europe yet effectively banned in the US, while flashier and riskier options continue to slip through. That’s not a public-health victory; it’s a missed opportunity.
If the goal is to help adult smokers move to lower-risk products while keeping youth use low, the path forward is clear: enforce smartly, make compliance easy, and give good products a fair shot. Right now, we’re doing the first part well—but failing at the second and third. It’s time to fix that.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
Cigarettes kill nearly half a million Americans each year. Everyone knows it, including the Food and Drug Administration. Yet while the most lethal nicotine product remains on sale in every gas station, the FDA continues to block or delay far safer alternatives.
Nicotine pouches—small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip—deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn’t be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved.
Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This “Swedish Experience” shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily—no prohibition required.
In the United States, however, the FDA’s tobacco division has turned this logic on its head. Since Congress gave it sweeping authority in 2009, the agency has demanded that every new product undergo a Premarket Tobacco Product Application, or PMTA, proving it is “appropriate for the protection of public health.” That sounds reasonable until you see how the process works.
Manufacturers must spend millions on speculative modeling about how their products might affect every segment of society—smokers, nonsmokers, youth, and future generations—before they can even reach the market. Unsurprisingly, almost all PMTAs have been denied or shelved. Reduced-risk products sit in limbo while Marlboros and Newports remain untouched.
Only this January did the agency relent slightly, authorizing 20 ZYN nicotine-pouch products made by Swedish Match, now owned by Philip Morris. The FDA admitted the obvious: “The data show that these specific products are appropriate for the protection of public health.” The toxic-chemical levels were far lower than in cigarettes, and adult smokers were more likely to switch than teens were to start.
The decision should have been a turning point. Instead, it exposed the double standard. Other pouch makers—especially smaller firms from Sweden and the US, such as NOAT—remain locked out of the legal market even when their products meet the same technical standards.
The FDA’s inaction has created a black market dominated by unregulated imports, many from China. According to my own research, roughly 85 percent of pouches now sold in convenience stores are technically illegal.
The agency claims that this heavy-handed approach protects kids. But youth pouch use in the US remains very low—about 1.5 percent of high-school students according to the latest National Youth Tobacco Survey—while nearly 30 million American adults still smoke. Denying safer products to millions of addicted adults because a tiny fraction of teens might experiment is the opposite of public-health logic.
There’s a better path. The FDA should base its decisions on science, not fear. If a product dramatically reduces exposure to harmful chemicals, meets strict packaging and marketing standards, and enforces Tobacco 21 age verification, it should be allowed on the market. Population-level effects can be monitored afterward through real-world data on switching and youth use. That’s how drug and vaccine regulation already works.
Sweden’s evidence shows the results of a pragmatic approach: a near-smoke-free society achieved through consumer choice, not coercion. The FDA’s own approval of ZYN proves that such products can meet its legal standard for protecting public health. The next step is consistency—apply the same rules to everyone.
Combustion, not nicotine, is the killer. Until the FDA acts on that simple truth, it will keep protecting the cigarette industry it was supposed to regulate.
Author
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