Dylan Sjolie said he had been too much of a “goody-two shoes” to participate in his high school’s vape craze.
When he tried Zyn at 19, during his first semester of college, it seemed like everyone he saw carried a hockey-puck-sized container of the chalky nicotine pouches: athletes, comedians, his roommate. Underclassmen traded tips on where to purchase the pouches, which you must be 21 to buy legally, without needing ID.
“I walk around my campus and I just see the little Zyn pouches all over, spit on the sidewalk and grass,” said Mr. Sjolie, now 21, who is from Maryland. “I’d be talking to people, and they would smile and I’d see it in their upper lip.”
By the beginning of his sophomore year, he kept a Zyn tucked into his mouth every waking moment except when he was showering, eating or brushing his teeth. Soon, the pleasant buzz faded to dependence. His heart raced, and he had anxiety and trouble sleeping that he said hadn’t been the case before his nicotine habit.
A panicked Google search on Super Bowl Sunday led him to Reddit forum called QuittingZyn, an online watering hole for people who are trying to give up Zyn and other nicotine pouches. Its members coach one another through the process of weaning off an addictive substance. But they’re also helping each other give up something more than that.
In an age of looksmaxxing and beefier-than-ever influencers, throwing in a lip pillow can seem like a low-effort way to fit in with the guys. Leaving that club can be lonely, according to conversations with a half-dozen men in various stages of quitting Zyn. So, many of them turned to a similar club. It’s also pretty bro-y — but the point is to quit.
Members of the Reddit group, which is 10,000 strong as of last month, write to one another with a kind of muscular camaraderie that makes it sound like they are about to explode from a pregame huddle and charge onto the muddy turf of nicotine cessation.
“Let’s get it bro,” one wrote to cheer on a recent quitter.
“Keep smashing it,” said another, adding a flexing-bicep emoji.
Another: “Keep your nose to the grindstone and out of the Zyns.”
When he first found the group, Mr. Sjolie scrolled past paragraph after paragraph that reminded him of his own experience.
He knew those stomach issues. He’d dealt with that insomnia. He finally worked up the courage to post his own missive declaring that he wanted to be done with the pouches, too.
The messages began to pour in.
‘A Quiet Struggle’
The Zyn guy contains multitudes, which might be part of why the product has grown so quickly: Zyn sales rose around 50 percent in the United States last year, to 581 million cans, according to a recent earnings call for the brand’s owner, Phillip Morris International. Around 75 percent of its customers in the United States are male, according to the company.
The high-profile Zyn user might be a boldfaced name of the manosphere like Joe Rogan or a lefty livestreamer like Hasan Piker, who at one point filmed himself with a tower of empty Zyn cans teetering precariously atop his mini-fridge. Maybe he’s a perpetually irate media character like Tucker Carlson, or a sweet-guy singer-songwriter like Noah Kahan, who played a concert in March that was available only to those who had bought more than 200 cans of Zyn.
Whatever his politics, he comes across as unselfconscious in his masculinity and fluent in the language of the “Zynternet,” whose inside jokes are nonsensical puns like “Zynbabwe” and “Zyn-Manuel Miranda.” If you buy a tin, maybe you’ll laugh along too.
James McHugh, a stock trader in Phoenixville, Pa., said that Zyn was baked into the hustle culture of his workplace. Tins were stuffed in trash cans in his office bathrooms, and people never talked about trying to quit, he said, as if doing so might be seen as weak or embarrassing.
“It’s sort of a quiet struggle for an individual to quit,” Mr. McHugh, 36, said in an interview.
“At least within men, it’s somehow this form of masculinity that you take some kind of identity from the fact that you are a user of nicotine,” he added. “It still has the ability to influence like it did in the Marlboro man days.”
Mr. McHugh started QuittingZyn, the Reddit group, in 2021 after his first failed attempt to quit Zyn, modeling it on a similar Reddit forum for quitting vaping. At the time, he said, he was spending more than $3,500 dollars a year on the pouches.
He hopes the group will help young men realize that not everyone is happily burning through the pouches.
“They’ll eventually view the cultural beacons of nicotine to be the clowns that they are,” he said.
Zyn was introduced to the U.S. market in 2014 and acquired by the tobacco giant Philip Morris International in 2022, right around the time when sales of the pouches began to surge. The company has invested $600 million in a new manufacturing facility for Zyn in Colorado.
The pouches are marketed as a healthier alternative to cigarette smoking that should be purchased only by people older than 21 who already use nicotine. “Your best option is never starting in the first place, your second best option is complete cessation, and your third is to switch” to a smoke-free product like a nicotine pouch, said Brian Erkkila, the senior adviser for scientific engagement at Swedish Match, the subsidiary of Philip Morris International that produces Zyn.
The long-term health effects of nicotine pouches are not yet clear: Doctors believe they are safer than cigarette smoking, but warn they may increase cardiovascular risk and deteriorate gum tissue. And medical experts and legislators worry about the products’ potential to hook people like Mr. Sjolie: teenagers who have never before tried a nicotine product.
In the absence of a clear understanding of potential side effects, members of the Reddit group spend a lot of time describing unpleasant physical symptoms and asking whether they might be connected to their Zyn habit.
Gum recession, anxiety, racing heart rates and excessive mucus make frequent appearances. “I wake up with loogies every morning the size of Texas,” one member wrote.
Paging ‘Benjazyn Franklin’
A month into his efforts to quit Zyn, Mr. Sjolie said he was thinking about the pouches constantly. But instead of reaching for a can, he would pick up his phone and tap out his feelings for the QuittingZyn crew to read.
On Day 33, Mr. Sjolie wrote that chewing gum was helping him manage his cravings. “Mood swings are also still present and this has made me feel crazy,” he added.
On Day 65, he wrote that he felt “mentally beat.” It was difficult to tell if changes to his physical or mental health had to do with Zyn or with the general stressors of being a college student.
“I often find myself overthinking 24/7, asking myself why I feel a certain way and what’s wrong with me?” he wrote.
He also described struggling with the social ramifications of quitting. “Most of my anxiety I have right now I feel comes from more of a cluelessness to how I should conduct myself socially,” he wrote on Day 91.
His posts often ended with a version of the same question: Is anybody else feeling this way?
Reddit’s cloak of anonymity can make it a hotbed for “snark” and bullying — but it can also allow for vulnerability. In interviews, several members of the group said that they, too, had turned to Reddit for social support that had been harder to find offline.
Ty Robertson, 25, who works in sales for a plumbing company in San Antonio, got in the habit of using Zyn alongside his teammates on his high school and college baseball teams, where the pouches were “super, super, super common.” First he popped a pouch every few hours. Then it became a can of 15 pouches a day. Then it became two pouches at a time.
Mr. Robertson went to the emergency room last year experiencing chest pain and difficulty breathing. He thought he was having a heart attack. The doctor he saw told him it was more likely that he was having an anxiety attack and advised him to cool it on the nicotine, a stimulant.
“I threw a Zyn in as he was saying that,” Mr. Robertson said. “I was like, ‘Cool, don’t care.’”
He was not persuaded to quit until later that night when he came across a post in the Reddit group from another heavy Zyn user who described similar symptoms. He reached out to the person, and the two began to talk, said Mr. Robertson, who has now gone three months without Zyn.
The post had been written by Don Hood, 41, one of the three volunteer moderators whom Mr. McHugh enlisted in the last year to help. Mr. Hood spends hours each week outside his job as a property manager in North Carolina checking in with strangers from the group via direct messages, texts and sometimes phone calls.
Mr. Hood said he had assumed a “fatherly” role with the group’s many men in their 20s.
“I give the younger ones some hell, and some tough love,” said Mr. Hood, who quit Zyn about a year ago. In real life, he added, “you don’t sit there and talk about your problems with other guys, especially with something everyone else is using.”
Sometimes the encouragement of the group, along with repeated follow-up messages from Mr. Hood, are enough to help a young person overcome the social pressure and physical pull of nicotine. But not always. Mr. Hood sounded a little defeated when he brought up an 18-year-old who had quit for a week or so after experiencing heart palpitations.
“Everyone around him is using them, so he’s using them again,” Mr. Hood said.
Life After Zyn
No matter how many supportive messages they exchange with other anonymous Redditors, those who quit Zyn still have to navigate more treacherous territory where they cannot hide behind a username: real life.
Devon Verro, 26, an optician in Denver, is wrestling with the fact that while she has quit Zyn, most of her family members remain addicted to nicotine. When she visited her father last month, he made a “sweet” but not entirely successful effort to hide his Zyns and cigarettes before she arrived.
“Any time he’d reach for anything, he’d say ‘Dev, look away,’” she said.
Ms. Verro has noticed that she is in the apparent minority of women who use Zyn (“Chicks vape, and dudes do Zyn,” she said.) But the “macho” energy of her brothers-in-arms in the Reddit group has not bothered her, she said: “They’re talking to me like I’m a human, not like I’m a problem.”
For Mr. Sjolie, things have gotten easier with time. In a phone conversation last month, almost a year after we first got in touch, he sounded lighter. He barely thought about Zyn at all anymore, he said. He was sleeping much better.
Quitting had not had the disastrous effect on his social life that he had imagined. He said he felt like he could go out with friends occasionally without getting sucked back into using nicotine. He had joined a couple of film clubs on campus that kept him busy. “I’m probably actually more social now than I was a year ago,” he said.
As we spoke, he pulled up the Reddit app on his phone and saw that he had six notifications from members of the QuittingZyn group. One person asked whether his anxiety had eased. Another, a former smoker, wrote that Zyn withdrawal was the hardest thing he’d ever had to go through.
Mr. Sjolie realized that it had been a couple of months since he’d checked the group at all. “I’m probably going to answer these later,” he said.
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
The post The Brotherhood of Quitting Zyn appeared first on New York Times.
