Brownstone Institute
How Government and Big Tech Colluded to Usurp Constitutional rights
From the Brownstone Institute
“It is also axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” ~ Norwood v. Harrison (1973).
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Government cannot coerce private parties to violate citizens’ constitutionally protected liberties. Under the guise of Covid responses, government officials defied this principle to strip Americans of their rights.
Behind Covid’s public spectacles – the memorable headlines of forced church closings, house arrest edicts, playground prohibitions, and bans on “unnecessary walking” – there was a coordinated effort to overthrow constitutional liberties.
Bureaucrats, federal officers, and elected officials colluded with Big Tech firms to accomplish unconstitutional aims. In doing so, they augmented government power and enriched Silicon Valley companies.
A federal-corporate collusion supplanted the American system of separation of powers and individual rights. This coup d’état usurped the Constitution and created a new ruling order of suppression and surveillance.
Suppression, Censorship, and the First Amendment
“Government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter or its content,” the Supreme Court decided in Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002). Yet, the Biden White House and the federal government seized that power under the shadow of Covid. They coerced, colluded, and encouraged social media companies to suppress speech that deviated from their preferred messaging.
The White House’s conduct in July 2021 exemplified this behavior. Publicly, officials launched a pressure campaign; privately, they conducted a direct censorship operation.
On July 15, 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki discussed social media “disinformation” related to Covid-19 at her press briefing. “Facebook needs to move more quicky to remove harmful, violative posts,” she told reporters.
Her boss, President Joe Biden, spoke with the press the following day. Discussing social media companies, he remarked, “They’re killing people.”
Biden later clarified his remarks, explaining that he was advocating for censorship, not making personal attacks. “My hope is that Facebook, instead of taking it personally that somehow I’m saying ‘Facebook is killing people,’ that they would do something about the misinformation,” he explained.
That week, White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield appeared on MSNBC and said that social media “should be held accountable” and reiterated President Biden’s support for private actors to restrict the speech of journalists, advocates, and citizens.
Privately, government officials called for direct censorship of American citizens and journalists.
Twitter worked with the government to stifle criticism of the Biden administration related to Covid. For example, White House officials met with Twitter content moderators in April 2021 to coordinate censorship initiatives. White House officials specifically pressed Twitter on “why Alex Berenson [a journalist] hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
White House senior adviser Andy Slavitt continued to encourage Twitter to remove Berenson from the platform, and his efforts succeeded when Berenson received a “permanent ban” in August 2021, just weeks after the White House’s public pressure campaign.
White House officials encouraged Big Tech groups to censor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tucker Carlson for questioning vaccine efficacy. White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty demanded to know why Facebook had not removed a video of Carlson reporting the announcement that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was linked to blood clots.
In January 2023, Reason revealed internal Facebook emails concerning the federal government’s campaign to censor users that deviated from Covid orthodoxy.
Robby Soave explains:
Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was “man-made” rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was “technically possible” but “extremely unlikely.”) In other emails, Facebook asked: “For each of the following claims, which we’ve recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?”
These initiatives stifled dissent by infringing on American citizens’ speech; in doing so, they stripped millions of Americans of their First Amendment right to receive information.
In Martin v. City of Struthers (1941), Justice Hugo Black wrote that the First Amendment “embraces the right to distribute literature, and necessarily protects the right to receive it.” Nearly thirty years later, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, “it is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas” in Stanley v. Georgia.
In defiance of this precedent, bureaucrats specifically sought to interfere with citizens’ right to hear criticism of government Covid policy. In his demands to Facebook regarding Carlson’s coverage of the J&J vaccine, Flaherty wrote, “There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many?”
Flaherty’s censorship pressure continued, “How was this not violative… What exactly is the rule for removal vs. demoting?”
Republican state attorneys general have sued the Biden administration for allegedly violating the First Amendment in its censorship promotion. Their case – Schmitt v. Biden – has uncovered communications between the Biden White House and social media companies.
The emails discovered in the case reveal an ongoing collusion to stifle dissent. Over fifty government bureaucrats, twelve federal agencies, and representatives from companies including Google, Twitter, and Facebook worked together to coordinate censorship efforts.
For example, Facebook employees met with officials at the Department of Health and Human Services the week after President Biden accused the company of “killing people.” A Facebook executive followed up with the HHS officials after the meeting:
“I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to the disinfo dozen (so a total of 39 Profiles, Pages, Groups and IG accounts deleted thus far, resulting in every member of the disinfo dozen having had at least one such entity removed).”
In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Court ruled that Rhode Island violated the First Amendment when a state commission advised book distributors against publishing certain content. In a concurring opinion, Justice Douglas wrote, “the censor and First Amendment rights are incompatible.”
Despite this constitutional incompatibility, the government deliberately and repeatedly encouraged and coerced private companies into censoring Americans’ speech.
Meanwhile, the fourth estate actively participated and profited from the censorship regime.
Amidst its efforts to censor dissent, the federal government siphoned tax dollars to media networks – including CNN, Fox News, and The Washington Post – to promote its official narrative. The US Department of Health and Human Services paid media outlets $1 billion to “strengthen vaccine confidence” in 2021 as part of a “comprehensive media campaign.”
At the same time, legacy media outlets like The Washington Post, The BBC, Reuters, and ABC partnered with Google, YouTube, Meta, and Twitter in the “Trusted News Initiative” to coordinate censorship initiatives. In “The Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that these tech firms held “regular meetings” – often with government officials – to discuss efforts to suppress speech critical of government narratives.
In summary, the government cannot restrict speech based on content, cannot decide what information a citizen can obtain, cannot advise private companies against publishing speech, and cannot use private entities to encourage unconstitutional aims. Yet our government launched a coordinated campaign, publicly and privately, to augment its powers and suppress citizens’ speech.
Surveillance. General Warrants, and the Fourth Amendment
In addition to suppressing dissent, the federal government’s Covid response usurped the protections of the Fourth Amendment in its partnership with Big Tech data brokers.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees citizens the right to be free from unreasonable government searches and seizures. Designed in response to the British practice of “general warrants,” the Framers sought to end a police system that provided the government nearly unrestrained access to searching colonists, their homes, and their belongings.
Since its ratification in 1791, the Supreme Court has maintained that technological advancements do not diminish the right of citizens to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.
For example, in Kyllo v. United States (2001), the Court ruled that the use of thermal imagery to search a home violated the Fourth Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts later explained that Government – absent a warrant – “could not capitalize” on new technology to strip citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights.
In 2012, a unanimous Court ruled that warrantless GPS tracking violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights in United States v. Jones.
Six years later, the Court again ruled that the Government violated a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights when it tracked a suspect by acquiring his cell phone location data from his wireless carrier.
In that case – Carpenter v. United States – Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Fourth Amendment’s “basic purpose” is to “safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by government officials.”
During Covid, however, the United States government violated these legal holdings. Despite repeated rulings that the Government cannot use new technologies to infringe Fourth Amendment rights and clear precedent regarding the use of GPS and cell phone location data, the CDC used taxpayer funds to purchase Americans’ cell phone data from data broker SafeGraph.
In May 2022, Vice revealed that the CDC used cell phone data to track the location of tens of millions of Americans during Covid.
At first, the agency used this data to track compliance with lockdown orders, vaccine promotions, attendance at churches, and other Covid-related initiatives. Additionally, the agency explained that the “mobility data” will be available for further “agency-wide use” and “numerous CDC priorities.”
SafeGraph sold this information to federal bureaucrats, who then used the data to spy on millions of Americans’ behavior, including where they visited and whether they complied with house arrest orders. This created a digital “general warrant” unshackled from Constitutional restraints.
In other words, big tech firms profited from surreptitious schemes in which the U.S. Government used taxpayer dollars to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of the citizens that fund their operations. Unelected officials at the CDC then tracked Americans’ movements, religious observances, and medical activity.
A similar process occurred at the state level.
In Massachusetts, the state Department of Public Health worked with Google to secretly install Covid-tracing software on citizens’ smartphones. The public-private partnership created “MassNotify,” an app that tracks and traces people’s locations. The program appeared on citizens’ phones without their consent.
Robert Wright, a Massachusetts resident, and Johnny Kula, a New Hampshire resident who commutes to Massachusetts to work every day, have brought a legal action against the state. “Conspiring with a private company to hijack residents’ smartphones without the owners’ knowledge or consent is not a tool that the Massachusetts Department of Public Health may lawfully employ in its efforts to combat COVID-19,” they say in their complaint.
Public officials also used citizens’ GPS data to support their election campaigns in 2020. Voter analytics firm PredictWise boasted that it used “nearly 2 billion GPS pings” from Americans’ cell phones to assign citizens a “COVID-19 decree violation” score and a “COVID-19 concern” score.
PredictWise explained that the Arizona Democratic Party used these “scores” and collections of personal data to influence voters to support US Senator Mark Kelly. The firm’s clients include the Democratic parties of Florida, Ohio, and South Carolina.
Politicians and government agencies repeatedly and deliberately augmented their power by tracking their citizens and thus depriving them of their Fourth Amendment rights. They then analyzed that information, assigned citizens compliance “scores,” and used the spyware to manipulate voters to maintain their positions of authority.
In effect, government forces used Covid as a pretext to return to the system of general warrants that the Framers designed the Fourth Amendment to abolish. Government officials gained access to citizens’ movements, locations, and travel patterns, and they used the citizens’ tax dollars to do it.
The collusion of government and corporate power siphoned millions of dollars from taxpayers while abolishing the Fourth Amendment safeguards that protect citizens against arbitrary invasions by government officials.
In 1975, Senator Frank Church led a government investigation into intelligence agencies’ domestic spy programs that targeted groups including anti-war protestors and civil rights leaders. Senator Church, speaking of the agencies’ covert capability nearly 50 years ago, warned, “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
Not only did the government turn its capability on the American people, but it recruited the most powerful information companies in the history of the world to advance its agenda, leaving American citizens poorer, stripped of their rights, and left with no place to hide.
How did it happen here?
Most of these Constitutional violations will never have their day in court. In addition to stripping Americans of their rights, the ruling class has insulated Covid’s hegemonic forces from legal liability.
No matter the result of the ongoing cases, including Schmidt v. Biden and Wright v. Mass. Department of Public Health – the questions loom: How did we lose our Bill of Rights so quickly? How did it happen here?
Justice Antonin Scalia noted that the Bill of Rights cannot serve as a safeguard against tyranny on its own. “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy,” he said. “Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights.”
The key to safeguarding liberty, according to Scalia, is the separation of powers.
Commenting on the Constitution of the Soviet Union’s extensive guarantees of freedoms of speech, assembly, political affiliation, religion, and conscience, Scalia wrote:
“They were not worth the paper they were printed on, as are the human rights guarantees of a large number of still-extant countries governed by Presidents-for-life. They are what the Framers of our Constitution called ‘parchment guarantees,’ because the real constitutions of those countries—the provisions that establish the institutions of government—do not prevent the centralization of power in one man or one party, thus enabling the guarantees to be ignored. Structure is everything.”
Our Constitution created a structure of government with multiple levels of separation of powers. But, to the detriment of Americans’ liberties, the federal government and Big Tech supplanted that structure with a federal-corporate partnership devoid of constitutional restraints.
Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett describes the Constitution as “the law that governs those who govern us.” But those who govern us deliberately disregarded constraints on their own authority and led a coup against their citizens in partnership with Big Tech.
Covid served a pretext for a convergence of power that left our Bill of Rights as little more than a “parchment guarantee.”
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I recently purchased Aaron Siri’s new book Vaccines, Amen. As I flipped though the pages, I noticed a section devoted to his now-famous deposition of Dr Stanley Plotkin, the “godfather” of vaccines.
I’d seen viral clips circulating on social media, but I had never taken the time to read the full transcript — until now.
Siri’s interrogation was methodical and unflinching…a masterclass in extracting uncomfortable truths.
A Legal Showdown
In January 2018, Dr Stanley Plotkin, a towering figure in immunology and co-developer of the rubella vaccine, was deposed under oath in Pennsylvania by attorney Aaron Siri.
The case stemmed from a custody dispute in Michigan, where divorced parents disagreed over whether their daughter should be vaccinated. Plotkin had agreed to testify in support of vaccination on behalf of the father.
What followed over the next nine hours, captured in a 400-page transcript, was extraordinary.
Plotkin’s testimony revealed ethical blind spots, scientific hubris, and a troubling indifference to vaccine safety data.
He mocked religious objectors, defended experiments on mentally disabled children, and dismissed glaring weaknesses in vaccine surveillance systems.
A System Built on Conflicts
From the outset, Plotkin admitted to a web of industry entanglements.
He confirmed receiving payments from Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Pfizer, and several biotech firms. These were not occasional consultancies but long-standing financial relationships with the very manufacturers of the vaccines he promoted.
Plotkin appeared taken aback when Siri questioned his financial windfall from royalties on products like RotaTeq, and expressed surprise at the “tone” of the deposition.
Siri pressed on: “You didn’t anticipate that your financial dealings with those companies would be relevant?”
Plotkin replied: “I guess, no, I did not perceive that that was relevant to my opinion as to whether a child should receive vaccines.”
The man entrusted with shaping national vaccine policy had a direct financial stake in its expansion, yet he brushed it aside as irrelevant.
Contempt for Religious Dissent
Siri questioned Plotkin on his past statements, including one in which he described vaccine critics as “religious zealots who believe that the will of God includes death and disease.”
Siri asked whether he stood by that statement. Plotkin replied emphatically, “I absolutely do.”
Plotkin was not interested in ethical pluralism or accommodating divergent moral frameworks. For him, public health was a war, and religious objectors were the enemy.
He also admitted to using human foetal cells in vaccine production — specifically WI-38, a cell line derived from an aborted foetus at three months’ gestation.
Siri asked if Plotkin had authored papers involving dozens of abortions for tissue collection. Plotkin shrugged: “I don’t remember the exact number…but quite a few.”
Plotkin regarded this as a scientific necessity, though for many people — including Catholics and Orthodox Jews — it remains a profound moral concern.
Rather than acknowledging such sensitivities, Plotkin dismissed them outright, rejecting the idea that faith-based values should influence public health policy.
That kind of absolutism, where scientific aims override moral boundaries, has since drawn criticism from ethicists and public health leaders alike.
As NIH director Jay Bhattacharya later observed during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, such absolutism erodes trust.
“In public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody,” he said. “Having alternatives that are not ethically conflicted with foetal cell lines is not just an ethical issue — it’s a public health issue.”
Safety Assumed, Not Proven
When the discussion turned to safety, Siri asked, “Are you aware of any study that compares vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children?”
Plotkin replied that he was “not aware of well-controlled studies.”
Asked why no placebo-controlled trials had been conducted on routine childhood vaccines such as hepatitis B, Plotkin said such trials would be “ethically difficult.”
That rationale, Siri noted, creates a scientific blind spot. If trials are deemed too unethical to conduct, then gold-standard safety data — the kind required for other pharmaceuticals — simply do not exist for the full childhood vaccine schedule.
Siri pointed to one example: Merck’s hepatitis B vaccine, administered to newborns. The company had only monitored participants for adverse events for five days after injection.
Plotkin didn’t dispute it. “Five days is certainly short for follow-up,” he admitted, but claimed that “most serious events” would occur within that time frame.
Siri challenged the idea that such a narrow window could capture meaningful safety data — especially when autoimmune or neurodevelopmental effects could take weeks or months to emerge.
Siri pushed on. He asked Plotkin if the DTaP and Tdap vaccines — for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis — could cause autism.
“I feel confident they do not,” Plotkin replied.
But when shown the Institute of Medicine’s 2011 report, which found the evidence “inadequate to accept or reject” a causal link between DTaP and autism, Plotkin countered, “Yes, but the point is that there were no studies showing that it does cause autism.”
In that moment, Plotkin embraced a fallacy: treating the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
“You’re making assumptions, Dr Plotkin,” Siri challenged. “It would be a bit premature to make the unequivocal, sweeping statement that vaccines do not cause autism, correct?”
Plotkin relented. “As a scientist, I would say that I do not have evidence one way or the other.”
The MMR
The deposition also exposed the fragile foundations of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
When Siri asked for evidence of randomised, placebo-controlled trials conducted before MMR’s licensing, Plotkin pushed back: “To say that it hasn’t been tested is absolute nonsense,” he said, claiming it had been studied “extensively.”
Pressed to cite a specific trial, Plotkin couldn’t name one. Instead, he gestured to his own 1,800-page textbook: “You can find them in this book, if you wish.”
Siri replied that he wanted an actual peer-reviewed study, not a reference to Plotkin’s own book. “So you’re not willing to provide them?” he asked. “You want us to just take your word for it?”
Plotkin became visibly frustrated.
Eventually, he conceded there wasn’t a single randomised, placebo-controlled trial. “I don’t remember there being a control group for the studies, I’m recalling,” he said.
The exchange foreshadowed a broader shift in public discourse, highlighting long-standing concerns that some combination vaccines were effectively grandfathered into the schedule without adequate safety testing.
In September this year, President Trump called for the MMR vaccine to be broken up into three separate injections.
The proposal echoed a view that Andrew Wakefield had voiced decades earlier — namely, that combining all three viruses into a single shot might pose greater risk than spacing them out.
Wakefield was vilified and struck from the medical register. But now, that same question — once branded as dangerous misinformation — is set to be re-examined by the CDC’s new vaccine advisory committee, chaired by Martin Kulldorff.
The Aluminium Adjuvant Blind Spot
Siri next turned to aluminium adjuvants — the immune-activating agents used in many childhood vaccines.
When asked whether studies had compared animals injected with aluminium to those given saline, Plotkin conceded that research on their safety was limited.
Siri pressed further, asking if aluminium injected into the body could travel to the brain. Plotkin replied, “I have not seen such studies, no, or not read such studies.”
When presented with a series of papers showing that aluminium can migrate to the brain, Plotkin admitted he had not studied the issue himself, acknowledging that there were experiments “suggesting that that is possible.”
Asked whether aluminium might disrupt neurological development in children, Plotkin stated, “I’m not aware that there is evidence that aluminum disrupts the developmental processes in susceptible children.”
Taken together, these exchanges revealed a striking gap in the evidence base.
Compounds such as aluminium hydroxide and aluminium phosphate have been injected into babies for decades, yet no rigorous studies have ever evaluated their neurotoxicity against an inert placebo.
This issue returned to the spotlight in September 2025, when President Trump pledged to remove aluminium from vaccines, and world-leading researcher Dr Christopher Exley renewed calls for its complete reassessment.
A Broken Safety Net
Siri then turned to the reliability of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — the primary mechanism for collecting reports of vaccine-related injuries in the United States.
Did Plotkin believe most adverse events were captured in this database?
“I think…probably most are reported,” he replied.
But Siri showed him a government-commissioned study by Harvard Pilgrim, which found that fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported to VAERS.
“Yes,” Plotkin said, backtracking. “I don’t really put much faith into the VAERS system…”
Yet this is the same database officials routinely cite to claim that “vaccines are safe.”
Ironically, Plotkin himself recently co-authored a provocative editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, conceding that vaccine safety monitoring remains grossly “inadequate.”
Experimenting on the Vulnerable
Perhaps the most chilling part of the deposition concerned Plotkin’s history of human experimentation.
“Have you ever used orphans to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“Yes,” Plotkin replied.
“Have you ever used the mentally handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?” Siri asked.
“I don’t recollect…I wouldn’t deny that I may have done so,” Plotkin replied.
Siri cited a study conducted by Plotkin in which he had administered experimental rubella vaccines to institutionalised children who were “mentally retarded.”
Plotkin stated flippantly, “Okay well, in that case…that’s what I did.”
There was no apology, no sign of ethical reflection — just matter-of-fact acceptance.
Siri wasn’t done.
He asked if Plotkin had argued that it was better to test on those “who are human in form but not in social potential” rather than on healthy children.
Plotkin admitted to writing it.
Siri established that Plotkin had also conducted vaccine research on the babies of imprisoned mothers, and on colonised African populations.
Plotkin appeared to suggest that the scientific value of such studies outweighed the ethical lapses—an attitude that many would interpret as the classic ‘ends justify the means’ rationale.
But that logic fails the most basic test of informed consent. Siri asked whether consent had been obtained in these cases.
“I don’t remember…but I assume it was,” Plotkin said.
Assume?
This was post-Nuremberg research. And the leading vaccine developer in America couldn’t say for sure whether he had properly informed the people he experimented on.
In any other field of medicine, such lapses would be disqualifying.
A Casual Dismissal of Parental Rights
Plotkin’s indifference to experimenting on disabled children didn’t stop there.
Siri asked whether someone who declined a vaccine due to concerns about missing safety data should be labelled “anti-vax.”
Plotkin replied, “If they refused to be vaccinated themselves or refused to have their children vaccinated, I would call them an anti-vaccination person, yes.”
Plotkin was less concerned about adults making that choice for themselves, but he had no tolerance for parents making those choices for their own children.
“The situation for children is quite different,” said Plotkin, “because one is making a decision for somebody else and also making a decision that has important implications for public health.”
In Plotkin’s view, the state held greater authority than parents over a child’s medical decisions — even when the science was uncertain.
The Enabling of Figures Like Plotkin
The Plotkin deposition stands as a case study in how conflicts of interest, ideology, and deference to authority have corroded the scientific foundations of public health.
Plotkin is no fringe figure. He is celebrated, honoured, and revered. Yet he promotes vaccines that have never undergone true placebo-controlled testing, shrugs off the failures of post-market surveillance, and admits to experimenting on vulnerable populations.
This is not conjecture or conspiracy — it is sworn testimony from the man who helped build the modern vaccine program.
Now, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reopens long-dismissed questions about aluminium adjuvants and the absence of long-term safety studies, Plotkin’s once-untouchable legacy is beginning to fray.
Republished from the author’s Substack
From the Brownstone Institute
A walk through a dozen convenience stores in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says a lot about how US nicotine policy actually works. Only about one in eight nicotine-pouch products for sale is legal. The rest are unauthorized—but they’re not all the same. Some are brightly branded, with uncertain ingredients, not approved by any Western regulator, and clearly aimed at impulse buyers. Others—like Sweden’s NOAT—are the opposite: muted, well-made, adult-oriented, and already approved for sale in Europe.
Yet in the United States, NOAT has been told to stop selling. In September 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the company a warning letter for offering nicotine pouches without marketing authorization. That might make sense if the products were dangerous, but they appear to be among the safest on the market: mild flavors, low nicotine levels, and recyclable paper packaging. In Europe, regulators consider them acceptable. In America, they’re banned. The decision looks, at best, strange—and possibly arbitrary.
What the Market Shows
My October 2025 audit was straightforward. I visited twelve stores and recorded every distinct pouch product visible for sale at the counter. If the item matched one of the twenty ZYN products that the FDA authorized in January, it was counted as legal. Everything else was counted as illegal.
Two of the stores told me they had recently received FDA letters and had already removed most illegal stock. The other ten stores were still dominated by unauthorized products—more than 93 percent of what was on display. Across all twelve locations, about 12 percent of products were legal ZYN, and about 88 percent were not.
The illegal share wasn’t uniform. Many of the unauthorized products were clearly high-nicotine imports with flashy names like Loop, Velo, and Zimo. These products may be fine, but some are probably high in contaminants, and a few often with very high nicotine levels. Others were subdued, plainly meant for adult users. NOAT was a good example of that second group: simple packaging, oat-based filler, restrained flavoring, and branding that makes no effort to look “cool.” It’s the kind of product any regulator serious about harm reduction would welcome.
Enforcement Works
To the FDA’s credit, enforcement does make a difference. The two stores that received official letters quickly pulled their illegal stock. That mirrors the agency’s broader efforts this year: new import alerts to detain unauthorized tobacco products at the border (see also Import Alert 98-06), and hundreds of warning letters to retailers, importers, and distributors.
But effective enforcement can’t solve a supply problem. The list of legal nicotine-pouch products is still extremely short—only a narrow range of ZYN items. Adults who want more variety, or stores that want to meet that demand, inevitably turn to gray-market suppliers. The more limited the legal catalog, the more the illegal market thrives.
Why the NOAT Decision Appears Bizarre
The FDA’s own actions make the situation hard to explain. In January 2025, it authorized twenty ZYN products after finding that they contained far fewer harmful chemicals than cigarettes and could help adult smokers switch. That was progress. But nine months later, the FDA has approved nothing else—while sending a warning letter to NOAT, arguably the least youth-oriented pouch line in the world.
The outcome is bad for legal sellers and public health. ZYN is legal; a handful of clearly risky, high-nicotine imports continue to circulate; and a mild, adult-market brand that meets European safety and labeling rules is banned. Officially, NOAT’s problem is procedural—it lacks a marketing order. But in practical terms, the FDA is punishing the very design choices it claims to value: simplicity, low appeal to minors, and clean ingredients.
This approach also ignores the differences in actual risk. Studies consistently show that nicotine pouches have far fewer toxins than cigarettes and far less variability than many vapes. The biggest pouch concerns are uneven nicotine levels and occasional traces of tobacco-specific nitrosamines, depending on manufacturing quality. The serious contamination issues—heavy metals and inconsistent dosage—belong mostly to disposable vapes, particularly the flood of unregulated imports from China. Treating all “unauthorized” products as equally bad blurs those distinctions and undermines proportional enforcement.
A Better Balance: Enforce Upstream, Widen the Legal Path
My small Montgomery County survey suggests a simple formula for improvement.
First, keep enforcement targeted and focused on suppliers, not just clerks. Warning letters clearly change behavior at the store level, but the biggest impact will come from auditing distributors and importers, and stopping bad shipments before they reach retail shelves.
Second, make compliance easy. A single-page list of authorized nicotine-pouch products—currently the twenty approved ZYN items—should be posted in every store and attached to distributor invoices. Point-of-sale systems can block barcodes for anything not on the list, and retailers could affirm, once a year, that they stock only approved items.
Third, widen the legal lane. The FDA launched a pilot program in September 2025 to speed review of new pouch applications. That program should spell out exactly what evidence is needed—chemical data, toxicology, nicotine release rates, and behavioral studies—and make timely decisions. If products like NOAT meet those standards, they should be authorized quickly. Legal competition among adult-oriented brands will crowd out the sketchy imports far faster than enforcement alone.
The Bottom Line
Enforcement matters, and the data show it works—where it happens. But the legal market is too narrow to protect consumers or encourage innovation. The current regime leaves a few ZYN products as lonely legal islands in a sea of gray-market pouches that range from sensible to reckless.
The FDA’s treatment of NOAT stands out as a case study in inconsistency: a quiet, adult-focused brand approved in Europe yet effectively banned in the US, while flashier and riskier options continue to slip through. That’s not a public-health victory; it’s a missed opportunity.
If the goal is to help adult smokers move to lower-risk products while keeping youth use low, the path forward is clear: enforce smartly, make compliance easy, and give good products a fair shot. Right now, we’re doing the first part well—but failing at the second and third. It’s time to fix that.
Author
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