The FDA Just Approved More Nicotine Pouches — Teenagers Are the Ones Getting Trapped

On August 4, the FDA cleared four new “on!” nicotine pouches for sale, bringing the total number of pouch products the agency has formally authorized to 30. The agency’s reasoning is that these products contain fewer harmful chemicals than dip or chew, and could help adult smokers switch off cigarettes. Fine. Except nobody in that approval is asking what happens to the fifteen-year-old who never smoked a cigarette in his life and just wants a mint-flavored pouch that gets him through third period.

Everyone keeps citing the same reassuring number: teen vaping rates are down from their 2019 peak. That’s true, and it’s the wrong number.

The teenagers who are still vaping are getting hooked harder, faster, and more permanently than the teenagers who vaped four years ago.

Here’s what that looks like from the inside, not the spreadsheet. If you started vaping at 16 because everyone had one and it seemed like a phase, you probably didn’t think about tolerance — your body demanding more nicotine to produce the same calm, the same edge-off — until you were already reaching for your device before you’d even gotten out of bed. That’s not a metaphor. Per Truth Initiative, 76% of teen vapers now use within 30 minutes of waking up — the exact clinical marker doctors use to gauge how physically dependent a cigarette smoker is. Teenagers are hitting that mark on flavored vapes.

And when they try to stop, they can’t. Among daily middle and high school e-cigarette users, the share who tried to quit and failed went from 28.2% in 2020 to 53% in 2024. That’s not a modest uptick — failed quit attempts among daily teen users more than doubled in four years, while the industry was telling everyone vaping was the easy off-ramp from real addiction. If you’ve tried to quit and white-knuckled it for two days before caving, you’re not weak-willed and you’re not the exception — you’re the majority now, and the product got engineered to make sure of it.

That engineering is the part that gets buried under the falling-usage-rate headline. Between 2017 and 2022, disposable vape nicotine strength nearly tripled, e-liquid capacity quintupled, and prices dropped 70%. Fewer teens are picking up nicotine. The ones who do are handed something three times as potent, five times as loaded, and cheaper than a candy bar. Meanwhile 67% of nicotine users aged 18-24 say they want to quit and cite their physical and mental health as the reason — but they’re quitting into a market Truth Initiative’s CEO describes as flooded with “bigger, cheaper and more potent products.”

The FDA’s harm-reduction math is built for a 45-year-old two-pack-a-day smoker deciding between cigarettes and a pouch. It was never built for a kid who never smoked, picking up his first nicotine product because it tastes like watermelon and costs less than lunch — and the agency keeps approving products into that gap anyway.