It's even funnier actually. Yes, Palantir does have free Zyn vending machines in every office, but the Zyn is only for visiting customers. Employees are explicitly prohibited from using the machines.
>The pouches are available for free in Palantir’s offices for employees and guests over the age of 21, a Palantir spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. Palantir, which did not respond to requests for comment, pays to stock the products.
Big tobacco won. They realized the lobby was saying cigarettes were bad for the lungs, so they … fixed that with a vape product. Still addictive as shit. Hah! Oh, and now the Zyn.
Which industry has the most to gain from these products? We’re living in some weird time period where value systems are regressing.
In this time and age going against proven scientific knowledge or even basic decency signals toughness and manliness. It works particularly well on deeply insecure men who need to prove their masculinity, and boy is there an endless supply of those in the US.
Seems a good time to link to Gwern's well-researched notes on why nicotine, when consumed in purer forms (e.g. patches, gum), may be pretty useful and not really as harmful nor as addictive as one might think.
Its been a while since I read this post and I don’t have time to reread it but from my experience while it is a useful drug it definitely has addiction and health issues even in more pure forms.
- when quantifying for gum and patches, it is really hard to conclude that these pure forms of nicotine are any different from caffeine in harms / addictiveness
- cigarettes, or even pure tobacco smoked is definitely addictive and bad due to other compounds in play
- chewing tobacco products are likely a lot less worse than smoking, but still probably worse than pure nicotine gum or patches
- data is very unclear on vaping
IMO experience suggests vaping can clearly be highly addictive (see: young adults and teens), and I know personally there is even some minimal research on vaping e.g. THC that shows that vaping might be worse than just smoking cannabis, so vaping definitely warrants caution in general [though vaping THC requires much higher temps and different solvents, and involves different terpenes and other compounds].
I agree to a point. Although, alcohol (when consumed responsibly) has a social element to it, so companies having a "beers on Friday after 4pm" just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money." They are serving different functions.
> just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money."
More likely these companies just offered to give them some free vending machines and some office manager said sure why not. Not everything is a careful corporate strategy.
Beers on Friday after 4pm is rarely done because management really cares about the employees. It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.
If my boss gives me a stimulant to be more productive, especially a relatively harmless one like nicotine, I would gladly take it, as I like stimulants and am an adult capable of making decisions for myself. If I didn't, I would just refuse, just how I might refuse the free coffee by boss offers me.
I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants. That would be bad, indeed.
> It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.
Yes, but the important distinction is that its intention is to bring people together face-to-face, not isolate them to their desks for continued work. Just because the end goal is "productivity" broadly speaking, doesn't mean the mechanisms are socially/morally equivalent.
> I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants.
I agree, and I hope my comment didn't imply I thought that was the case.
I don't see how offering nicotine (or caffeine, or amphetamine) is morally wrong if it's not mandatory. In fact, given 2 companies that only differ in what they offer - free beer on Fridays for 1 hour or free stimulants all the time - I would choose the second one in a heart beat. Many people wouldn't, and that's their choice. I just don't see how one approach is better ethically than the other at all.
That's unnecessarily cynical. I've been in plenty of companies where the staff, managers included, enjoy going for a pint together. I'm in the UK, maybe it's cultural.
I agree, I made it too black and white. I should've said that some, probably most (in my opinion), of such decisions are made with productivity in mind, whether it's in the form of team cohesiveness or favorable view of management, but some are just because managers have the best interest in mind for their subordinates.
OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.
Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.
Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.
Tech companies are less receptive to alcohol than they used to be. There was a post (can't find it now) from a VC firm saying something like, "We encourage our companies to throw no alcohol parties; there's less risk of all kinds, and overall it's less messy."
I'll take one addiction and a possible oral cancer for the company, thank you so much. No, I understand it's not guaranteed, but I am seriously flabbergasted by the careless actions of some companies...
Probably not the case for some modern pure nicotine products (gum, patches). Vaping is harder to say due to lack of data and clear cases of addiction in young people, but pure nicotine is definitely a different animal than the classical delivery forms. See my response to GP.
I wonder if the issue with vapes isn't the sweeteners they put in them. I sometimes vape a specific liquid, which has never given me any cravings. I'll just stop after my bottle is done for multiple months until I remember to buy some more. I never carry my vape with me when I leave home (not to the office, not for multi-week holidays, nothing). It's not difficult to go without, I don't even think about it when I don't have it.
But the other day I ended up vaping some melon-flavored liquid. When it was empty, I was going crazy for a few hours, I absolutely had to have more. And it didn't even have more nicotine than what I usually vape. It was just the sweet taste that had me wanting more, exactly like back in my college days when I was eating Snickers bars like no tomorrow. Now that was a habit that was tough to break. And most people I see vaping out in the street seem to be vaping those ultra-sweet smelling liquids.
An interesting thought, I myself have met at least a couple people that tried to break an addiction by switching to vape products that were essentially just flavour (no nicotine, no THC; THC vapes are common and legal in Canada) and somehow stayed just as addicted to the flavour / oral stimulation. So that sounds at least plausible to me.
Nicotine is depending on how you measure the 3rd or 4th most addictive substance on the planet. It's up there with Heroine, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Meth.
If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.
What dimension of “addictive” are you anchoring on? Capture rate? Withdrawal severity? Reinforcement strength? Relapse rate after quitting? Nicotine dominates on some of those and not others.
Pretty clear from the responses to OP that most people are quite unaware there is almost two decades of decent research on pure nicotine now, and that, outside of vaping (where hard evidence is mostly lacking, due to the novelty), the purer stuff probably really isn't all that addictive, in the grand scheme of things. In many cases it is hard to even say it is much different than caffeine.
It's a reasonable mistake, I'd say. We spent those decades conflating "nicotine" with "smoking" and, through herculean efforts, managed to get the smoking rate down to 12-14% (in Germany it's still 22.7%!). Now, tobacco companies have come through with genuinely less harmful, genuinely less addictive products, but because of their previous wild duplicity, nobody really "believes" it. They think that nicotine must cause cancer. "Fool me once," for sure.
Can you point to said research because everything I can find from any kind of authoritative source is that form doesn't matter and nicotine is strongly addictive in all of them.
There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.
The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.
There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.
Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes
bullshit. i've been smoking cigars for 5 years now. sometimes 2 or 3 a day and have zero issues stopping or going without a smoke for months. i was surprised as i was never smoker, but it is what it is. nicotine addiction is not nicotine addiction but cigarette addiction. cigars are pure tobacco. nothing else. cigarettes have over thousand ingredients in them. cigars also have higher nicotine dose than cigarettes and as i have said, zero issues.
as i said, nictoine is a non-factor. as for caffeine, i quit multiple times. once the headaches are gone, which takes a week or two, followed by another week, or few, of feeling lethargic, it is back to normal(ie. give it a month altogether). so it's not too bad. it might be also easier to wean off slowly by decreasing caffeine consumption over longer period than quitting cold turkey to avoid the negative effects altogether.
Utter nonsense. I have replaced my ADHD prescription with nicotine patches, and in my experience I have had worse withdrawals, and greater desire to consume caffeine than either dermal nicotine or dexamfetamine. And I’m only a cup a day kinda guy, and I used to be a heavy smoker for years, so I know how dangerous the stuff can be.
If we’re talking about smoking or vaping, or nicotine pouches, sure, but mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.
Got something other than anecdata? Because a web search returns a list of contrary sources as long as my arm.
But, hell, if we are trading stories, I dipped snuff for 30 years and I’ve consumed coffee since middle school. I can go days without coffee, even if I might not be happy about it. Quitting tobacco, OTOH, that was tough, with multiple starts and stops until success.
Is that because it's a stimulant, or is there some other known mechanism? It seems like most (maybe all) stimulants I've read about are correlated with cardiovascular issues.
I think one theory is that nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. Though whether, in its pure form, it is a particularly significant one, i.e. any worse than caffeine, is really not so clear.
Cancer also stems from non-heated tobacco because the plant itself contains carcinogens that are pressed into the skin in the mouth for example, often including lesions and such
Given the long-term, widespread usage of coffee, is there something specific they're waiting on? Or is that an "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" thing?
Your final statement doesn't really add value without knowing that, unless you agree that we shouldn't assume other people are actually people, and not lizards in people suits until they prove, definitively, otherwise.
My mistake. I interpreted their comment to be implying that nicotine pouches do. I'm not referring to evidence for the safety of coffee, but of nicotine pouches.
I don't think zyn has been studied enough to be conclusive, but it does have some negative effects similar to dip I suppose? Dip on the other hand is described as using something like 'fiberglass' that cuts your mouth so your gums can absorb the nicotine quicker, of course the tobacco industry denies this. I've only tried dip once, and it was like a kick to the face. I'll stick to casual cigar smoking (its been 4 years though!).
These kind of synthetic nicotine products aren't carcinogenic. They were originally developed as a safer replacement for the traditional Swedish practice of stuffing a bag of tobacco in your mouth, although after acquisition by Phillip Morris they've become common among people who never used tobacco in the first place. (As the article gestures towards, they are "tobacco products" under US law because of their nicotine content, even though they contain no tobacco leaf.)
they are horrendously addicting though which is the huge difference between nicotine and caffeine. Even though I love caffeine I can go days without it no problem (besides being slightly more tired). Habitual nicotine users tend to need to re-up every hour or so
I quit zyns a year ago and still crave them daily. Sooooo good and addictive and they don’t have that “it’s killing you” imperative to quit like cigarettes do
I'm not sure it is actually all that clear that pure nicotine products really are so addictive as people believe. E.g. most studies claiming such addictiveness may simply be because those that get addicted to patches / gum were already addicted to cigarettes (or other classic tobacco product) prior. See e.g. Gwern's notes on the topic.
Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be, which I don't think is credible at all. It's very common for addicts to falsely believe that they're not addicted and could quit whenever they want.
> Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be
This is an incredible and outright lie.
Actually try reading the page I linked, there are plenty of links to scientific studies, scientific reviews, and high-quality resources, as well as lots of careful notes about serious confounds in the usual studies. This includes in exactly the sections I linked.
By all means still be cautious and not careless about using the stuff, that is a perfectly sane position. But I think it is very clear that e.g. patches and gum are highly unlikely to have anything even approaching the risk profile of classic tobacco products.
I’m taking a low dose (and spread out beyond 1 week) of mounjaro.
I realize the risk as GLP long term use is untested, but in my case it’s that; or deal with inevitable health problems from high BP and being only moderately overweight.
I didn't mean to say don't take novel but mainstream medications you have a health reason for and are under the guidance of a doctor about.
I'm saying nicotine pouches are the tobacco industry's successor to vapes in the way vapes were their successor to cigarettes and some conservatism is warranted in light of that. Or like how every 10-15 years the evidence of health effects of some ubiquitous plastic grows too heavy and 3M comes out with a new one to replace it and the cycle repeats.
If companies are going to start giving us free drugs to boost productivity, they should at least give out the good stuff. Give me a modafinil (/provigil) vending machine, forget nicotine.
The article specifically mentions Lucy & Sesh. A quick Google search confirmed some suspicions:
Sesh (2025): Max Cunningham is the Founder & CEO of Sesh, a nicotine pouch startup. In September 2025, Sesh raised $40 million in funding from investors including 8VC, a firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
David Renteln is the ceo of Lucy. I couldn't find a direct link between Thiel and Lucy, but it looks like Thiel has been friends with Renteln for a while and invested in Renteln's Soylent.
Nicotine is highly addictive but also relatively harmless. I would appreciate it provided by an employer though even though I wouldn't normally use it.
> Palantir’s move is just one of the ways biohacking has taken the Silicon Valley tech space by storm.
It's not a new phenomenon, either. I remember biohacking being mentioned in the late aughts, if not earlier, and it's referenced as being part of SV culture in the 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [0].
I used to envy people that work in Silicon Valley, right where all the action is. But with all the recent developments, I don't anymore. I'm happy that I live in Europe, where we are still acting more or less normal these days.
Now there is a perk that is going to get expensive, and boy it is going to suck when theres a downturn or new facilities manager who decides to cut back and stop offering them.
I strongly urge against consuming any tobacco or nicotine product. At the very least, it's very bad for your heart in pretty much every form, whether pure or impure, smoked or absorbed. Besides being directly bad for the heart, nicotine also metabolizes to carcinogens.
If you need a boost beyond caffeine, consider a square of 95% or 100% dark chocolate. It works. It too stresses the heart mildly, and can aggravate reflux a lot, but overall it's significantly safer than any tobacco product. You can also eat more of it if as needed.
The only sane time to take pure nicotine might be if someone is dying from Covid, their lungs are collapsing, and one desperately needs a daytime breathing boost.
"Montezuma Absolute Black 100% Cocoa With Orange And Coco Nibs" is what I ultimately went with. It is available on Amazon.
I have paused it for the time being due to reflux, but not everyone has reflux. Note that its strength can build up over days, so do not exceed the amount taken by more than 1 square a week. Overall, do not exceed 1 square per day per 50 lbs of body weight. Overuse can risk a high heart rate and insomnia.
From personal experience, this isn't even a top-down push. I know people who have defended in detail why it's a good idea for them to develop a nicotine addiction. Bizarre behavior.
Nicotine has been demonstrated to help people with schizophrenia and certain mental illnesses quite a bit. It's considered a medicine by indigenous cultures for a reason.
I've been wondering how long it would take for tobacco to make a comeback given that we seem to be in a weird era where it's some kind of flex to embrace idiotic ideas.
Nicotine (without tobacco e.g. Zyn or gum) does seem to have some nootropic-ish properties but it's vastly inferior to a lot of other things and has major addiction/tolerance problems. It's not a great performance enhancer for anything but very sporadic use.
Funny. At least since Covid, I’ve noticed a number of employers, often at municipalities or other governments, but sometimes at private companies, are adding terms that employees cannot use any nicotine products whatsoever. What’s even stranger is the always go out of their way to explicitly note that non tobacco cessation aids are not allowed either. Seems like pure virtue signaling, though at least one person has suggested to me that the companies engaging in this are serious and go as far as blood testing.
Ah that makes sense. Was something changed recently to enable this? I’ve certainly seen employer health insurance discounts for not smoking for years, but the complete ban, listed in a job application, and explicitly including cessation aids feels like something I’ve only seen in recent years.
The first time I heard about it was hospital groups and other healthcare employers around 2010. Like you said it was originally an optional bonus/discount but even then there were explicit plans to make it mandatory over some years.
The timing as I remember it matches up with ACA passing (optional) and going into effect (mandatory) so may have something to do with health insurer costs related to that. But I don't know enough about it to guess more, just a suspicion.
It's even funnier actually. Yes, Palantir does have free Zyn vending machines in every office, but the Zyn is only for visiting customers. Employees are explicitly prohibited from using the machines.
Just vice signaling all the way down.
>The pouches are available for free in Palantir’s offices for employees and guests over the age of 21, a Palantir spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. Palantir, which did not respond to requests for comment, pays to stock the products.
Is the article wrong in this statement?
Yes, palantir is lying to the press, suprise suprise!
Big tobacco won. They realized the lobby was saying cigarettes were bad for the lungs, so they … fixed that with a vape product. Still addictive as shit. Hah! Oh, and now the Zyn.
Which industry has the most to gain from these products? We’re living in some weird time period where value systems are regressing.
In this time and age going against proven scientific knowledge or even basic decency signals toughness and manliness. It works particularly well on deeply insecure men who need to prove their masculinity, and boy is there an endless supply of those in the US.
The opening line - “puff puff pass the spreadsheets” - was written by someone with absolutely no idea what that means
Username checks out?
Bob from marketing used half a million tokens on that, you monster. He is now crying and talking to his ChatGPT therapist / boyfriend.
"How do you do, fellow coworkers?"
you mean AI?
Hey, that is the kind of corporate lingo I can get behind.
Seems a good time to link to Gwern's well-researched notes on why nicotine, when consumed in purer forms (e.g. patches, gum), may be pretty useful and not really as harmful nor as addictive as one might think.
https://gwern.net/nicotine
Its been a while since I read this post and I don’t have time to reread it but from my experience while it is a useful drug it definitely has addiction and health issues even in more pure forms.
Correct. My TL:DR summary would be:
- when quantifying for gum and patches, it is really hard to conclude that these pure forms of nicotine are any different from caffeine in harms / addictiveness
- cigarettes, or even pure tobacco smoked is definitely addictive and bad due to other compounds in play
- chewing tobacco products are likely a lot less worse than smoking, but still probably worse than pure nicotine gum or patches
- data is very unclear on vaping
IMO experience suggests vaping can clearly be highly addictive (see: young adults and teens), and I know personally there is even some minimal research on vaping e.g. THC that shows that vaping might be worse than just smoking cannabis, so vaping definitely warrants caution in general [though vaping THC requires much higher temps and different solvents, and involves different terpenes and other compounds].
When is my corporate sponsored adderall IV drip coming in?
I always assumed that was one of the benefits of FAANG offering onsite company doctors.
I mean what do you think that big push of vc funded online adhd medication services a few years ago was about.
greed?
Not much different than a fully stocked fridge with alcoholic beverages. Consume responsibly, we're all adults.
I agree to a point. Although, alcohol (when consumed responsibly) has a social element to it, so companies having a "beers on Friday after 4pm" just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money." They are serving different functions.
> just feels different than "here's nicotine so you can be more productive and make us more money."
More likely these companies just offered to give them some free vending machines and some office manager said sure why not. Not everything is a careful corporate strategy.
One could pretty easily argue that free coffee, tea, energy drinks and energy bar snacks are all productivity driven perks.
Beers on Friday after 4pm is rarely done because management really cares about the employees. It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.
If my boss gives me a stimulant to be more productive, especially a relatively harmless one like nicotine, I would gladly take it, as I like stimulants and am an adult capable of making decisions for myself. If I didn't, I would just refuse, just how I might refuse the free coffee by boss offers me.
I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants. That would be bad, indeed.
> It's a type of team building, improves employee morale and humanizes management. All lead to improved productivity in the long term.
Yes, but the important distinction is that its intention is to bring people together face-to-face, not isolate them to their desks for continued work. Just because the end goal is "productivity" broadly speaking, doesn't mean the mechanisms are socially/morally equivalent.
> I doubt anyone is forcing the employees to take the stimulants.
I agree, and I hope my comment didn't imply I thought that was the case.
I don't see how offering nicotine (or caffeine, or amphetamine) is morally wrong if it's not mandatory. In fact, given 2 companies that only differ in what they offer - free beer on Fridays for 1 hour or free stimulants all the time - I would choose the second one in a heart beat. Many people wouldn't, and that's their choice. I just don't see how one approach is better ethically than the other at all.
That's unnecessarily cynical. I've been in plenty of companies where the staff, managers included, enjoy going for a pint together. I'm in the UK, maybe it's cultural.
I agree, I made it too black and white. I should've said that some, probably most (in my opinion), of such decisions are made with productivity in mind, whether it's in the form of team cohesiveness or favorable view of management, but some are just because managers have the best interest in mind for their subordinates.
OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.
Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.
Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.
Tech companies are less receptive to alcohol than they used to be. There was a post (can't find it now) from a VC firm saying something like, "We encourage our companies to throw no alcohol parties; there's less risk of all kinds, and overall it's less messy."
After MeToo it was all gone. A lot of the incidents that were problematic from that era almost all had some alcohol involved.
A fully stocked fridge with alcoholic beverages also doesn't belong in a work place.
I'll take one addiction and a possible oral cancer for the company, thank you so much. No, I understand it's not guaranteed, but I am seriously flabbergasted by the careless actions of some companies...
biohacking? it's snus and it's dangerous: https://www.fhi.no/en/publ/2019/health-risks-from-snus-use2/
https://archive.ph/Upeo5
“While the pouches are considered a tobacco product, they don’t contain any tobacco, and are instead made from the plant fiber cellulose”
It’s just Zyn, which doesn’t seem that dramatically different than coffee. But maybe that’s because I don’t drink coffee or use nicotine
Nicotine is addictive, much more so than coffee
It is really not so clear at all this is the case for pure nicotine products. See https://gwern.net/nicotine#habit-formation, and https://gwern.net/nicotine#dependence for a starter / some brief counter-evidence.
it's like 25x more addicting than coffee, not sure how OP misses that
Probably not the case for some modern pure nicotine products (gum, patches). Vaping is harder to say due to lack of data and clear cases of addiction in young people, but pure nicotine is definitely a different animal than the classical delivery forms. See my response to GP.
I wonder if the issue with vapes isn't the sweeteners they put in them. I sometimes vape a specific liquid, which has never given me any cravings. I'll just stop after my bottle is done for multiple months until I remember to buy some more. I never carry my vape with me when I leave home (not to the office, not for multi-week holidays, nothing). It's not difficult to go without, I don't even think about it when I don't have it.
But the other day I ended up vaping some melon-flavored liquid. When it was empty, I was going crazy for a few hours, I absolutely had to have more. And it didn't even have more nicotine than what I usually vape. It was just the sweet taste that had me wanting more, exactly like back in my college days when I was eating Snickers bars like no tomorrow. Now that was a habit that was tough to break. And most people I see vaping out in the street seem to be vaping those ultra-sweet smelling liquids.
An interesting thought, I myself have met at least a couple people that tried to break an addiction by switching to vape products that were essentially just flavour (no nicotine, no THC; THC vapes are common and legal in Canada) and somehow stayed just as addicted to the flavour / oral stimulation. So that sounds at least plausible to me.
they miss it because they're an industry plant, mate.
bots are very active on HN and are very effective
Nicotine is depending on how you measure the 3rd or 4th most addictive substance on the planet. It's up there with Heroine, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Meth.
If you consider heroine a "not even once" type of drug then nicotine should give you pause.
What dimension of “addictive” are you anchoring on? Capture rate? Withdrawal severity? Reinforcement strength? Relapse rate after quitting? Nicotine dominates on some of those and not others.
Pretty clear from the responses to OP that most people are quite unaware there is almost two decades of decent research on pure nicotine now, and that, outside of vaping (where hard evidence is mostly lacking, due to the novelty), the purer stuff probably really isn't all that addictive, in the grand scheme of things. In many cases it is hard to even say it is much different than caffeine.
It's a reasonable mistake, I'd say. We spent those decades conflating "nicotine" with "smoking" and, through herculean efforts, managed to get the smoking rate down to 12-14% (in Germany it's still 22.7%!). Now, tobacco companies have come through with genuinely less harmful, genuinely less addictive products, but because of their previous wild duplicity, nobody really "believes" it. They think that nicotine must cause cancer. "Fool me once," for sure.
Can you point to said research because everything I can find from any kind of authoritative source is that form doesn't matter and nicotine is strongly addictive in all of them.
There is like zero messaging out there from anything resembling a health organization that says, "nicotine in purer forms is okay actually." It's an extraordinary claim that nicotine is super addictive only when mixed with other stuff and if you get the pure concentrated drug that actually lessens its pharmacological effects.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-outlook/20...
The delivery system modulates speed and magnitude of the hit, which affects how rapidly and how strongly dependence forms, but every form produces dependence with sustained use.
There isn’t anyone who is going to say “nicotine in purer forms is okay actually” because there isn’t anyone who is tasked with answering such a broad question.
Also, be careful not to shift the frame. Spivak ranked nicotine with other drugs. You changed the framing to “all are highly addictive.” These are different assertions, and both can be true at the same time. That’s why it’s more important and more interesting to discuss it in terms of addiction subtypes
Plenty of the sources I linked at https://gwern.net/nicotine are scientific and high-quality, that is not just some lazy list or junk compilation.
Nothing wrong with still being cautious about pure nicotine products though, and I definitely would be cautious about vaping.
bullshit. i've been smoking cigars for 5 years now. sometimes 2 or 3 a day and have zero issues stopping or going without a smoke for months. i was surprised as i was never smoker, but it is what it is. nicotine addiction is not nicotine addiction but cigarette addiction. cigars are pure tobacco. nothing else. cigarettes have over thousand ingredients in them. cigars also have higher nicotine dose than cigarettes and as i have said, zero issues.
know thy enemy.
It is bullshit. Stopping nicotine is like 2 days of mild discomfort. Stopping caffeine is absolute hell.
as i said, nictoine is a non-factor. as for caffeine, i quit multiple times. once the headaches are gone, which takes a week or two, followed by another week, or few, of feeling lethargic, it is back to normal(ie. give it a month altogether). so it's not too bad. it might be also easier to wean off slowly by decreasing caffeine consumption over longer period than quitting cold turkey to avoid the negative effects altogether.
Utter nonsense. I have replaced my ADHD prescription with nicotine patches, and in my experience I have had worse withdrawals, and greater desire to consume caffeine than either dermal nicotine or dexamfetamine. And I’m only a cup a day kinda guy, and I used to be a heavy smoker for years, so I know how dangerous the stuff can be.
If we’re talking about smoking or vaping, or nicotine pouches, sure, but mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.
> mode of administration and how quickly it peaks in your bloodstream cannot be hand-waved away like that.
Then surely you have some evidence, especially that caffeine is more addictive, rather than "hand-waving it away" via personal anecdote?
Utter nonsense
Got something other than anecdata? Because a web search returns a list of contrary sources as long as my arm.
But, hell, if we are trading stories, I dipped snuff for 30 years and I’ve consumed coffee since middle school. I can go days without coffee, even if I might not be happy about it. Quitting tobacco, OTOH, that was tough, with multiple starts and stops until success.
Tobacco is not pure nicotine. If you can’t even get your basics straight, I’m not sure on what level we can even have a discussion about it.
Here’s from someone that knows what they’re talking about: https://gwern.net/nicotine
Coffee doesn’t give you mouth cancer
Does nicotine?
Cancer no, but nicotine is implicated in heart disease and other cardiovascular issues.
Is that because it's a stimulant, or is there some other known mechanism? It seems like most (maybe all) stimulants I've read about are correlated with cardiovascular issues.
I think one theory is that nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. Though whether, in its pure form, it is a particularly significant one, i.e. any worse than caffeine, is really not so clear.
No, //cancer stems from the carcinogens in the burning / heating of tobacco//. Nicotine is not cancerous in itself any more than caffeine.
I'm not a doctor though so while I might sound sure it's based on what I've read on the topic over the many years.
Edit : rightly corrected its not just heating and burning, its tobacco and others in general. But nicotine itself is not cancerous.
Cancer also stems from non-heated tobacco because the plant itself contains carcinogens that are pressed into the skin in the mouth for example, often including lesions and such
Chewing tobacco causes cancer
But not because of the nicotine.
According to several reputable sources (cancer societies around the world), it isn't known if this is a risk yet. What are you being this on?
I'm not encouraging anyone to use these things, but we should only make claims that are based on evidence.
Given the long-term, widespread usage of coffee, is there something specific they're waiting on? Or is that an "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" thing?
Your final statement doesn't really add value without knowing that, unless you agree that we shouldn't assume other people are actually people, and not lizards in people suits until they prove, definitively, otherwise.
My mistake. I interpreted their comment to be implying that nicotine pouches do. I'm not referring to evidence for the safety of coffee, but of nicotine pouches.
Do nicotine pouches give you mouth cancer?
I don't think zyn has been studied enough to be conclusive, but it does have some negative effects similar to dip I suppose? Dip on the other hand is described as using something like 'fiberglass' that cuts your mouth so your gums can absorb the nicotine quicker, of course the tobacco industry denies this. I've only tried dip once, and it was like a kick to the face. I'll stick to casual cigar smoking (its been 4 years though!).
These kind of synthetic nicotine products aren't carcinogenic. They were originally developed as a safer replacement for the traditional Swedish practice of stuffing a bag of tobacco in your mouth, although after acquisition by Phillip Morris they've become common among people who never used tobacco in the first place. (As the article gestures towards, they are "tobacco products" under US law because of their nicotine content, even though they contain no tobacco leaf.)
they are horrendously addicting though which is the huge difference between nicotine and caffeine. Even though I love caffeine I can go days without it no problem (besides being slightly more tired). Habitual nicotine users tend to need to re-up every hour or so
I quit zyns a year ago and still crave them daily. Sooooo good and addictive and they don’t have that “it’s killing you” imperative to quit like cigarettes do
I'm not sure it is actually all that clear that pure nicotine products really are so addictive as people believe. E.g. most studies claiming such addictiveness may simply be because those that get addicted to patches / gum were already addicted to cigarettes (or other classic tobacco product) prior. See e.g. Gwern's notes on the topic.
https://gwern.net/nicotine#habit-formation
https://gwern.net/nicotine#dependence
Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be, which I don't think is credible at all. It's very common for addicts to falsely believe that they're not addicted and could quit whenever they want.
> Both of these links go to self-reported data about how addicted people feel themselves to be
This is an incredible and outright lie.
Actually try reading the page I linked, there are plenty of links to scientific studies, scientific reviews, and high-quality resources, as well as lots of careful notes about serious confounds in the usual studies. This includes in exactly the sections I linked.
By all means still be cautious and not careless about using the stuff, that is a perfectly sane position. But I think it is very clear that e.g. patches and gum are highly unlikely to have anything even approaching the risk profile of classic tobacco products.
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History has taught me to wait on the science of newer products that are consumed.
Seriously. How many times in your life have you seen "ok ok, yah that thing was bad, sorry everyone. but this new one isn't :)"
I’m taking a low dose (and spread out beyond 1 week) of mounjaro.
I realize the risk as GLP long term use is untested, but in my case it’s that; or deal with inevitable health problems from high BP and being only moderately overweight.
I don’t see a good reason for nicotine products.
I didn't mean to say don't take novel but mainstream medications you have a health reason for and are under the guidance of a doctor about.
I'm saying nicotine pouches are the tobacco industry's successor to vapes in the way vapes were their successor to cigarettes and some conservatism is warranted in light of that. Or like how every 10-15 years the evidence of health effects of some ubiquitous plastic grows too heavy and 3M comes out with a new one to replace it and the cycle repeats.
Right. I’m just saying the nicotine pouches have no real reason for being, other than the industry itself pushing it.
If companies are going to start giving us free drugs to boost productivity, they should at least give out the good stuff. Give me a modafinil (/provigil) vending machine, forget nicotine.
Soldiers have always been given cocaine and meth to stay awake and alert during battles. Guess their tech backup will have to do with nicotine.
During battles the calculations around health are completely different.
Are the Palantir headquarters inside an active war zone?
lord knows they're trying to be
They're "tobacco products" in the same sense that Diet Coke is a "cocaine product".
Ok, nicotine products. Still addictive junk, way harder to quit than any other nicotine product.
Or more literally in the sense that cocaine is a narcotic. This is the legal category, not the medical one.
The article specifically mentions Lucy & Sesh. A quick Google search confirmed some suspicions:
Sesh (2025): Max Cunningham is the Founder & CEO of Sesh, a nicotine pouch startup. In September 2025, Sesh raised $40 million in funding from investors including 8VC, a firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
David Renteln is the ceo of Lucy. I couldn't find a direct link between Thiel and Lucy, but it looks like Thiel has been friends with Renteln for a while and invested in Renteln's Soylent.
Nicotine is highly addictive but also relatively harmless. I would appreciate it provided by an employer though even though I wouldn't normally use it.
You would appreciate it? Why?
My own risk estimation is that its harmless enough for me and id want to try and see how it made me feel. Chemicals are cool.
When i worked in an office with free zoke zero I drank 3 cans per day.
> Palantir’s move is just one of the ways biohacking has taken the Silicon Valley tech space by storm.
It's not a new phenomenon, either. I remember biohacking being mentioned in the late aughts, if not earlier, and it's referenced as being part of SV culture in the 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore [0].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Penumbra%27s_24-Hour_Books...
I used to envy people that work in Silicon Valley, right where all the action is. But with all the recent developments, I don't anymore. I'm happy that I live in Europe, where we are still acting more or less normal these days.
This reads like an ad.
it is. but boy howdy wait until you read the rest of the comments.
that said, this is a site run by venture capitalists -- flogging product is a given
Now there is a perk that is going to get expensive, and boy it is going to suck when theres a downturn or new facilities manager who decides to cut back and stop offering them.
I strongly urge against consuming any tobacco or nicotine product. At the very least, it's very bad for your heart in pretty much every form, whether pure or impure, smoked or absorbed. Besides being directly bad for the heart, nicotine also metabolizes to carcinogens.
If you need a boost beyond caffeine, consider a square of 95% or 100% dark chocolate. It works. It too stresses the heart mildly, and can aggravate reflux a lot, but overall it's significantly safer than any tobacco product. You can also eat more of it if as needed.
The only sane time to take pure nicotine might be if someone is dying from Covid, their lungs are collapsing, and one desperately needs a daytime breathing boost.
Any brand or store recommendations?
"Montezuma Absolute Black 100% Cocoa With Orange And Coco Nibs" is what I ultimately went with. It is available on Amazon.
I have paused it for the time being due to reflux, but not everyone has reflux. Note that its strength can build up over days, so do not exceed the amount taken by more than 1 square a week. Overall, do not exceed 1 square per day per 50 lbs of body weight. Overuse can risk a high heart rate and insomnia.
Back in 2003: tech companies are stocking offices with coffee machines to boost employees productivity.
From personal experience, this isn't even a top-down push. I know people who have defended in detail why it's a good idea for them to develop a nicotine addiction. Bizarre behavior.
Nicotine has been demonstrated to help people with schizophrenia and certain mental illnesses quite a bit. It's considered a medicine by indigenous cultures for a reason.
I've been wondering how long it would take for tobacco to make a comeback given that we seem to be in a weird era where it's some kind of flex to embrace idiotic ideas.
Nicotine (without tobacco e.g. Zyn or gum) does seem to have some nootropic-ish properties but it's vastly inferior to a lot of other things and has major addiction/tolerance problems. It's not a great performance enhancer for anything but very sporadic use.
What the fuck
Funny. At least since Covid, I’ve noticed a number of employers, often at municipalities or other governments, but sometimes at private companies, are adding terms that employees cannot use any nicotine products whatsoever. What’s even stranger is the always go out of their way to explicitly note that non tobacco cessation aids are not allowed either. Seems like pure virtue signaling, though at least one person has suggested to me that the companies engaging in this are serious and go as far as blood testing.
This is almost always because the company gets a break on health insurance premiums for enacting such a policy.
Ah that makes sense. Was something changed recently to enable this? I’ve certainly seen employer health insurance discounts for not smoking for years, but the complete ban, listed in a job application, and explicitly including cessation aids feels like something I’ve only seen in recent years.
The first time I heard about it was hospital groups and other healthcare employers around 2010. Like you said it was originally an optional bonus/discount but even then there were explicit plans to make it mandatory over some years.
The timing as I remember it matches up with ACA passing (optional) and going into effect (mandatory) so may have something to do with health insurer costs related to that. But I don't know enough about it to guess more, just a suspicion.