HINESBURG, Vt. (WCAX) – For the first time ever, Vermont’s 2024-2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey asked teens whether they’re using nicotine pouches. While the survey results aren’t in yet, we asked experts where the concerns are coming from.
A newer kind of nicotine product could be cropping up at your child’s school. Nicotine pouches contain powder made of nicotine and flavoring that dissolves between the lip and gum.
As someone who talks with teens about drug use for a living, Matt Meunier says he’s been seeing more of them at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg.
“If you walk around our building, or even, you know, other buildings in the community, what you start to see are all the, you know, the white little pouches that end up on the ground, and those have become much more present,” Meunier said.
With the rise of vaping, the school installed vape detectors that Meunier says have made it harder for students to get away with the activity. Nicotine pouches, on the other hand, often fly under the radar.
“They’re a little bit more discreet. It’s harder to tell. There’s no smoke, there’s no vapor, none of that. And so I think that’s really one of the reasons why you find these high school students using pouches,” Meunier said.
State health officials say the Department of Taxes tipped them off several years ago that sales for the smokeless tobacco products were increasing.
“We’re like, hmm, is that what the nicotine pouch category is, what it’s contributing? We think it is,” said Rhonda Williams with the Vermont Department of Health.
As a public health program director, Williams says she hears from middle and high school administrators that students are using nicotine pouches. She believes vaping is still much more popular, but that the state needs to be on the defensive.
“While I think and hope that it is — and you know, an increase that is a couple percentage points, maybe, but — we need to be on the ready if we have a real emerging problem here,” Williams said.
At CVU, Meunier regularly speaks with students caught using nicotine, sometimes in pouch form. Concerned parents tell him packages of nicotine pouches have shown up at their doorsteps as kids order them online right under their noses. He says combating that means having regular, open conversations with students, something many are open to.
“Whether it’s that they want to quit, whether it’s that they want more information about what it looks like, or whether they just want to be able to kind of tell somebody like, ‘Hey, this is kind of going on with my friend group. What should I do?’” Meunier said.
The latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey results will come out in 2026. In the meantime, national data shows e-cigarette use dropped by nearly 2% from 2023 to 2024, with nicotine pouch use remaining stagnant.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the sale of nicotine pouches as a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, and the FDA says overall use of pouches by minors remains low.
Phillip Morris, the company that manufactures Zyn pouches, tells WCAX that no one under the legal age should use nicotine products. The company says it does not market its products to minors or pay social media influencers to endorse them.
