The Truth About Using Nicotine in 2026

Philip Morris, the company that sold you Marboro cigarettes, sold 581 million cans of this last year, and they're using the same chemical trick that made cigarettes super addictive. In this video, I'm going to tell you about that chemical trick, and we're going to go through nicotine from A to Z. Here's

the thing nobody's willing to say out loud about nicotine. For 50 years, the public health establishment told you nicotine was the villain. Nicotine causes cancer. Nicotine kills. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin. And most of that was wrong or at least deeply

misleading. The villain was really the delivery system for most of the time that people were smoking cigarettes. The 7,000 chemicals, the 70 carcinogens, the ammonia which you are freebasing when you smoke a cigarette, the MAO inhibitors, nicotine is a molecule that occurs normally in the human body that

was trapped inside a horrible machine originally with cigarettes. So once we figured out the truth, the pendulum swung and now a lot of people see nicotine as mostly harmless, possibly even beneficial. Andrew Huberman is discussing the ways that nicotine can be a cognitive enhancer on his neuroscience

podcast. He adds cautions about how addictive nicotine is, but I think most people just hear that nicotine can be a cognitive enhancer and they skip over his warnings. Peter Theal says it increases your IQ 10 points. Talente has

nicotine vending machines in their offices. So suddenly nicotine isn't the villain anymore. It's a wellness supplement in a little white pouch. Today I'm going to tell you the actual story of nicotine. All 12,000 years of it. It's a fascinating story. What it does in your brain, the

benefits and the costs. The wellness crowd isn't telling you about how cigarettes, vapes, and nicotine pouches like this compare when you look at the science. and I'm going to give you a framework for making the best possible decision when it comes to your health, your nervous system, and your cognition. In this video, I'm also going

to tell you about a neuroscientist who has studied nicotine for decades. His conclusions about the neotropic effects of nicotine are going to surprise you, and they're going to put a lot of people on blast. You also might think nicotine relieves your anxiety, but this isn't

entirely true. So, let's get into the history of nicotine and start 12,000 years ago. In 2021, archaeologists found charred seeds of a wild tobacco plant dating back over 12,000 years at an archaeologic dig that unearthed the

campsite in the Utah desert. But here's what matters more than the timeline, how they used it. Indigenous people across North America have traditionally used tobacco. The Lakota used it in prayer, believing that the tobacco smoke would carry prayers into the spirit world. The

Irakcoy used it to seal treaties. Coastal tribes used it to treat all sorts of afflictions, snake bites, ear infections, skin conditions, all kinds of things. The Karoo people used wild tobacco and mixed it with other plants for a variety of ceremonies and

medicinal purposes as well. In almost every way, the use was occasional. A small amount of wild tobacco, nothing like what is in here, much lower nicotine that is much less bioavailable for the human body. This was an intentional relationship with a plant.

And that distinction is the foundation for everything that I'm going to tell you because what happened next was one of the most profitable acts of destruction in human history. In 1994, under congressional pressure, the tobacco industry disclosed 599

chemical additives in a cigarette. Over a 100 of them served one single purpose, to make it more addictive. They took something that humans have had a relationship with for thousands of years and totally adulterated it. Here's what they did. They added ammonia compounds, specifically diam ammonium phosphate, to

convert nicotine into its freebased form. That's the exact same process that's used to convert cocaine into crack. Freebased nicotine crosses the bloodb brain barrier much more rapidly than nicotine salts that occur in wild tobacco. This makes the nicotine high you get from a cigarette much more

intense, much faster, and much more addictive. You may not know this, but when Marlboro cigarettes were first released, they were considered a ladies cigarette. They were mild, not as intense, not as addictive, not as spiky with their high. But then Marboro figured something out. They could

convert nicotine to the freebase form with this diamonium phosphate. Almost overnight, Malboro sales went through the roof as people experienced quick, strong, cravable highs with a form of nicotine,

the freebased form of nicotine that doesn't occur in wild tobacco. They also added bronco dilators, pharmaceutical compounds like the ones people with asthma use, to open your airways so you could inhale deeper, so the freebased nicotine in a cigarette could get deeper into your lung. They added sugars that

produce acid aldahhide when they burn. A compound that inhibits the breakdown of dopamine that leads to a bigger high, more addiction, and more craving. Again, all sinister. But there's a problem with freebased nicotine. It's very irritating for your throat. So, what did they do?

They added menthol to cigarettes to numb your throat so you could smoke longer and inhale more deeply and get more of this freebase nicotine. When you light that cigarette, combustion produces over 7,000 chemicals. At least 70 of these

are known carcinogen formaldahhide, benzene, arsenic, carbon monoxide. These are horrible for you. And in case you guys are wondering, yes, I have smoked a cigarette in my life. I smoked one and a half cigarettes when I was 13 years old. If my mom is watching this video, she

will not be happy about that. I was a skater. I was hanging out with kids who were not good influences on me. And you'll love this. I smoked a cigarette and then I ate McDonald's. And then later in the afternoon, I smoked another cigarette. And halfway through that

cigarette, I thought, I don't want to be a smoker. And I threw it away. And I've never smoked another cigarette since. I probably wasn't really inhaling the cigarettes deeply, but I at least wanted to look cool in front of my friends. Big mistake. My life would have been very differently if I'd been a smoker for the

last 30 plus years. Nicotine is not really the villain. Not in the way we were originally told it was. The Royal College of Physicians in the UK has concluded that nicotine is not a significant contributor to smoking related diseases. People use nicotine

patches sometimes for months or years to quit smoking with no evidence for increased in cancer related incidents. Here's what the tobacco industry did. Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, etc. that was truly diabolical. They built a machine that really kills with all of

those chemicals, the freebased nicotine, the sugar, the acid aldahhide, the dopamine inhibitors, the menthol. They blamed nicotine for what their processing of the tobacco really did. For years, nicotine and cigarettes were essentially the same in the public

mindset. This confusion kept people smoking. People who could have switched to something that was less harmful. I'm not saying that smoking tobacco is harmless, even if you smoke something like a natural wild tobacco cigarette. I'm not saying that at all. But I am showing you how the cigarette companies

made it much worse and kept people confused, which is a strategy that many processed food companies still employ today. And that led to millions and millions of Americans and people worldwide suffering horrible consequences, cancer, and even death. We

had a number of dark decades for American health during the heyday of cigarettes. And then we began to wake up to the harms of smoking and then came vaping. So in 2015, a Stanford startup called Jewel figured out something that completely changed the game. They

borrowed a technology from Swedish, nicotine salts, and they put it in something that looked like a USB drive, creating the vaping craze. The thing about nicotine salts is that they deliver nicotine at a lower pH. This leads to less throat irritation, which

means you can take a much bigger dose of nicotine without burning the back of your throat. Jules Pods contained about 5% nicotine by weight, equivalent to about a pack of cigarettes in a single Jewel pod. They marketed it to adults as

smoking sessation. Go from this to this. This is better for you, right? But the flavors they devised for the original Jewel vase suggested that their intentions were not entirely benign. Mango, mint, cucumber, creme brulee. By

2018, Jewel controlled 75% of the ecigarette market and jeweling was a term well known within every high school in the United States. Jewels have, for the most part, gone out of style now because of FDA limitations, but because

of an FDA loophole, these disposable devices are still allowed to have flavors. Jewels are not allowed to have flavors anymore. They only have menthol and tobacco, but these disposable devices can have every flavor under the sun because they're disposable.