- The lungs are too sensitive
to use as a delivery vehicle for stimulants.
I don't even wanna think
about smoking my coffee beans every morning,
that sounds terrible.
- Well, 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 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 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 2 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,
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 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 drug stores,
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
of 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 my savings account. - Yeah, you do.
- But, I see your point.