Tech Startups Are Handing Out Free Nicotine Pouches to Boost Productivity 78
The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The pouches are free for employees and guests over the age of 21, a spokeswoman for Palantir said. Palantir pays to stock the nicotine products.
Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.
Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.
Alex Cohen, a startup founder based in Austin, Texas, said he was first exposed to nicotine pouches in the workplace after seeing tins of Zyns on the desks of his software engineers. His company, Hello Patient, makes AI-powered healthcare-communication software. "They were very productive, so I thought maybe there's something here," he said. Those engineers soon asked him if he could buy it for the office.
Cohen said he initially bought the nicotine pouches as a joke for social media. He posted a picture of a drawer in his startup's office filled with nicotine pouches made by different brands with the caption, "We're hiring." "Then, I accidentally got addicted," said Cohen. He said he uses around two to three pouches a day. His go-to flavors are mango or minty. Cohen said he has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and he has found that the pouches can provide a quick productivity boost. "It helps with reining in my focus because it is a stimulant," he said. Today, Hello Patient has a nicotine-pouch fridge in its office kitchen.
Amateurs (Score:5, Funny)
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Cheapskate - coke ftw
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Plus it cures ADHD.
Re: Amateurs (Score:2)
Re:Amateurs (Score:5, Informative)
Meth is how the Nazi Germany was able to conduct their "Blitzkrieg" in Western Europe. When the drivers and soldiers did not feel fatigue or need to sleep they could go on all day and night, and the speed of their advance overwhelmed the enemy.
But as it took a toll, it could not go on forever. And the soldiers who showed signs of addiction were sent to concentration camps.
Re:Amateurs (Score:5, Informative)
WWII was the war of methedrine vs benzedrine.
Combat and other military use of performance enhancing drugs has been a widespread tradition ever since and continues to this day.
My father was a Marine ATC in Korea. They issued him drugs to keep him alert and awake and got him hooked on uppers, which affected him for the rest of his life.
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Meth is how the Nazi Germany was able to conduct their "Blitzkrieg" in Western Europe
The US (and other nations) provided amphetamines to its soldiers. Not meth, but similar.
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Smoke break? (Score:1)
It isn't to stop people from taking at least 10 minutes to have a smoke break?
Just bring back smoking (Score:2)
Even in the office, everyone knows a PC runs better when it gets a nice yellowed patina. This is America where every worker should have a ticket to flavor country.
Re:Just bring back smoking (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked for Bof A in the 80's. We had ashtrays on top of the tape drives in the data center in SF. Of course they also had a bar on the 8th floor that only employees could get to. God bless the Top Hat.
what about an union and a HARD NO to this? (Score:2)
what about an union and a HARD NO to this?
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That is ... really bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Free drugs (and nicotine is rather strongly addictive, even if not hallucinogenic) is pretty malicious.
Re: That is ... really bad? (Score:5, Funny)
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I was going to mod you funny but realized my cup is empty. brb
Re:That is ... really bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Coffee may be addictive, but it improves long term health and short term quality of life. It's like being addicted to going to the gym for a moderate workout 3-4 times a week. (Tea is similar, though the health-promoting compounds are different.)
About nicotine in the office: ugh. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen. I don't like it when my coworkers bring junk food to the office to share, for the same reason. It's a more moderate version of having dangerous drugs in the office. But now a company is bringing actual dangerous drugs. Nobody's going to overdose, but people will end up addicted and it will contribute to heart disease. Hopefully they will stop before they shorten someone's life. (The common legal test for causation is "but for", as in "But for the company giving out nicotine, would the plaintiff have become addicted?" Unfortunately it's harder to answer if a decades later heart attack would have occurred if not for free nicotine. There is a true mechanistic answer, but we can't presently prove it.)
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Coffee is only mildly addictive. You get over it with two weeks of abstinence with usually just some mild discomfort (light headaches). In addition, coffee is somewhat beneficial for your health, if not overdone and you do not have ADHD or some other condition that makes it hard to focus.
The dangerous thing with coffee is the sugar most people add. That is more addictive and has significant bad negative health effects. And the insidious thing is sweetener does not help as it triggers the insulin response, a
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Coffee may be addictive
Coffee is not considered addictive. It does not create a craving and quitting coffee is done trivially.
Re:That is ... really bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm fairly convinced that despite the "Coffee is good for you!" reports on Slashdot on a regular basis, caffeine is probably a bad thing - I mean, it's the drug equivalent of overclocking your heart, how can that end well.
That said, there's a massive difference between nicotine, which creates anxiety shortly after it's been taken and then "solves" its own anxiety next time you take it, giving the victim the false believe that nicotine somehow calms their nerves, and caffeine which just stimulates the central nervous system. One is a fake, and is bad for you (nicotine lowers your defenses against cancer, which is even more awful considering the primary delivery method for the last 100 years has been carcinogenic) the other is real but may ultimately be bad for you in ways that haven't yet been proven.
I'm all for discouraging nicotine intake by all means possible. It's been proven to be a problem and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Caffeine... until it's proven that it's a problem, it should be left alone.
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I'm fairly convinced that despite the "Coffee is good for you!" reports on Slashdot on a regular basis, caffeine is probably a bad thing - I mean, it's the drug equivalent of overclocking your heart, how can that end well.
You are in opposition to basically all research on the issue. Caffeine is generally not bad, except for some specific medical conditions being present. Now, if you add significant amounts of sugar to coffee, that is a different thing. Sugar is addictive and a killer with tons of nasty effects. But that is not a caffeine effect.
Here is a starting point for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
and (scroll down to "Health Effects"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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There's a daily recommended limit on caffeine for a reason. Anything over 480 mg per day (and perhaps 400mg per day) has been shown to exacerbate heart problems.
https://www.acc.org/Latest-in-... [acc.org]
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Thanks, that's an important distinction. My one cup in the morning and one cup in the afternoon just to enjoy a hot beverage are well within limits, then.
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"Heart problems" as in "some specific medical conditions being present"? Because I did cover that.
In the absence of such problems, drink as much as you like with no ill effects.
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The linked study indicates that chronic users of caffeine in amounts over 400mg per day are more likely to develop high blood pressure and or experience cardiac arrest/other related problems. I didn't dig into whether they screened for pre-existing conditions. There's also the possibility that some people who don't have obvious cardiac conditions could be pushed over the edge by caffeine in a way we don't yet understand.
In any case there was a nonzero number of study participants for whom large regular do
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For me coffee is the difference between having a good life and being too tied to most of the time. The trade off is worth it.
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One does get something of a tolerance to caffeine after a while, so if you're a regular coffee drinker then you will need coffee to get to the point you'd be with absistence.
With that said, am I giving up coffee? Fuck no. Are you crazy?
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Caffeine isn't considered addictive, it doesn't induce cravings. It makes you feel a little low if you build up a dependency, but it is trivial for anyone to quit and you recover quickly without any lasing effects.
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Malicious does not cover it, it can be deadly: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
The company officers should be put in jail for handing out this drug. Too bad there are no laws for nicotine. There are drug laws but nicotine is not considered an illegal pharmaceutical.
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Nicotine is legal only because of the large number of users it already has among the voters, not to mention among the politicians themselves.
Any politician trying to ban nicotine outright would see the end of their political career pretty swift
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Nicotine is only directly deadly if you reeeeeaaaaallllllly overdo it or do something stupid like eating a cigarette. You can kill yourself with lots of perfectly legal things if you overdo it or are use them stupidly.
Sorry, but this is a non-argument.
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Regardless of whether it kills you or not, it does explain what's wrong with you:
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu... [rochester.edu]
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Actually, it does not. They did not establish causality, just correlation. And the hypothesis saying mental fog causes vaping is pretty strong. Same principle that tiredness causes coffee-consume.
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Actually, it does not. They did not establish causality, just correlation.
Actually, it does. There's already a lot of literature out there describing the mechanism of action of nicotine on the central nervous system. For some more recent ones:
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067... [mdpi.com]
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
And no, the neuroprotective effects of a low dose aren't doing you any favors. That needs to be more in the nanogram scale, like what you find in non-tobacco nightshades like tomatoes, peppers, etc. Higher than that, it's neurotoxic. If reduced wnt signaling sounds familiar, i
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And then you read the actual paper you cited and find out you are full of crap. Nice self-own.
Re: That is ... really bad? (Score:2)
No, that's your own brain fog again.
I Can Relate (Score:2)
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Zyn is getting pretty aggressive with their marketing.
Bad idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
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So it's ok in the majority of cases? :D
Re:Bad idea. (Score:5, Funny)
Move Fast and Break People
Umm... (Score:2)
Wait until the company's insurer hears about this... I don't think they'll be amused.
Be careful what you wish for (Score:2)
When some people say they want to live in a "Star Trek future", it's probably worth mentioning there was also a lot of really dystopian shit in Star Trek. [tenor.com]
Manager: "[employee name], can you vouch for the dedication of your team?"
Employee: "We pledge our loyalty to the company, from now until our last deadline."
Manager: "Then receive these pouches from the company, may they keep you focused and productive."
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I'd like to see the original recording of this:D
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They still play the reruns on H&I.
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DS9 is religious spiritual fantasy trash trek. Only TOS and TNG are real trek.
Drugs (Score:2)
Remember the 1800s (Score:2)
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Nah, it's 6mg of straight-up nicotine in a flavored pouch. No actual tobacco. It still tastes pretty nasty, at least according to the people I know that use such things.
To Curry favor with our authoritarian overlords.. (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:1)
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And nicotine is in reality no worse than caffeine
This is completely false.
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And nicotine is in reality no worse than caffeine despite the brainwashing about smoking for the last 40 years.
Nicotine is more addictive.
First thought (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thought when I saw this: are you fucking KIDDING me?
I've always thought that "rugged individualism"was going to be this country's downfall. Add hyper-competitive workplace to that list. Have we really gone so far down the competitive road that we've forgotten why we work to earn a living? The pendulum has swung too far over to the "live to work" side.
I've known people who scoffed and complained how much vacation time European workers have. "I guess they just don't want to win." If getting doped up is one of the ways to "win," I don't want that prize.
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Just what the world needs (Score:2)
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Bawls is barely even sold anymore. Ghost, Reign, and Celcius seem more common.
I'm lucky (Score:2)
I'm lucky to be not likely to be subjected to this anytime soon, though. Where I work, most of my programmer colleagues use good old cigarettes.
Drug test? (Score:1)
CEOs watched Wolf of Wall Street... (Score:2)
... and thought it was a training video.
Good grief America, you really are winning the "Ways to Screw Humans Up" league aren't you? At least 100 years unmatched in that category.
The Germans called "Pervitin.." (Score:1)
PANZERSCHOKOLADE! (Score:2)
The Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht got issued "Panzer Chocolate". Bars of chocolate laced with meth, to keep tank crews going longer. They became quite popular. No idea why ;-). The chocolate came from the Herman Goering Chocolate Factory ("Herman Göring Schokoladenfabrik") ... because of course it did.
This news sounds quite similar to be honest.
Insecticide (Score:4, Interesting)
Ex-smoker here as well, so color me biased. It only took me 15 years to quit the stuff.
Arguably, it's tougher to quit than meth.
nicotine stains (Score:2)
It is by the juice of Killa that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
Quitting nicotine can cause Crohn's disease (Score:2)
Quitting nicotine can be so hard on your body that it can cause the genetic expression of latent diseases like Crohn's. Its also more addictive than heroin. Not to mention mouth and jaw cancer. Its a terrible idea to start.
QuittingZyn (Score:1)
Anyone considering trying nicotine pouches as a nootropic should first check out the horror stories on the QuittingZyn subreddit, of people having a bad time with them.