Wellness influencers and tech startups rebrand nicotine as cognitive enhancer, echoing historic tobacco industry tactics to expand addiction markets
Original framing: “How the pro‑nicotine 'wellness' movement rebranded an addictive drug” — Phys.org
The trickster Eshu (Yoruba) wears a hat red on one side, blue on the other — villagers fight over its color while he walks away with the market. So too the wellness nicotine debate: influencers and regulators argue 'harm reduction' vs. 'gateway' while the alkaloid itself, indifferent to discourse, rewires reward pathways. Erasmus's 'Praise of Folly' fits the MAHA-nicotine alliance: a movement claiming to restore 'natural health' while mainlining a pesticide-evolved neurotoxin. The trickster reveals the absurd edge — 'tobacco-free nicotine' is an ontological joke, like 'violence-free punching' — and the solemnity of 'wellness' conceals the oldest addiction playbook: rename the chain, sell the link.
The pro-nicotine wellness movement is not a grassroots discovery but a capital-intensive rebranding of addiction architecture, leveraging MAHA's anti-institutional sentiment to bypass the very regulatory frameworks that could evaluate harm reduction claims.
By restoring Indigenous relational governance, historical industry playbooks, marginalized community targeting data, and neuroadaptation science, we see a clear pattern: nicotine's 'wellness' turn serves venture returns, not human flourishing. The trickster reveals the joke — 'tobacco-free nicotine' is the hat Eshu wears to start the fight while the market walks away. Systemic solutions require transferring regulatory sovereignty to affected communities, making addiction mechanics visible at point-of-consumption, and investing in the structural rest that the 'performance' narrative exploits.