Pinch the Hose, Flood the House—Why Desire Needs a Spillway

Pick one image: a check valve in a pipe. Push water forward and the little flapper swings open—flow is effortless. Try to reverse it and the flapper snaps shut; pressure builds, and the water doesn’t go backward—it looks for leaks. That’s the nicotine transition in a nutshell. Clean, low-friction formats (pouches, regulated vapes) opened an easy forward channel: fast onset, no plume, no relocation. Brains learned the route (habit circuits), stores built the aisle (shelf space, supply chains), regulators wrote specs (age-gating, emissions). Together they became the valve’s hinge—forward is easy.

Now imagine cranking policy the other way—ban this flavor, pull that product, shutter the aisle. You’re not removing pressure (demand); you’re back-pressurizing the line. The flapper closes on the legitimate channel, and flow diverts to whatever gaps exist: gray imports, counterfeit batches, potency compression, riskier DIY. That’s not moralizing; it’s hydraulics. Once a low-noise route exists and millions have mapped to it, the system behaves like plumbing: you either give the water a monitored path or you get seepage in the walls.

So design like a plumber, not a hammer. Keep the forward path open for adults who smoke (tight specs, batch testing, tax differentials), clamp the leaks (youth access, contaminants, rogue sellers), and use pressure regulation—pricing and standards—to keep flow inside inspected pipes.