John Coogan, creator of Soylent and Lucy, argues nicotine itself isn't the killer in smoking. Combusted tobacco is. He compares nicotine to caffeine and says faster lung absorption from cigarettes drives addiction, while slower delivery like patches or lozenges is safer. His company makes synthetic nicotine products to give smokers a less harmful option.
Questions this video answers
June 16, 2022
About 45 minutes
Six to eight hours
The lungs are too sensitive to use as a delivery vehicle for stimulants. I don't even want to think about smoking my coffee beans every morning. That sounds terrible when you say it like that. It's, like, pretty straightforward. I'm John Coogan and I'm a heretic because I believe that smoking is bad, but nicotine is good.
Radicals, dissidents, rebels and misfits, you can call them whatever you like, but what if they're right?
I've been an entrepreneur for 10 years. My first company sold a controversial food product named Soylent. And my latest company sells a controversial nicotine product named Lucy. When you talk to most people and say, hi, I'm selling nicotine, they'll say, nicotine is bad. And I'll say, well, nicotine is a deeply, deeply emotional issue for a lot of people because everyone knows someone who's died of from cigarettes. And that leads to very tight associations between nicotine and cigarettes. Why did they smoke? Because they were addicted. Why were they addicted? Because it contained nicotine. Like the logic does track. The only problem is that it wasn't the nicotine that necessarily killed them.
Number one step forward.
It's really the tobacco leaf that has the carcinogens in it, that's combusted. That is very unhealthy. When you breathe it, they're two separate substances and they have very different behaviors and effects on the human body. Now the bigger question is, is nicotine a good thing? Is it ok, okay for someone to use nicotine as what it is, which is a stimulant? Is it like coffee? Should it be enjoyed by adults? I think that when nicotine products are formulated correctly, they can potentially have very, very low cost to the user's health. And why I personally sometimes choose nicotine over coffee is that nicotine has a shorter half life. Coffee might get out of your system in six to eight hours. With nicotine, the half life's 45 minutes, and so it shouldn't throw off your sleep cycle. Then we have to get to the question of addiction. If you're inhaling a cigarette that is absorbed through your lungs extremely quickly, it crosses the blood brain barrier and goes into your brain faster than if you injected it with a needle into your arm. When you're talking about something like a nicotine patch or nicotine lozenge that's absorbed orally, it's absorbed much more slowly. We're talking about 45 minutes as opposed to two minutes. You're looking at a different dopamine release schedule in your brain. If you're saving money in a 401k, you're not really getting a dopamine release when you see that you earn 2% on your account. But when you're playing a slot machine and that bell goes off, that's releasing dopamine. And what do the slot machine players do? They go right back to the slot machine. They play again. And that's what we're seeing with cigarette smokers. They're getting their nicotine very quickly, and that's winding up with them being more addicted. But the clearest benefit of nicotine is nicotine can help you quit cigarettes. Humans have been using tobacco for thousands of years, but once we industrialized the process and created cigarettes, that's where they became so harmful. And then we just looked at the data and saw that they were killing millions of people. And it became extremely clear that cigarettes had to go. The question was, how do we get rid of them most effectively? So a lot of people would just say, let's get rid of nicotine altogether, because it would just be the easiest way to put everything behind us. But we've seen that prohibition doesn't really work. I think people will figure out how to continue to use nicotine.
Yeah, I mean, marijuana was illegal for a while, but I never had a problem getting it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What we've come to is kind of this prohibition on cigarette marketing, but not a lot of room for innovation for products that will actually disrupt cigarettes. We have created this wildly uneven playing field where nicotine gums and patches and, and lozenges that have been studied by the FDA for decades are actually under, in some ways more restrictions than cigarettes because they can only be sold in certain packaging, they can only be sold at drugstores, they're not accessible. So instead, what we need to do is create a level playing field where all of the products can compete and the best ones can win. We see this with food products right now, where there are competitive pressures from healthier alternatives that are shifting the landscape. So that's why I believe the way to get people to quit smoking in the long term is to just give them better products that are better across every single dimension than cigarettes. We say, get rid of the tobacco plant, don't inhale it. Let's only focus on oral nicotine, a pure pharmaceutical grade or synthetic nicotine. If we're successful at Lucy, I think that we'll see smoking rates decrease precipitously. And what I think will happen is we'll go back to the pre cigarette era. There will be people that get a really positive benefit out of nicotine and then the rest of the population just won't use it at all. We're not really trying to fight the fight of getting non nicotine users to use nicotine. I think the name of the game right now is just take the millions of nicotine users that are inhaling burning ash and smoking cigarettes and move them to a nicotine product that doesn't involve inhaling burning ash.
Just to be clear, I definitely get a dopamine release from a 2% return on savings account. I see your point.
