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The Bank of Marlboro — 2008 Redux

When financial banks collapsed, the Bank of Marlboro and Newport stayed open—and solvent.

The Intoxication Impulse

Animals, humans, and the ancient urge to bend the mind

Across jungles, oceans, and cities, living things don’t just eat, mate, and flee—they also seek altered states. Fermenting fruit, alkaloid-rich leaves, bitter roots, psychedelic caps, numbing fish: from the canopy to the coral reef, organisms sample chemistry as if it were weather. This isn’t a quirky glitch in nature’s code. It’s a recurring pattern: curiosity meets opportunity, and physiology negotiates with risk. Where sugars rot into ethanol, where toxins arrive in microdoses, where plants hide messages in their molecules, creatures learn to listen—and sometimes lean in.

Consider the dolphins that gently mouth pufferfish, passing the animal between pod-mates like a living decanter. In tiny amounts the puffer’s tetrodotoxin seems to induce a dreamy, unthreatened calm; the dolphins float just below the surface, entranced by their reflections, as if they’d found a doorway to a softer world. In the forest, pen-tailed treeshrews lap low-alcohol palm nectar night after night without getting sloppy, the way a lineage adapts to a local bar. Reindeer browse Amanita muscaria and then prance and snort in ways herders have described for centuries. Vervet monkeys raid beach cocktails and quickly sort into lightweights and heavy-hitters. Cedar waxwings gorge on overripe berries and wobble, paying a small flight tax for a large sugar prize. Fruit flies choose boozy substrate when threats loom, as if ethanol itself were a tiny pharmacological shield. The details differ, but the curve repeats: signal (calories, antimicrobial action, analgesia, social bonding) versus noise (coordination loss, predation risk, hangovers). Species that can metabolize or behaviorally manage the noise keep the signal—and the behavior persists.

Humans take this primal curve and industrialize it into culture. We don’t stumble into intoxication; we choreograph it. Fermentation becomes a craft, distillation an art, and dosing a ritual. Every society builds its own grammar for crossing the threshold. The South Pacific kneads kava in bowls that quiet the body and smooth negotiations. The Andes chew coca leaves to lighten load and altitude alike. Arabia turns a bitter seed into coffee and erects an entire architecture of wakefulness around it. The Indian Ocean basin reddens its lips with betel nut and lime; East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula tune afternoons with khat; Mesoamerica drinks cacao as ceremony long before it becomes dessert. North America canonizes tobacco into pipes and peace, Europe baptizes wine and beer into sacrament and song, Siberia drums mushrooms into the night, Amazonia braids ayahuasca vines into stories that redraw the self. What begins as chemistry becomes choreography: vessels, songs, toasts, taboos, timings, thresholds, guardians.

Why does every culture do this? Because intoxication is not merely about escape; it is also about editing—turning down some channels (pain, rumination, social friction) to turn up others (affiliation, courage, pattern perception, grief-processing, play). Intoxicants compress time when endurance is needed, stretch it when reflection is overdue, and thicken it when a rite of passage demands weight. They create temporary rooms in the mind where communities can renegotiate status, transmit myth, reconcile enemies, or make the unbearable speakable. The pharmacology matters, but the container matters more: dose, setting, expectation, and meaning are the difference between medicine and carnage, between a council fire and a bar fight.

The animal kingdom previews the rule: approach the edge because something useful lives there, but learn to dance so you don’t fall. Humans answer with infrastructure. We invent vessels to pace the sip, music to entrain the breath, etiquette to allocate turns, and stories to remind us why the threshold exists at all. Even our prohibitions acknowledge the force of the current; only powerful rivers warrant dams. When bans crumble, rituals reassert themselves, often in new clothes—craft breweries, tea ceremonies, sober-curious cacao circles—because the underlying drive never left. It only looked for safer channels.

Intoxication has costs, and history tallies them honestly: addiction, violence, illness, empire-scale exploitation. But the ledger also records the things people reliably seek from these molecules: relief from pain, social glue, brief vacations from the tyranny of the self, perspective on grief, bravery for speech, an accelerant for creativity, a softener for hard days. The problem is not the existence of the drive; it is the quality of the channel. When the channel is noisy—dirty spirits, chaotic settings, predatory markets—the harms swell. When the channel is tended—clear dosing, communal guardrails, purposeful ritual—the same drive can civilize rather than shatter.

So the pattern resolves. Dolphins pass a puffer; treeshrews sip a palm; reindeer nose snow for red caps; birds overeat the orchard’s forgotten fruit. And people everywhere—from monasteries to music festivals, from tea houses to taverns—curate chemistry into meaning. The intoxication impulse is an old inheritance, a negotiation between biology and story. Animals demonstrate its roots. Human cultures write the user manual. The task is perennial: don’t deny the river; learn to steer it.

The Paradox of the Cigarette: How the Worst Delivery System Won—and How the Edit Saves the Story

Every now and then, markets crown a champion that offends common sense. By any engineering standard, the cigarette is a fiasco: a cargo of tar and carbon monoxide lugging a microgram payload of nicotine, lit with fire, exhaled as waste into shared air. It is inefficient (most of the drug is burned off), destructive (combustion creates thousands of toxic byproducts), and noisy—olfactorily, socially, environmentally. And yet, for a century, it was the most successful consumer product on earth. A thing that literally stains its users and their rooms still managed to colonize cultures, redirect tax bases, and write itself into cinema. If you wanted a case study in how “bad systems can scale,” you could stop at the ashtray.

Why did the worst vessel win? Because inside the racket of smoke and ash, the signal kept arriving. Nicotine binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors—an ancient interface in the brain’s attentional and arousal circuitry—and it does so quickly and predictably when delivered by smoke. The receptor is a primitive gatekeeper; it doesn’t adjudicate morality or scent. It registers timing and dose. Cigarette smoke, for all its ruin, offered pharmacokinetics that hit like a well-timed punctuation mark: fast onset to change state now, fast offset to permit another nudge later. That rhythm—the spiky, on-demand cadence—fit the human day: start-line nerves before a task, the sag after lunch, the solitude at dusk. The delivery system was a disaster for lungs and hearts; it was optimized for behavior.

Add the psychology of ritual and you get product–market inevitability. Cigarettes solved for immediacy and choreography. A lighter, a draw, a visible plume—each became a cue that trained the loop: see → do → feel. The plume itself doubled as social proof; you could recognize your tribe at fifty paces. Packaging, too, acted like a memory device: colors, crests, typography—retrieval cues that collapsed the search cost of choosing among near-substitutes. Distribution sealed the deal: affordable, ubiquitous, easy to carry, easy to share. Network effects did the rest: the more common smoking became, the more infrastructure (rooms, rules, rituals) sprang up to support it, which made it easier still to participate. The cigarette didn’t have to be good to be dominant; it had to be fast, repeatable, and embedded.

The bill, of course, was catastrophic. Combustion’s chemistry weaponized a small boon into a population disease. But the key to the paradox—the reason this awful vessel could win—remains crucial: the signal worked. It hit the receptor that tunes vigilance and calms jitter, and it did so on a schedule the brain could learn. That is the uncomfortable hinge of the story. If you focus only on the smoke, you miss why people reached for it. If you focus only on the receptor, you forgive the smoke. Both are mistakes. The right reading is that the drive to change state is conserved; people will recruit whatever mechanism fits their day and their budget. The tragedy of the 20th century is that the mechanism that best fit the day carried the most collateral damage.

Now we reach the part that looks, at first, like heresy and, on closer inspection, like hygiene: the single most life-saving “invention” of the 21st century for nicotine may not be a new molecule but a new edit—a change in delivery that preserves the signal and cuts the noise. Oral pouches, regulated e-vapor, and heated tobacco are not equal to one another, and none is equal to zero risk. But all share the same architectural ambition: remove fire, standardize dose, shrink externalities. You’re not inventing willpower or erasing demand; you are rerouting a conserved drive through a channel with lower loss—less waste heat to the body, less pollution to the room, less spectacle to the social graph.

To see why this matters, follow the chain that once elevated cigarettes. Pharmacokinetics: modern formats can deliver rapid, predictable effects without combustion’s toxic chemistry. Ritual: “pop, place, proceed” replaces “exit, light, broadcast,” lowering activation energy and increasing compatibility with ordinary life. Cues: disciplined sensory fingerprints—can silhouette, closure feel, first flavor note—become fast retrieval keys that help the brain say “this one works” without a committee meeting. Distribution: pocketable, portable, less stigmatized—more contexts available without conscripting bystanders. Crucially, this is not a permission slip for expansion; it’s a blueprint for substitution: for adults who would otherwise burn, move the drive to a channel with fewer externalities, and police that channel aggressively.

“Permission over performative prohibition” is not a slogan; it’s a systems choice. Performative prohibition ignores the conservation of drive and treats demand like a light switch: flip it off and the impulse is gone. In practice, the current simply jumps to weaker wires—counterfeit supply, improvised stimulants, potency spikes—where tolerances are worse and oversight thinner. Permission, correctly engineered, does the opposite. It sets specifications (materials, contaminants, dose variance), enforces truth-in-labeling, gates access by age, taxes by risk, and punishes leakage. It acknowledges that the receptor will keep listening and that our responsibility is to make sure the message arrives with the least possible collateral.

This approach also respects the biography of minutes. Combustion didn’t just harm bodies; it seized time—hard cuts in the day, weathered intermissions, performances no one asked to attend. Non-combustible formats, when used by adults in place of smoking, return those minutes to co-ownership with ordinary life. That recapture has value beyond convenience. Habits that no longer demand scene changes are easier to stabilize, easier to taper when goals change, and less likely to add harm to bystanders. A quieter delivery is a better neighbor—and often a better long-run match to the user’s own preferences for privacy and control.

There are boundaries that make the difference between a rescue and a rerun. Youth protection isn’t negotiable; an adult substitution strategy that leaks into adolescence is a policy failure, not a success. Quality and contamination are non-optional; a safer channel becomes a dangerous one if it cannot be trusted. Marketing ethics must shift from seduction to stewardship: distinctive brand assets help adults find what already works for them; they should not be used to recruit the young or the ambivalent. Taxation and regulation should mirror risk, not theater: price the externalities you can measure, align incentives with switching, and keep the enforcement hammer ready for actors who counterfeit or contaminate.

When you put these pieces together, the paradox dissolves into a clearer rule: the 20th century selected a delivery system that was exquisitely tuned to human behavior and disastrously misaligned with human health. The 21st century’s opportunity is to keep the tuning and fix the alignment. That is not a capitulation to vice; it is the ordinary work of public health and product design—what we did with unleaded gasoline, catalytic converters, seatbelts, airbags, needle exchange, guardrails on cliffs people already drive. In each case, we recognized that shouting at gravity does not change its vector; building better rails does.

So, yes: the wild claim stands. The most life-saving “invention” in nicotine may be an edit, not an epiphany—a delivery redesign that lets the receptor hear what it wants without the room having to listen to what it hates. But the edit only saves the story if we choose it on purpose: permission with standards over prohibition with pageantry. Preserve the signal. Cut the noise. And build a system that treats adults like signal processors, not sinners—because the receptor doesn’t care about our speeches, but our lungs, our streets, and our minutes surely do.

The Theater of Time: What You Get Back When Combustion Goes Away

David Eagleman’s thought experiment lands like a cold audit: sort your life not by chronology but by activity, and you discover you’ve lived in long, silent blocks—months of showers, years of email, whole seasons paved with commuting. It’s an unsettling way to see time, because it strips away narrative and leaves only allocation. Apply that lens to nicotine and the contrast between delivery systems stops being abstract chemistry and becomes autobiography. In the cigarette century, the blocks are concrete, cold, and solitary. A pack-a-day habit—roughly five minutes per cigarette, twenty times a day—consumes about 100 minutes daily. Stretch that over forty years and you compress roughly 2.8 years into a single, contiguous slab called “smoking,” without even counting the side quests: stepping outside, hunting a lighter, shielding a flame in the wind, washing smoke out of fabric, lingering under awnings in the rain. In Eagleman-time those become separate monoliths—months cupping matches, weeks waiting by service doors, a full season apologizing with mints. The habit doesn’t just skim minutes; it demands chapters. It imposes hard cuts in the film of your day.

Reduced-risk formats—oral pouches, regulated e-vapor, heated tobacco—re-edit the same reel. The “nicotine” block still exists, but the surrounding architecture changes. You remove the relocation tax (no walk outside), the weather tax (no rain or cold), the olfactory broadcast (far less or no lingering smell), and the fire-and-ash choreography. The time doesn’t vanish; it is recaptured into parallel use. In narrative terms, cigarettes behave like loading screens that halt the plot; pouches behave like background rendering while the scene continues. You answer email, drive, plan, parent—while the product runs quietly alongside. That edit matters because human behavior is path-dependent: when an action stops demanding scene changes, the friction falls, the reachable moments widen, the stigma narrows, and adoption shifts from a small, ritualized corner of life to the “between the lines” where most minutes actually live.

The psychology behind this re-edit is not conjecture. Habits take root where repetition meets low activation energy: the fewer steps and the less spectacle, the more frequently the loop completes. Cigarettes require a ritual tax—exit the task, exit the room, ignite, signal to others what you’re doing. That tax throttles when and where use occurs. Oral and other reduced-emission formats lower the threshold to “pop, place, proceed,” turning single-purpose blocks into dual-purpose minutes. At the same time, the brain’s prediction machinery learns from stable cues and reliable outcomes. A consistent sensory fingerprint (can silhouette, opening feel, first flavor note) and a dependable, modest state change teach faster than erratic timing and variable effects. Over many uneventful, satisfactory iterations, the nervous system tags the behavior as “known-good,” and choice migrates from deliberation to reflex. This is the mere-exposure dynamic and reinforcement learning working in concert: familiarity warms, predictability lowers search cost, small on-schedule rewards lock in the mapping from cue to outcome.

Time topology also alters social gravity. Combustion is performative whether you intend it or not: there is flame, plume, smell, and an inevitable audience. That broadcast invites stigma and regulation, which, in turn, push the habit into colder, lonelier places—outside, away, later. When a delivery format dramatically reduces the broadcast—no smoke in shared air, little to no residual odor—the social penalty drops. This doesn’t mean “riskless”; it means the behavior stops commandeering the environment. With smaller social costs, users who were penalized by spectacle—indoor workers, parents corralling kids, people navigating shared spaces—gain options. The result is the quiet expansion of use into contexts that were previously off-limits, not because the desire was absent, but because the choreography was too expensive in time, attention, or reputation.

Health risk is, and should remain, the first-order question. Here the contours are clear: cigarette smoke is a toxic mixture linked causally to cancer, cardiovascular, and respiratory disease; eliminating combustion eliminates thousands of combustion byproducts. Regulators in multiple jurisdictions now distinguish combustible from non-combustible nicotine on exposure grounds, and clinical and biomarker studies show meaningful reductions in many smoke-related toxicants when adult smokers switch completely. None of that upgrades “reduced risk” to “harmless,” and none of it grants a free pass to youth access, manufacturing quality, or truthful labeling. But it does clarify the trade: different chemistry, different exposure, different externalities. The timeline edit—fewer hard cuts, more crossfades—rides on that chemistry change.

Marketing science catches up to the same conclusion from a different angle: brands grow by becoming easy to notice and easy to choose in the moments that matter. Distinctive assets (shape, color, mark) that survive at a glance, coupled with distribution that puts the product where the minutes are, generate mental and physical availability. Dwell time supercharges this, because the brand isn’t just noticed; it’s lived with. Each additional minute is a rehearsal that makes the next choice cheaper. Over months and years, the rehearsal compounds into a moat: switching feels like friction not because of a slogan, but because the learned fingerprint makes alternative options register as “almost right,” which the brain reads as “not right.”

Eagleman’s framing lets us quantify the stakes. If a pack-a-day smoker spends ~100 minutes daily on cigarettes, that’s nearly 12% of waking hours assuming a 14–16 hour day—time that is mostly single-purpose, geographically constrained, and often socially taxed. Shift the same underlying drive into a format that runs parallel to ordinary life, and a meaningful share of those minutes is reclaimed into dual-purpose time. You are not abolishing the “nicotine” block; you are dissolving its walls so that work, family, and leisure can co-occupy the space. Over decades, the difference between years cordoned off into weathered, solitary chapters and years braided into daily life is not merely cosmetic—it is autobiographical. What you do with your minutes becomes what your life feels like.

There is a practical management corollary. If the engine of transition is a reallocation of minutes, the levers that matter are the ones that engineer minutes responsibly: keep activation energy low for adults who would otherwise smoke; keep variance low so predictions stay cheap; keep contamination and labeling standards high so trust can form; keep access gated so youth exposure is minimized. Do that, and the “Eagleman cut” of a user’s life looks less like a series of hard stops and more like an unbroken line of lived moments—emails answered, drives completed, workouts logged—where the nicotine block no longer steals chapters but shares scenes.

The larger story, then, is not just substitution (“this instead of that”) but narrative repair. Combustion carved visible epochs out of a life—years of standing apart from your own day. Reduced-risk formats, properly regulated and responsibly used by adults who would otherwise smoke, give many of those minutes back to the activities that define a person’s identity. In the long audit at the end—the kind Eagleman imagines—you don’t just want fewer grim monoliths. You want a film with fewer loading screens, more continuity, and more of you present in your own scenes. That is the underappreciated dividend of the transition: not only fewer toxicants in blood and breath, but fewer jump cuts in the story of a life.

The Pocket Ritual

The strange thing about brand power is how quiet it is while it’s being built. We imagine it arriving with a bang—ad campaigns, celebrity endorsements, a flashy shelf takeover—but most of the time it accumulates like sediment. Minute by minute, encounter by encounter, the brain files away a verdict so small you don’t notice it forming: this thing works for me. Pouches change the rate of accumulation. What used to be a five-minute, outdoor, break-only ritual becomes ambient time—ten to thirty quiet minutes that ride along at the desk, in the car, on the couch—repeated often enough that the product stops visiting your day and starts living there. And when something lives there, the brain does what it always does with reliable regularities: it learns.

The mechanics aren’t mystical. Familiarity has a way of warming preference. Repeated, uneventful encounters make a thing easier to process, and “easy to process” often feels like “good” before you’ve had a chance to explain why. Under the hood, your nervous system is running a constant forecasting exercise. It tries to predict what’s about to happen and rewards itself when the prediction lands. A stable sensory fingerprint—recognizable can silhouette, disciplined colorway and type, the first precise snap of a lid, the opening note of flavor—shrinks uncertainty before language arrives. Recognition is faster than thought. The logo is less a picture than a retrieval key; the colorway is less paint than a promise that “this is the one that works.” When the expected state change follows—attention up a notch, tension down a notch—the brain strengthens the association by a hair. Not a flood of gratitude, just a subtle “yep, that again.” Multiply that by hundreds of sessions and you don’t get a straight line; you get curvature. Selection shifts from preference to reflex.

Reinforcement adds structure to the curve. Small rewards teach better than erratic ones because timing is the teacher. When the effect arrives on schedule, the system can credit the right cue: that look, that feel, that taste triggered the outcome. Over time the cue itself becomes valuable; it’s the little green light on the jetway that tells you the plane is here. This is why sensory discipline matters so much more than many operators appreciate. Drift in flavor or feel isn’t just “new news”; it’s a prediction error the user can’t always name but can always feel. Prediction errors are friction, and friction is a tax on switching in reverse: you’re taxing your own incumbency. Keep the fingerprint tight and the loop tightens; loosen it, even a little, and you force relearning.

Habits form where repetition meets low activation energy. The cigarette demanded an act: leave the task, leave the room, ignite the ritual. That friction made the behavior costly and pushed it into fewer contexts. Pouches lower the threshold to almost nothing: pop, place, proceed. Lower the threshold and you raise the trial count. Raise the trial count and you give the brain more data to confirm its prediction that “this works.” Frequency is the solvent of doubt. Ten minutes here, twenty there, repeated across a day, and the product becomes the background instrument keeping time while you do your real work.

Context is the other half of memory. We don’t just remember that something worked; we remember where and who we were when it worked. Pair a particular mint with the first ninety minutes of deep work, and it becomes a key to that cognitive room. Pair another with the drive home, and it becomes the signal to downshift without turning off. These tags are durable precisely because the moments are consequential. We keep what helps us in the places we care about—focus blocks, commutes, decompressions—and we prefer it there again. Change the cue and performance wobbles, a barely audible “not quite right” that nudges you back to the known-good.

Very few everyday products earn this much continuous time in a life. Gum racks up respectable minutes with continuous mouthfeel and ritual. Coffee and tea layer identity and flavor onto ten to sixty minutes of cup-in-hand time. Lozenges and hard candies dissolve into smaller intervals. Seeds and nuts run long idle stretches with a repetitive, soothing rhythm. Cigarettes historically claimed serious minutes but levied social and environmental tolls that forced the ritual into a narrow lane. Vapes peck in countless micro-touches with less continuous “in-mouth” dwell. Pouches stitch together indoor sessions and stack them, often surpassing gum and coffee on daily time-on-brand—and, crucially, they add a reliable state change. That combination—high dwell, low spectacle, consistent reward—moves the brand from the shelf to the fabric of the day, which is where learning runs fastest.

If you had to write the model on a single napkin, it would look like this: brand equity grows as exposure minutes × reward consistency × cue clarity × context fit, accumulated over years. Each term matters because each amplifies the others. Minutes without consistency are noise and don’t compound. Consistency without minutes doesn’t teach. A beautiful cue that doesn’t fit the user’s real contexts won’t be retrieved when it matters. When all four march in step, the slope steepens in a way that, from the outside, looks like inevitability. From the inside, it feels like a lot of agreeable sessions that never call attention to themselves.

This is why the most prosaic parts of design carry so much weight. Silhouette and color work at the periphery; they announce themselves before your fovea gets involved. Haptics—the lid’s resistance, the seal’s micro-texture, the click at close—live below narration but squarely inside prediction. Flavor is where identity meets reinforcement: onset time, note fidelity, the arc of cool or warmth, the fade. When these are tuned and held steady, the brain can run on cheap predictions. When they drift, it must spend energy evaluating. Evaluation is noble but tiring. Tiring is the enemy of repetition.

From an operator’s perspective, the growth lever that counts is unglamorous and relentlessly practical: minutes. Engineer more of them without asking the room for permission. Standardize the fingerprint so recognition is pre-conscious. Guard variance as if it were radioactive. Expand contexts not by exhortation but by making it natural to reach for the can in the moments the user already values: the first task block, the post-lunch dip, the drive home. Discounts and promotions can widen the top of the funnel; dwell is what deepens the well.

From an investor’s perspective, the story looks like marketing on the surface and like compounding underneath. Businesses with high dwell, tight variance, and reliable reward accumulate advantages that financial statements only hint at: lower search costs for the customer, higher switching costs over time, and a stock of state-dependent memories competitors can’t easily buy. A small share gain in “minutes” can prefigure a larger share gain in “market” because the brain is training on what it uses, not what it notices in passing. Awareness wavers; muscle memory repeats.

There are responsibilities embedded in this, and they’re not optional. Products that live close to the body and tune mental state demand guardrails proportionate to their power. Age gates, quality control, contamination standards, truthful labeling—these are not regulatory chores but gaskets that keep pressure from spraying where it shouldn’t. The strategic error is to pretend demand can be commanded to zero; the strategic craft is to route conserved drive through low-loss channels and police variance with zeal. Reliability protects the user and the category. Chaos harms both.

Seen this way, “brand power scales with time-on-brand” is not a clever line; it’s a description of how learning systems behave in the wild. Pouches expand time-on-brand. The brain converts repetition into belief, belief into habit, habit into loyalty that feels less like sentiment and more like physics. The logo and can stop behaving like decoration and start behaving like a tool—an instrument you use to steer the day. And tools, once trusted, are stubborn. If you’re building, make recognition effortless, make reward reliable, make friction quiet, and give the minutes room to work. If you’re analyzing, discount the noise, watch the dwell, and remember that in compounding processes the interesting action is rarely where things start. It’s where they persist.

Smoke as Metronome: Tobacco Rituals from Daily Routines

Open a century of day planners and you’ll find the same quiet tick: tobacco as a clock. For Immanuel Kant, a single pipe of weak-leaf smoke wasn’t a vice so much as a sand timer—the bowl’s burn rate marking out a meditation interval before work began. Charles Darwin reserved 3 p.m. for a cigarette and light reading with Emma; the ritual split his day cleanly into before and after. Truman Capote swore thinking required two instruments—coffee and a cigarette—so the act of puffing and sipping became a cognitive cadence. P. G. Wodehouse started with a pipe packed (eccentrically) from crumbled cigars; the preparation itself primed the prose. Winston Churchill threaded cigars through meals, memos, and midnight strategy—punctuation marks in a schedule that otherwise had no commas. Artists and writers echoed the same beat: Willem de Kooning’s studio breaks with coffee and cigarettes; William Styron’s afternoons smoking to music; Gustave Flaubert’s pipe filled on waking; Will Self’s “smoker’s toolkit” as armor for long drafts; Stefan Sagmeister’s breakfast cigar before a day of experiments; even C. S. Lewis noting how conversation “almost inevitably” glide-pathed into smoke—social tempo as much as chemical state.

What all these cases share isn’t glamor; it’s meter. Tobacco rituals operated like metronomes for attention: a packed bowl, a lit end, a visible ember, a predictable span. They created bounded sessions (one bowl, one page, one thought), state transitions (from errands to ideas, from fury to focus), and social handshakes (a match offered, a pause shared). In behavioral terms, they bundled three controls into one gesture: (1) a timebox (burn duration), (2) a sensory cue stack (taste, smell, hand-to-mouth) that told the brain “work/rest now,” and (3) a reward prediction (nicotine’s onset) that reinforced returning to that same groove tomorrow.

Pulled straight from Mason Currey’s Daily Routines blog (not the books), with verbatim snippets where available.

·       Immanuel Kant — pipe-as-meditation timer.
“After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of tea — weak tea. With that, he smoked a pipe of tobacco. The time he needed for smoking it ‘was devoted to meditation.’”

·       P. G. Wodehouse — first pipe of the day; cigar-crumb ritual.
“Then he would light the first pipe of the day, crumbling the cigars Peter Schwed sent him into the bowl in preference to pipe tobacco.”

·       Charles Darwin — 3 p.m. cigarette with reading.
“3 p.m., Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, [and] listened to a novel or other light literature read by Emma.”

·       Truman Capote — can’t think without cigarette + coffee.
“I can’t think unless I’m lying down… with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping.”

·       Winston Churchill — cigars thread through long, scheduled days.
“Clementine drank claret, Winston champagne… port brandy and cigars. When lunch ended, about 3:30 p.m., he…” (The entry sketches cigars alongside meals, work blocks, and late nights.)

·       Will Self — smoking as a survival ritual of the writing life.
“Rituals. Smoking—pipes, cigars, special brands, accessories, the whole bollocks.”

·       Stefan Sagmeister — breakfast cigar before “experiments.”
“After a giant pot of coffee and a medium-sized cigar for breakfast, I start my daily schedule of little experiments.”

·       Willem de Kooning — sessions punctuated by many cigarettes.
The studio routine is described with strong coffee and “cigarettes” as they worked at their easels for long stretches.

·       William Styron — afternoons of smoking and music.
Connecticut routine included “morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.”

·       Gustave Flaubert — pipe filled at wake-up.
“Flaubert, a man of nocturnal habits, usually awoke at 10 am… [the valet] filled his pipe…” (part of the morning setup before he started working).

·       C. S. Lewis — social talk “leads almost inevitably to smoking.”
Entry notes his preference for strict hours and the aside that conversation “leads almost inevitably to smoking,” included here as a social/transition cue.

The First Law of Feeling: Conservation of State

Physics has a blunt rule: energy is conserved. It doesn’t vanish when you flip a switch; it changes form—potential to kinetic, heat to motion, current to light. Human regulation runs on the same math. The drive to change state is conserved. Turn off one pathway and the impulse doesn’t disappear; it reappears somewhere else—faster, louder, or riskier—depending on how we’ve engineered the system.

Think in circuits. Desire is voltage. Habits are wires. Friction—stigma, smell, logistics—is resistance. Harm is waste heat. Cigarettes ran high voltage through a bad resistor: huge “Joule heating” in the body and room (tar, CO, ash). Reduced-risk products are better wiring: lower resistance to access the same effect with far less heat loss. If you sever that clean circuit, the voltage hunts new paths: gray-market stimulants (thin wires that overheat), alcohol creep (big heat in the social environment), or potency compression (higher voltage through narrower traces). You didn’t cut demand; you rerouted current into places with worse tolerances.

Or take fluids. Drive is pressure; channels are pipes. Close the main valve and the head doesn’t fall to zero; it backs up and finds seams. That’s prohibition’s signature: leaks, bursts, and unpredictable spray. Smarter plumbing widens the safe pipe (clean, standardized RRPs for adults who would otherwise burn) and gaskets the rest (hard enforcement on contaminants and illicit supply). Pressure is managed, not wished away.

Thermodynamics offers the cleanest metaphor. The first law (conservation) says the “state budget” stays constant; the second law (entropy) says unmanaged flows spread disorder. Combustion maximized entropy—smoke in shared air, burns, fires, chronic disease. Cleaner delivery lowers entropy per dose: less mess, less collateral, more order. Ban the low-entropy path and the same energy returns as disorder elsewhere—variance spikes, potency roulette, emergency rooms learning new acronyms.

Even phase changes map. Liquid water to steam needs latent heat; nicotine from “off” to “on” needs effort. Cigarettes demanded phase energy—go outside, light, inhale—so many simply abstained. Pouches drop the latent heat: pop–place–proceed. Lowering that threshold raises frequency for those already set on using. The policy job isn’t to pretend the phase won’t happen; it’s to ensure when it does, it happens in a vessel that doesn’t explode.

You can also see it as resonance. Brains have target states (focus up, anxiety down). When a product matches that natural frequency, small inputs do useful work. Cigarettes hit resonance but shook the chassis. RRPs keep the note and damp the rattle. Remove the tuned oscillator and people bang on the system with hammers—triple espresso here, mystery capsule there—same melody, more distortion.

So the rulebook writes itself:

• Preserve the signal, cut the heat. Route the conserved drive through low-loss channels.

• Design for impedance matching. Make the useful state easy for would-be smokers, hard for everyone else.

• Police variance, not voltage. The danger isn’t that current flows; it’s that it jumps through bad wiring.

Energy moves or it burns. State does, too. The only real choice is whether that conserved force flows through measured pipes with known specs—or rips a hole where the wall was weakest.

From Marlboros to Mint Pouches, from Monster to “Clean Energy”: How a Male-Coded Habit Is Crossing the Aisle

For most of the 20th century, cigarettes and (later) energy drinks wore the same jacket: male-coded. Smoking spread through barracks, shop floors, pubs, and factory gates—spaces where men clustered and spectacle didn’t penalize them. The cues screamed “masculine”: fire, grit, ash, a voice roughened by smoke. Early energy drinks repeated the pattern—extreme-sports ads, matte-black cans, bitter bite, convenience-store endcaps—telegraphing risk and rev to young men.

What’s changing isn’t the molecule; it’s the friction profile and aesthetic. Nicotine pouches delete the very costs that historically taxed women hardest—plume, smell, hair/clothes contamination, cosmetic aging cues—while letting the “state control” remain. The result: adoption opens in image-sensitive contexts (offices, retail, healthcare, on-camera jobs) where cigarettes could never live. Meanwhile, a new wave of energy drinks reframes the category around wellness and composure instead of chaos—think cleaner flavor, lighter cans, pastel or white palettes, “no sugar / green tea extract / vitamins,” distribution through gyms, yoga/barre studios, and supermarket cold boxes rather than only gas stations. (Celsius is the poster child: fitness-forward branding, sessionable flavors, and a can that looks at home next to a water bottle.)

Three levers drive the gender shift:

1. Cosmetic externalities ↓
   Smoke’s beauty tax (odor, staining, skin impact) once repelled many women. Pouches remove the visible tells; “clean energy” drinks avoid sticky sweetness, dye-stained tongues, and “dare me” branding.

2. Ritual optics → Daily utility
   A five-minute smoke break is a public event; a pouch is a private valve. A skull-branded 16-oz bomb reads like a stunt; a slim can with citrus and “thermogenic” copy reads like gear. Same function (arousal control), different theater.

3. Packaging psychology
   Design shifts from angular/heavy to sleek/bright; from “extreme” to “athletic.” Flavor architecture moves from harsh-bitter to crisp-mint, citrus, berry—profiles with high repeat and low social cost. The can and the tin feel like accessories, not declarations.

The outcome is not a simple flip from male to female; it’s de-gendering via engineering. When you strip the mess and menace from the carrier, demand looks less like a tribe and more like a bell curve. Men still dominate legacy formats (cigarettes, traditional snus) in many markets, but pouches and “clean” energy are expanding the center—especially among women who were historically blocked by smoke’s stigma and heavy-metal branding.

The lesson for operators and investors is straightforward: remove friction that maps onto identity (beauty, scent, social optics), and a “male” category becomes a human category. The levers are boring on paper—chemistry, flavor, form factor, design, channel—but they rearrange who shows up.

The Law of Conservation of State

Physics says energy cannot be created or destroyed—only transformed. Human behavior runs on a parallel rule: state cannot be legislated out of existence—only rerouted. Call it the fourth drive (after hunger, thirst, sex): the urge to modulate our internal state. We wake up and move the sliders—up (alertness), down (anxiety), sideways (mood, focus). That motive force doesn’t vanish when a substance disappears; it seeks the next available conduit.

Prohibitions mistake supply for source. Ban one valve and the pressure doesn’t go to zero; it displaces. People substitute (more caffeine, more alcohol, more “study aids”), compress (stronger, smaller, riskier goods), or migrate to markets with worse tolerances (potency spikes, contamination, no QA). The pattern is as old as policy: remove the well-lit corridor and traffic shifts to darker alleys. You didn’t reduce desire; you reduced telemetry.

Nicotine is the live case. Combustion was the worst channel—fire, tar, secondhand fallout. Cleaner delivery (pouches, regulated vapes, heated) separates signal from plume and shrinks externalities. Shut that corridor rather than steward it and the drive routes elsewhere: to black-box stimulants, to alcohol creep, to “legal” but high-variance stacks. The harm budget doesn’t disappear; it gets reallocated—often toward options with higher volatility per dose.

A smarter frame is hydraulic, not heroic. Shape the flow. Keep youth out hard. Standardize purity so the “clean” stays clean. Price and message by relative risk so complete switching is rewarded, not punished. Put bright lights on the corridor you want used and starve the ones you don’t with enforcement focused on variance, contaminants, and illicit distribution—not on the adult who’s choosing the lower-harm path.

The lesson isn’t that any drug is a virtue; it’s that drives are conserved. When the social body offers safe, age-gated, low-variance channels, demand is domesticated—predictable, inspectable, boring. Weld those channels shut and the same energy reappears as leakage, potency compression, and policy whack-a-mole. You cannot outlaw the impulse to change state. You can only decide whether it flows through a measured pipe—or bursts a seam.

Shots on Goal: The Greatness of Rodman

Dennis Rodman didn’t change the scoreboard with jumpers; he changed the math of the game. Rebounding is defense that turns into offense—an invisible hinge where possession scarcity flips. Rodman mastered that hinge: reading spin, beating the second jump, arriving half a step early. Every miss became a new try. That’s why his value compounded even on nights he scored two points—he manufactured inevitability.

Rodman wasn’t just good at rebounding; he’s the outlier.

·       Seven straight rebounding titles (1991–98). No one else has a streak that long in the modern era.

·       All-time #1 in rebound percentage. By the best era-adjusted stat (Total Rebound %), Rodman owns the top career mark and most of the top single-season marks. In plain English: when he was on the floor, no one grabbed a higher share of available boards.

·       Undersized anomaly. At ~6'7", he consistently out-rebounded seven-footers, which makes his dominance even weirder and more singular.

Philip Morris International (PM) and British American Tobacco (BTI) are the portfolio analog of that skill: defensive dividends that quietly turn volatility into extra possessions. Price can brick shots; cash doesn’t. A scheduled payout lands, quarter after quarter, and gives you a choice: put the ball right back up (reinvest into yield when the market is sulking) or kick it out to the open shooter (reallocate into whatever’s mispriced). Either way, you extended the play without needing a perfect entry pass from Mr. Market.

The Pocket Residency Effect

Brand power scales with time-on-brand, and pouches massively increase that dwell time: instead of a five-minute, outdoor, break-only encounter, you’ve got a can in your pocket and a 10–30 minute session that can run at your desk, in the car, on the couch—dozens of micro-touches a day. That extra exposure isn’t cosmetic; it rewires preference. The brain’s “mere-exposure” bias, predictive coding, and habit loops all strengthen when the same sensory fingerprint arrives under the same badge again and again: the logo and can shape become fast retrieval cues, the colorway and typography compress uncertainty into a one-glance “this is the one that works,” and the flavor note acts as a checksum that confirms the reward is on the way. More minutes per user × more usage occasions × more years using means exponentially more branded impressions, deeper state-dependent memory (“this mint = deep work/drive home”), and higher switching costs—because anything that deviates even slightly from your learned feel now trips prediction error. Net effect: as pouches push total time-in-use up, branding doesn’t just ride along; it compounds into a moat—turning a logo + can into a trusted instrument you spend real life with, every day.

Very few FMCG products rack up as much time-in-experience per day as nicotine pouches. The closest peers:

• Chewing gum — 2–5 pieces/day × ~10–20 min each = 20–100 min; continuous mouthfeel, ritualized.

• Coffee/tea — 1–3 cups × ~10–20 min each = 10–60 min; strong cup-in-hand branding + flavor ritual.

• Hard candy/lozenges — 1–4 × ~5–10 min = 5–40 min; slow dissolve, flavor-led.

• Sunflower seeds/nut snacking — long, idle sessions = 15–45+ min; repetitive hand-to-mouth rhythm.

• Cigarettes (for comparison) — ~5–7 min each × 5–15/day = 25–100+ min, but mostly outside and socially constrained.

• Vapes — micro-doses all day; high touch frequency, but less continuous “in-mouth” dwell per session.

Pouches routinely hit 10–30 minutes per session, often indoors, and stack multiple sessions—so daily time-on-brand competes with or exceeds gum and coffee, while adding nicotine’s reinforcement loop. That’s why branding and flavor matter so much here: like coffee’s “my usual” or gum’s signature chew, a pouch’s sensory fingerprint + brand code (can, color, mark) is encountered dozens of times a day, for long stretches, in moments that users enjoy. More minutes + more occasions = faster habit learning, stronger “known-good” tagging, and higher switching costs.

Bottom line: from an FMCG lens, pouches combine gum’s dwell, coffee’s ritual, and mints’ refresh—then supercharge loyalty with nicotine—making brand power unusually scalable.

Proving the State Without Revealing the Secret

In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a protocol where one party can prove to another that they know a value, without conveying any information apart from the fact that they know the value. It’s a way to verify a secret without revealing the secret itself.

For a century, nicotine use was the opposite of this. Combustion was a plaintext broadcast. The lighter's flash, the plume of smoke, the lingering odor, the designated huddle outside—every part of the ritual was a public broadcast of the user's internal state management. You couldn't achieve the state without announcing the method to the entire network. This made the act readable, taxable, and stigmatizable.

Reduced-risk products—especially pouches—are a zero-knowledge protocol for the self. The user can achieve and verify their desired internal state (focus, composure, relief) without broadcasting any of the underlying data to untrusted observers. The only party that needs proof—the user's own nervous system—gets it. The rest of the world gets zero information.

This privacy layer is not a feature; it is a phase shift. It unlocks adoption in high-scrutiny environments where plaintext broadcasting was impossible: on camera, in client meetings, in scent-policed offices, around family who have veto power over shared air. It turns a conspicuous act into an encrypted one.

When the social cost of the broadcast collapses, the calculus of the behavior changes. The system moves from a state of constant, low-grade impression management to one of quiet execution. The user stops spending energy hiding the signal and simply uses it. This isn't just a new product; it's a new communications protocol for the self, one built for a world that demands performance but punishes spectacle.

The Greatest Non-Ad Ad Ever Made: “No Smoking”

Every “No Smoking” sign is a tiny billboard for cigarettes. It doesn’t sell you a brand; it sells you the idea—by forcing you to think about smoking right now, in this specific place, and by telling you that you can’t. That’s not an ad in the legal sense, but in the behavioral sense it’s perfect creative: salient, frequent, and scarcity-coded.

Here’s the mechanism. A prohibition primes the concept (availability), tags it with “not now” (reactance), and leaves an open loop (Zeigarnik effect). Your brain files a deferred intention: later. Multiply that by thousands of doors, elevators, concourses, menus, and seatbacks, and you’ve placed the most ubiquitous, high-frequency, brand-agnostic “campaign” in history—paid for by property owners, not by tobacco companies. The sign also carved geography: smoke here, not there. Those thresholds created rituals (the step outside, the cluster at the curb) that reinforced identity and routine. In effect, the rule wrote the habit’s choreography.

And the copy line writes itself: “You can’t smoke here, but you can smoke.” Rory Sutherland (the Ogilvy behavioral-econ guy), who popularized the idea that prohibitions can function like advertising by keeping the forbidden object mentally alive. Whether or not he coined it first, the line captures the psychology exactly.

Live Your Life in Clumps—Now Watch What Nicotine Does to the Timeline

David Eagleman has that eerie “afterlife” thought experiment where you don’t replay your life chronologically—you replay it grouped by activity: all your shower time in one block, all your commuting in another, months of brushing your teeth stitched together into a single, surreal stretch. In his words, you “spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex, one year reading email,” and so on. It’s a brutal way to see where your hours actually go.

Now apply that lens to nicotine.

In the cigarette century, your “clumps” are concrete, cold, and lonely. A pack-a-day habit (≈5 minutes per cigarette × 20) is ~100 minutes a day. Over 40 years that compresses into roughly 2.8 years spent smoking—not counting the side quests: stepping outside, hunting lighters, washing the smell out of clothes, waiting in the rain by the service door. In Eagleman-time, those become contiguous slabs: nine months standing under awnings, four months cupping a match, a full season apologizing with mints. The habit doesn’t just skim minutes; it carves visible epochs out of your life.

Reduced-risk formats (pouches, regulated vapes, heated tobacco) re-edit the timeline. The big lonely clumps—relocation, weather, ash, smell—get chopped to zero. The “nicotine” block still exists, but it runs in parallel with real life: emails, calls, workouts, commutes. In the Eagleman cut, cigarettes look like years sequestered in loading screens; pouches look like background rendering—the same minutes now co-owned by work, play, and presence. The behavior hasn’t vanished; the time topology has. We moved from wired hotspots (go outside to a designated zone) to wireless coverage (anytime, anywhere), and the edit suite of your life suddenly has fewer hard cuts and more crossfades.

This is the underappreciated engine of the RRP transition: it doesn’t only change toxicology; it rearranges your autobiography. When a product stops demanding its own chapters—when it can live between the lines—usage patterns expand, stigma contracts, and whole demographics (especially those penalized for spectacle and smell) lean in. That’s why the “re-nicotinization” story is bigger than substitution. You aren’t just swapping a tool; you’re rewriting the order of your days—turning what used to be two and three-year blocks of standing outside into minutes you actually get to keep.

At the Feet of the Goddess: A Field Guide to Human Kneeling

Across history, kneeling isn’t just worship—it’s a user interface. You drop to the ground to negotiate with forces bigger than you, to trade offerings for state: calm, rain, luck, love, courage. Change the goddess, change the ritual; the posture stays.

• Demeter’s Porch (Hunger): Farmers once knelt to the grain mother with bread, beer, and smoke, asking for steady harvests and steady moods. The bargain was simple: feed the field, feed the self. When scarcity bites, we still reenact Demeter—only now it’s pantry raids at 11 p.m. and “just one more” snack to quiet the belly’s weather.

• Fortuna’s Wheel (Risk): Merchants knelt to Fortune before voyages, hoping the dice would fall their way. Today we call it “variance,” but the prayer’s the same: less bad luck, more smooth sailing. The tokens changed—lucky coins became algorithms—but the kneel is intact: please, make the curve predictable.

• Inanna’s Mirror (Desire): Lovers once left combs, kohl, and perfume at the altars of Ishtar/Aphrodite to summon charm and composure. We haven’t moved far. Hair, skin, scent—still ritual tools we use to bend a room gently toward yes. The offering buys a state: a little lightness, a little poise.

• Mazu’s Lantern (Fear): Sailors prayed to the sea mother for nerve in heavy weather. Modern seas are meetings, night shifts, long drives; the wave is adrenaline. People still kneel—sometimes to caffeine, sometimes to breathwork, sometimes to worse—and ask for hands that don’t shake.

• Black Madonna’s Cloister (Endurance): Pilgrims brought candles for the strength to carry grief without blowing apart. Our candles are smaller—five quiet minutes in a stairwell, a practiced ritual before the hard thing. Endurance is a state, too.

Seen this way, “kneeling” is any repeatable act that buys a state on demand. A sip, a scent, a chew, a prayer. The genius (and danger) of modernity is that we’ve industrialized altars. We mass-produce offerings, standardize their effects, ship the shrine to the pocket. You no longer need a temple; you need a habit.

If you want a clean metaphor for the present, call her La Diva Nicotiana—not a saint, a performer. People don’t kneel to worship her; they kneel to meter their weather: to round off a spike of fear, to sharpen a foggy morning, to stitch a frayed mood. In the bonfire age the ritual scorched the house; in the solid-state age the same gesture can be made with less smoke and less penance. Either way, the posture is ancient: human beings, bargaining with the day.

The broader lesson isn’t to celebrate kneeling or to banish it; it’s to name it. Wherever you find a goddess—grain, luck, love, sea, nerve—you’ll find offerings designed to modulate state. Change the offering and you change the collateral. Change the collateral and you change who is willing to kneel. History is a museum of altars; the present is just deciding which ones we can live with.

The Control Room: Siegel’s Fourth Drive and the Engineering of State

Ronald K. Siegel’s big idea is disarmingly simple: alongside hunger, thirst, and sex sits a fourth drive—the urge to modulate our internal state. Not intoxication for its own sake, but control: turn the volume down on fear, turn the focus up on a deadline, blur grief long enough to move. Across species, he argued, organisms seek compounds and contexts that shift consciousness. Civilization, seen through this lens, is a series of inventions that make state control cheaper, faster, and safer—from coffeehouses to anesthesia to SSRIs.

If you map that onto brains-as-controllers, it snaps into focus. Your nervous system runs like a feedback loop: it tracks goals, senses stress, computes “error,” and tries to stabilize. Substances are just control surfaces—sliders on the console—with three specs that matter more than morality: latency (how fast it hits), jitter (how predictable the curve is), and externalities (what it does to bodies, rooms, and bystanders). Alcohol is high-amplitude, high-jitter, high-externality; caffeine is medium-amplitude, low-jitter, low-externality. Nicotine is the low-dose, low-latency microservo: tiny adjustments to vigilance and mood you can engage in seconds.

The paradox of the 20th century is that we ran this elegant microservo through a catastrophically noisy carrier—fire. The signal (nicotinic receptor activation) was useful; the channel (combustion) was lethal and loud. People didn’t smoke because smoke was good; they smoked in spite of it, because the slider worked and the world had few better knobs. Siegel would say: don’t confuse the drive with the device.

The 21st-century rewrite is about channel engineering. If the fourth drive is real, the relevant public-health question isn’t “Why do people want to change state?”—it’s “Which control surfaces have the right specs?” Cleaner nicotine formats (pouches, well-regulated vapes, heated) keep the latency and predictability while collapsing the externalities of plume, fire, and indoor pollution. That doesn’t make them vitamins; it makes them better-matched tools for a drive that won’t retire just because we wish it would. Design them like instruments, not fireworks: age-gated access, tight emissions and variance standards, honest risk language, and steep penalties for youth leakage.

Once you see the world as a control room, a lot of behavior stops looking mysterious. Coffee at dawn, nicotine at noon, a run at dusk, chamomile at night—it’s the same loop seeking different sliders, tuned for context. Siegel’s thesis isn’t a license; it’s a diagnostic. Kill the knob and pressure migrates—toward sugar, alcohol, sketchy stimulants, or gray-market “focus” brews with worse jitter and unknown tails. Curate the knob—clear specs, clean carriers, minimal externality—and you shape the flow of an invariant drive into safer lanes.

That’s the mind-bender tucked in Siegel’s work: the “drug problem” is often a controls problem. Get the engineering right—low latency, low jitter, low collateral—and the fourth drive stops breaking the room to fix the mind. Get it wrong, and the room (and the mind) pay together.

The Butter Echo: An Interesting (Not Exact) Mirror for RRPs

If you’re looking for a useful rhyme rather than a perfect mirror for today’s nicotine shift, the long, weird saga of butter vs. margarine is a good one. It’s not 1:1. Food isn’t nicotine, kitchens aren’t regulatory mazes, and trans fats aren’t tar. But as an interesting echo—how a demonized incumbent meets a lab-built alternative, how cues get weaponized, how science updates—there’s signal worth borrowing.

In the mid-century nutrition wars, butter wore the black hat. Enter margarine: engineered, plant-oil based, pitched as a lighter path. What sticks from that story isn’t “margarine = RRPs.” It’s how surroundings shape adoption. Laws once forced margarine to be sold white (even pink in spots), because golden butter had trained our brains on a color cue. The product might have been sensible on paper, but the cue mismatch made it feel wrong in the mouth before taste even arrived. That’s an echo with clean nicotine: remove smoke and ash and you delete negative cues; alter familiar signals and you risk rejection—even if the underlying risk profile is better.

There’s a second echo: science moves. Early margarines carried a hidden design flaw—trans fats from partial hydrogenation—later shown to be worse for hearts than the butter they replaced. Reformulation solved much of that, but trust took a hit. That’s not a prophecy for RRPs; it’s a humility check. The way to avoid a “trans-fat moment” is boring and grown-up: emissions limits, batch consistency, transparent surveillance, fast recalls—engineering plus measurement—so the category earns its claims instead of borrowing a halo.

Policy echoes too. Anti-margarine rules often targeted optics (color bans, quirky taxes) more than outcomes. It didn’t make diets healthier; it just slowed switching by making the alternative feel alien. With nicotine, the lesson is to aim regulation at harm, not harmless cues: keep youth out, crush contaminants and variance, and price by relative risk so the easiest legal path for adults who already smoke is the cleaner one.

And then there’s narrative discipline. Butter-bad/margarine-good was a crisp story that broke on contact with new data. RRPs need tighter prose: not risk-free; far less harmful than smoking when fully substituted; adults-only; standardized and testable. Overclaiming now is how you seed tomorrow’s backlash.

So no, the butter fight isn’t the template. It’s an interesting parable about channels, cues, and course-corrections: how a familiar ritual can be steered by tiny signals; how incumbents defend themselves by making alternatives feel “off”; how a fix can carry its own risks—and how transparent engineering can fix the fix. If we take those lessons seriously, the nicotine story doesn’t have to end like the worst chapters of the margarine one.

The One Place Where Pouches Skew Female

Sweden is a global outlier: among young adults, nicotine pouch use runs higher in women than in men. In the 16–29 bracket, 18% of women vs 12% of men reported using nikotinsnus (white snus/pouches) in 2022, per national surveys reported by Svenska Dagbladet. SvD.se

Why Sweden—and why women? Two forces cross: (1) Swedish men already have a long-standing habit base in traditional (brown) snus, so they’re “counted” heavily in another format; (2) pouches strip away smoke, smell, and stain, slashing the beauty/scent penalties that historically kept many women out of combustible nicotine. The net result is a female-skew in the clean format even as overall oral nicotine (snus + pouches) remains male-heavy.

Is Sweden the only country like this? As far as credible national stats show today, yes; most other markets still see male-dominant oral nicotine. But Sweden’s trajectory is a preview: once the fire, plume, and odor are engineered out—and a familiar, consistent “feel” is engineered in—friction drops for groups that previously opted out.

Artifact of Presence

“I drink a great deal. I sleep a little, and I smoke cigar after cigar. That is why I am in two-hundred percent form.”

— Winston Churchill