From the Brownstone Institute

By Roger Bate  

Every morning, hundreds of millions of people perform a socially approved ritual. They line up for coffee. They joke about not being functional without caffeine. They openly acknowledge dependence and even celebrate it. No one calls this addiction degenerate. It is framed as productivity, taste, wellness—sometimes even virtue.

Now imagine the same professional discreetly using a nicotine pouch before a meeting. The reaction is very different. This is treated as a vice, something vaguely shameful, associated with weakness, poor judgment, or public health risk.

From a scientific perspective, this distinction makes little sense.

Caffeine and nicotine are both mild psychoactive stimulants. Both are plant-derived alkaloids. Both increase alertness and concentration. Both produce dependence. Neither is a carcinogen. Neither causes the diseases historically associated with smoking. Yet one has become the world’s most acceptable addiction, while the other remains morally polluted even in its safest, non-combustible forms.

This divergence has almost nothing to do with biology. It has everything to do with history, class, marketing, and a failure of modern public health to distinguish molecules from mechanisms.

Two Stimulants, One Misunderstanding

Nicotine acts on nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, mimicking a neurotransmitter the brain already uses to regulate attention and learning. At low doses, it improves focus and mood. At higher doses, it causes nausea and dizziness—self-limiting effects that discourage excess. Nicotine is not carcinogenic and does not cause lung disease.

Caffeine works differently, blocking adenosine receptors that signal fatigue. The result is wakefulness and alertness. Like nicotine, caffeine indirectly affects dopamine, which is why people rely on it daily. Like nicotine, it produces tolerance and withdrawal. Headaches, fatigue, and irritability are routine among regular users who skip their morning dose.

Pharmacologically, these substances are peers.

The major difference in health outcomes does not come from the molecules themselves but from how they have been delivered.

Combustion Was the Killer

Smoking kills because burning organic material produces thousands of toxic compounds—tar, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other carcinogens. Nicotine is present in cigarette smoke, but it is not what causes cancer or emphysema. Combustion is.

When nicotine is delivered without combustion—through patches, gum, snus, pouches, or vaping—the toxic burden drops dramatically. This is one of the most robust findings in modern tobacco research.

And yet nicotine continues to be treated as if it were the source of smoking’s harm.

This confusion has shaped decades of policy.

How Nicotine Lost Its Reputation

For centuries, nicotine was not stigmatized. Indigenous cultures across the Americas used tobacco in religious, medicinal, and diplomatic rituals. In early modern Europe, physicians prescribed it. Pipes, cigars, and snuff were associated with contemplation and leisure.

The collapse came with industrialization.

The cigarette-rolling machine of the late 19th century transformed nicotine into a mass-market product optimized for rapid pulmonary delivery. Addiction intensified, exposure multiplied, and combustion damage accumulated invisibly for decades. When epidemiology finally linked smoking to lung cancer and heart disease in the mid-20th century, the backlash was inevitable.

But the blame was assigned crudely. Nicotine—the named psychoactive component—became the symbol of the harm, even though the damage came from smoke.

Once that association formed, it hardened into dogma.

How Caffeine Escaped

Caffeine followed a very different cultural path. Coffee and tea entered global life through institutions of respectability. Coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire and Europe became centers of commerce and debate. Tea was woven into domestic ritual, empire, and gentility.

Crucially, caffeine was never bound to a lethal delivery system. No one inhaled burning coffee leaves. There was no delayed epidemic waiting to be discovered.

As industrial capitalism expanded, caffeine became a productivity tool. Coffee breaks were institutionalized. Tea fueled factory schedules and office routines. By the 20th century, caffeine was no longer seen as a drug at all but as a necessity of modern life.

Its downsides—dependence, sleep disruption, anxiety—were normalized or joked about. In recent decades, branding completed the transformation. Coffee became lifestyle. The stimulant disappeared behind aesthetics and identity.

The Class Divide in Addiction

The difference between caffeine and nicotine is not just historical. It is social.

Caffeine use is public, aesthetic, and professionally coded. Carrying a coffee cup signals busyness, productivity, and belonging in the middle class. Nicotine use—even in clean, low-risk forms—is discreet. It is not aestheticized. It is associated with coping rather than ambition.

Addictions favored by elites are rebranded as habits or wellness tools. Addictions associated with stress, manual labor, or marginal populations are framed as moral failings. This is why caffeine is indulgence and nicotine is degeneracy, even when the physiological effects are similar.

Where Public Health Went Wrong

Public health messaging relies on simplification. “Smoking kills” was effective and true. But over time, simplification hardened into distortion.

“Smoking kills” became “Nicotine is addictive,” which slid into “Nicotine is harmful,” and eventually into claims that there is “No safe level.” Dose, delivery, and comparative risk disappeared from the conversation.

Institutions now struggle to reverse course. Admitting that nicotine is not the primary harm agent would require acknowledging decades of misleading communication. It would require distinguishing adult use from youth use. It would require nuance.

Bureaucracies are bad at nuance.

So nicotine remains frozen at its worst historical moment: the age of the cigarette.

Why This Matters

This is not an academic debate. Millions of smokers could dramatically reduce their health risks by switching to non-combustion nicotine products. Countries that have allowed this—most notably Sweden—have seen smoking rates and tobacco-related mortality collapse. Countries that stigmatize or ban these alternatives preserve cigarette dominance.

At the same time, caffeine consumption continues to rise, including among adolescents, with little moral panic. Energy drinks are aggressively marketed. Sleep disruption and anxiety are treated as lifestyle issues, not public health emergencies.

The asymmetry is revealing.

Coffee as the Model Addiction

Caffeine succeeded culturally because it aligned with power. It supported work, not resistance. It fit office life. It could be branded as refinement. It never challenged institutional authority.

Nicotine, especially when used by working-class populations, became associated with stress relief, nonconformity, and failure to comply. That symbolism persisted long after the smoke could be removed.

Addictions are not judged by chemistry. They are judged by who uses them and whether they fit prevailing moral narratives.

Coffee passed the test. Nicotine did not.

The Core Error

The central mistake is confusing a molecule with a method. Nicotine did not cause the smoking epidemic. Combustion did. Once that distinction is restored, much of modern tobacco policy looks incoherent. Low-risk behaviors are treated as moral threats, while higher-risk behaviors are tolerated because they are culturally embedded.

This is not science. It is politics dressed up as health.

A Final Thought

If we applied the standards used against nicotine to caffeine, coffee would be regulated like a controlled substance. If we applied the standards used for caffeine to nicotine, pouches and vaping would be treated as unremarkable adult choices.

The rational approach is obvious: evaluate substances based on dose, delivery, and actual harm. Stop moralizing chemistry. Stop pretending that all addictions are equal. Nicotine is not harmless. Neither is caffeine. But both are far safer than the stories told about them.

This essay only scratches the surface. The strange moral history of nicotine, caffeine, and acceptable addiction exposes a much larger problem: modern institutions have forgotten how to reason about risk.

Author

Roger Bate

Roger Bate is a Brownstone Fellow, Senior Fellow at the International Center for Law and Economics (Jan 2023-present), Board member of Africa Fighting Malaria (September 2000-present), and Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (January 2000-present).

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Joseph Fournier

Livestock contribute far less to emissions than activists claim, and eliminating them would weaken nutrition, resilience and food security

The war on livestock pushed by Net Zero ideologues is not environmental science; it’s a dangerous, misguided campaign that threatens global food security.

The priests of Net Zero 2050 have declared war on the cow, the pig and the chicken. From glass towers in London, Brussels and Ottawa, they argue that cutting animal protein, shrinking herds and pushing people toward lentils and lab-grown alternatives will save the climate from a steer’s burp.

This is not science. It is an urban belief that billions of people can be pushed toward a diet promoted by some policymakers who have never worked a field or heard a rooster at dawn. Eliminating or sharply reducing livestock would destabilize food systems and increase global hunger. In Canada, livestock account for about three per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Activists speak as if livestock suddenly appeared in the last century, belching fossil carbon into the air. In reality, the relationship between humans and the animals we raise is older than agriculture. It is part of how our species developed.

Two million years ago, early humans ate meat and marrow, mastered fire and developed larger brains. The expensive-tissue hypothesis, a theory that explains how early humans traded gut size for brain growth, is not ideology; it is basic anthropology. Animal fat and protein helped build the human brain and the societies that followed.

Domestication deepened that relationship. When humans raised cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens, we created a long partnership that shaped both species. Wolves became dogs. Aurochs, the wild ancestors of modern cattle, became domesticated animals. Junglefowl became chickens that could lay eggs reliably. These animals lived with us because it increased their chances of survival.

In return, they received protection, veterinary care and steady food during drought and winter. More than 70,000 Canadian farms raise cattle, hogs, poultry or sheep, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs across the supply chain.

Livestock also protected people from climate extremes. When crops failed, grasslands still produced forage, and herds converted that into food. During the Little Ice Age, millions in Europe starved because grain crops collapsed. Pastoral communities, which lived from herding livestock rather than crops, survived because their herds could still graze. Removing livestock would offer little climate benefit, yet it would eliminate one of humanity’s most reliable protections against environmental shocks.

Today, a Maasai child in Kenya or northern Tanzania drinking milk from a cow grazing on dry land has a steadier food source than a vegan in a Berlin apartment relying on global shipping. Modern genetics and nutrition have pushed this relationship further. For the first time, the poorest billion people have access to complete protein and key nutrients such as iron, zinc, B12 and retinol, a form of vitamin A, that plants cannot supply without industrial processing or fortification. Canada also imports significant volumes of soy-based and other plant-protein products, making many urban vegan diets more dependent on long-distance supply chains than people assume. The war on livestock is not a war on carbon; it is a war on the most successful anti-poverty tool ever created.

And what about the animals? Remove humans tomorrow and most commercial chickens would die of exposure, merino sheep would overheat under their own wool and dairy cattle would suffer from untreated mastitis (a bacterial infection of the udder). These species are fully domesticated. Without us, they would disappear.

Net Zero 2050 is a climate target adopted by federal and provincial governments, but debates continue over whether it requires reducing livestock herds or simply improving farm practices. Net Zero advocates look at a pasture and see methane. Farmers see land producing food from nothing more than sunlight, rain and grass.

So the question is not technical. It is about how we see ourselves. Does the Net Zero vision treat humans as part of the natural world, or as a threat that must be contained by forcing diets and erasing long-standing food systems? Eliminating livestock sends the message that human presence itself is an environmental problem, not a participant in a functioning ecosystem.

The cow is not the enemy of the planet. Pasture is not a problem to fix. It is a solution our ancestors discovered long before anyone used the word “sustainable.” We abandon it at our peril and at theirs.

Dr. Joseph Fournier is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An accomplished scientist and former energy executive, he holds graduate training in chemical physics and has written more than 100 articles on energy, environment and climate science.