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.
