This is the Kadeh daily podcast for Thursday, February 1st, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New York Senator Charles Schumer wants to ban yet another nicotine product.

This one is Zinn, a smokeless,

vaporless pouch that lets users get a hit of that addictive chemical

while avoiding most of the downsides of smoking. Cato's Jeff Singer details how the anti-smoking

crusade has just become an anti- nicotine crusade.

It shouldn't continue to surprise me, Jeff, but whenever I read about a politician or some interest group that wants to ban, for example, vaping products or other nicotine products that are sold over the counter at pharmacies or gas stations. It always surprises me and it, I don't know, it's just confusing to me that

we have made such tremendous progress in getting people to quit smoking, very deadly, very bad for you, cigarettes and other combustible tobacco products.

And now these people want to go after the products that help people stop doing the bad for them stuff like smoking.

Yeah, I think I've actually coined the phrase nicotineophobia to describe this irrational fear of nicotine.

And I don't know why it exists.

The best explanation I can come up with is that there are a lot of people who are just against anything that conjures up the image in their mind of smoking and nicotine is associated with tobacco, which of course people smoke, so maybe that's why they're trying to stomp out nicotine.

But it makes no sense to me because nicotine is the component in tobacco smoke that's addictive and actually is what oftentimes people are smoking for because it creates certain effects that are positive.

But it otherwise is a relatively harmless drug.

In fact, the Royal Society of Public Health

in the UK has said that it's very analogous to caffeine.

And so for example, like caffeine, nicotine

is a stimulant that tends to make you focus your mind better and be more alert. But unlike caffeine,

nicotine stimulates beta endorphins, which have a kind of a soothing calming effect.

I've never smoked, but I'm sure those of us

whether we smoke to not have seen situations where people who do smoke and when

...