B.I.G.
Part Two: Big Tobacco, Big Vape, Big Nicotine — and the People Erased by Big Language
May 4, 2026
Published yesterday: B.I.G. Part One: Big Business — When the Past Screams at the Future.
It feels a little strange to continue this story by moving from railroads to tobacco.
Railroads helped build the country. Cigarettes helped fill cemeteries. I do not want to blur that difference or pretend the comparison is cleaner than it is. Part One was not an argument that railroads and cigarettes are the same. They are not. While we didn't need cigarettes to build a nation, the regulatory lesson is the same: when we focus only on the “Big” industry, we often lose sight of modern technology's real impact on the people who use it.
Part One was not really about trains or any specific industry. It was about “Big”: what happens when power, money, influence, technology, public need, private profit, and human harm get tangled together. It was about how a word that begins as a size description can become a warning label. I can think of no example that demonstrates this more clearly than the war over nicotine.
Big Tobacco earned its name. I am not asking anyone to forget what cigarette companies did. I could not forget it if I tried. I’ve lost too many loved ones to smoking to ever forget. The major cigarette companies denied, minimized, manipulated, marketed, lobbied, litigated, and protected profits while smoking caused enormous harm. That history should guide regulation. It should not trap people there.
For a long time, the public-health goal seemed easier to describe. Smoking was killing people, and the goal was to reduce the death and disease caused by smoking. Some imagined a literal end to tobacco use. Others used a more practical “smoke-free” benchmark, often somewhere around five percent smoking prevalence. Either way, the smoke was the disaster.
Vaping separated nicotine from smoke in a way public health still struggles to talk about honestly. For decades, tobacco, nicotine, smoking, addiction, industry misconduct, and disease were bundled together in public messaging. That made the story easy to tell. The U.S. discussion of vaping became so focused on youth risks and industry misconduct that many adults who smoke came to believe vaping was as dangerous as, or more dangerous than, smoking.
That is how cigarettes and noncombustible products get pulled into the same emotional category, even as the products themselves become less like cigarettes.
The language followed. Big Tobacco became Big Vape, and Big Vape became Big Nicotine. These are not just updated labels for the same old problem. Each one expands the target. Big Tobacco points to large cigarette companies and the reputation they earned. Big Vape pulls a lower-risk technology that began outside Big Tobacco into the same moral frame as cigarettes. Big Nicotine goes further still, making nicotine itself sound like the enemy.
I have written before about my discomfort with the word “endgame.” At its best, the tobacco endgame seemed to mean ending the suffering caused by smoking. Who would not want that? Yet no one ever fully settled the question of what the endgame was supposed to be. Was it the end of smoking? The end of tobacco companies? The end of nicotine? All three?
If the goal is ending smoking-related death and disease, then harm reduction belongs in the conversation. If the goal is ending nicotine use, harm reduction will always look like a compromise. If the goal is eliminating the tobacco industry, then even a lower-risk product can look like a threat, not because of what it does for people, but because of who might profit from it.
That unresolved question is now sitting in the middle of every argument about vaping, nicotine pouches, and the adults who use them.
Smoking still kills nearly half a million people in the United States each year. Cigarettes are still legal, still available, and still sold in airports, grocery stores, smoke shops, and convenience stores across the country. Cigarettes do not need our help. They are already everywhere.
For adults who smoke, replacing some or all cigarettes with e-cigarettes or nicotine pouches can reduce exposure to many harmful chemicals found in cigarette smoke, with greater reductions as smoking decreases. That does not make the products “safe”, make the companies trustworthy, or erase concerns about dependence. It simply means the difference between combustion and noncombustion is not a tiny detail. It is the difference that should be at the center of the conversation.
Somewhere in the moral battle to defeat Big Tobacco, public health seems to have picked up a Big Eraser. The 'moral signal' we discussed in Part One has become so loud that it is now blurring the lines of the very problem we are trying to solve. It is no longer just erasing the industry’s reputation; it is erasing the people who use nicotine.
The eraser rubbed away the difference between smoking and nicotine, between cigarettes and noncombustible products, between a multinational corporation and a small shop, and between protecting young people and misleading adults.
Worst of all, it erased people from the very conversation that is supposed to be about saving lives.
The companies, products, and warnings are still visible. So are the youth-risk headlines. But the adult who still smokes keeps disappearing from the page, along with the adult who switched to vaping or nicotine pouches and is afraid of going back to cigarettes. Even the adult who uses nicotine without having smoked first becomes hard to talk about honestly.
That last group makes some people uncomfortable. I understand why. If the public-health goal quietly shifts from a smoke-free society to a nicotine-free society, we need to say that out loud. A smoke-free society is about removing the most deadly form of nicotine use from everyday life. A nicotine-free society is about deciding that adult nicotine use itself is the problem to be solved.
That is a much bigger claim.
Adults use caffeine, drink alcohol, and, in many states, use cannabis. Adults take risks for pleasure, focus, relief, ritual, social connection, and habit. We can have honest conversations about risk without pretending adult choices disappear the moment a product contains nicotine. Nothing in life is risk-free, and “not harmless” is not the same as “must be eliminated from adult life.” “Not for everyone” is not the same as “for no one.”
That is where “Big Nicotine” becomes slippery. It can sound like we are talking about companies, and sometimes we are. The broader the label gets, the easier it becomes to treat nicotine itself as the enemy. Once nicotine becomes the enemy, the people who use it become harder to see as people making choices, reducing harm, or meeting needs. They start to look like evidence that public health has failed, instead of people whose choices and lives deserve to be understood.
Some organizations seem unable to accept harm reduction in the nicotine space because the tobacco industry also talks about it. In their view, if industry supports reduced-risk products, harm reduction must be an industry strategy rather than a public-health strategy. I understand the distrust. The industry earned it. But industry interest does not make harm reduction imaginary. A company can profit from a lower-risk product, and an adult who smokes can still benefit from switching to it. Both things can be true at the same time.
That seems to be where some of tobacco control gets stuck. Harm reduction is accepted in theory only after it has been stripped of the marketplace where people actually encounter nicotine products. It is treated as legitimate when it is medicalized, supervised, tightly controlled, and safely removed from anything that looks like pleasure, choice, or commerce.
Adults who smoke do not live inside a supervised public-health program; they live in the real world. It is a world where cigarettes remain legal, familiar, and deadly—yet often easier to buy than the products meant to replace them. Just as early railroads used their power to limit choices for farmers, modern 'Big Eraser' policies can create a de facto monopoly for the cigarette. By over-regulating lower-risk alternatives while leaving the most dangerous product readily available, we risk making it easier for people to simply keep smoking.
Regulation is complicated, too. Part One touched on one of America’s earliest examples of both industry and anti-industry forces pushing for regulation. That was not just a railroad story. Tobacco policy has its own version of that complication.
Public-health groups and industry actors may support the same law for very different reasons. A rule may be promoted as consumer protection, youth prevention, or enforcement, while also protecting the market share of certain companies. That does not automatically make the rule wrong. It does mean we should look carefully at who benefits, who disappears, and who gets left with cigarettes instead of lower-risk products that are acceptable and appealing enough to replace smoking.
None of this is an argument against regulation. Responsible regulation is necessary, especially in a space with such a long history of industry misconduct and smoking-related harm. Regulation also needs to be reasonable. That means evaluating products, holding companies accountable, requiring accurate labels, setting quality standards, enforcing age restrictions, and creating consequences for irresponsible behavior. Responsible regulation should protect people without becoming a Big Eraser.
Regulation becomes a problem when it makes cigarettes and lower-risk products look the same, makes safer products harder to find while cigarettes remain easy to buy, treats adult autonomy as a threat, or ignores the people who have already found something that keeps them away from smoke.
I understand not trusting the companies. I do not understand turning that distrust into a policy environment that leaves people with cigarettes. At some point, distrust of industry can start to look less like protection and more like punishment, except the punishment does not fall on the industry. It falls on the person who is still smoking.
People who smoke should not have to keep paying for Big Tobacco’s sins with their own lives.
This is not a call for blind trust. It is a call for clear thinking. If a company misleads the public, targets young people, hides evidence, manipulates science, or buys influence, it should be named, documented, regulated, and held accountable.
A product that can help adults move away from the most dangerous form of nicotine use deserves careful evaluation instead of automatic condemnation by association. We should not build policy on the idea that every adult who uses nicotine has been duped by industry and represents a public-health failure.
A train can move what we need, or it can run people over. “Big” language is no different. It can expose power where it needs exposing, but if we aren't careful, it becomes the very tool that flattens the people we were supposed to protect.
That is what worries me about “Big” language in nicotine policy. It can expose power, and sometimes that power needs exposing. Big Tobacco earned its name. But as the language shifts from Big Tobacco to Big Vape to Big Nicotine, the label can become a Big Eraser, blurring the lines between products, risks, motives, and choices.
That is when people who use nicotine get erased from the conversation.
Until next time…
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I need a Part 3 even though I'm not sure what it would be about! Great writing Skip! We should be talking to the people to understand the people to better serve the people.
Wonderful stuff Skip. Inspiring!