There’s a nicotine no one has heard of and it’s already on shelves

In April 2022, Congress closed the synthetic nicotine loophole. Manufacturers had spent years sidestepping regulation by swapping a plant-derived compound for a lab-built version, and Congress had finally caught on. The loophole was closed with the FDA’s authority. This was a rather small but meaningful victory for American public health, and everybody went home feeling pretty good about it. Everybody except the chemists, presumably.

What followed was not defiance so much as chemistry. Add a methyl group at the right position on the molecule and you no longer have nicotine, at least as far as the FDA’s current statutory definition is concerned. You have something that works the same way, sells the same way, and is consumed by people seeking the same effects. Just not nicotine. Technically.

What you have instead is something that behaves the same way, delivers equivalent effects, and is sold in similar products to consumers seeking the same experience. You just don’t have the original compound. You know, technically speaking.

The products started appearing in US shops in late 2023. The label said “PMTA-exempt,” which is to say: the rules that apply to every other product on the market do not apply to this one, because this one contains a molecule Congress hasn’t gotten around to banning yet.

Three times the potency, zero times the oversight

The compound is called 6-methyl, and the early science on it is not reassuring. Duke University researcher Sven Jordt puts it at least three times more potent than the conventional version, with a lower median lethal dose. A 2025 toxicology study found the aerosols more damaging to human bronchial cells than anything in a standard product. For a product marketed as a regulatory workaround, it has turned out to be a meaningful step up in the wrong direction.

It has turned up under the trade names Metatine, Nixotine, and Imotine, in pod systems and oral pouches alike. The flavours are bright and sweet. One formulation contains neotame, an artificial sweetener roughly 8,000 times sweeter than sugar, which is a detail that answers one question and raises many more.

The first product to market was called SpreeBar, a name with the carefree energy of a poolside cocktail menu. It came in fruit flavours. It was available to anyone who walked in and asked for it, which in this industry is a sentence that tends to end badly.

One very obvious gap 

The 2022 legislation covered the synthetic version alone. Not analogues, or derivatives, or, indeed, whatever you want to call a compound that delivers the same hit through a slightly different arrangement of atoms. The industry read it, noted where the fence ended, and built the next product just on the other side of it.

This is not a new trick. Synthetic cannabinoids followed cannabis scheduling with similar precision. Bath salts followed MDMA controls. The pattern is consistent enough that one might reasonably expect legislation to account for it. One would, on this evidence, be disappointed. There is something almost sporting about it, if you are not the one being regulated or the one inhaling the product.

Adult users trying to navigate the American market in good faith (people who just want to find a decent e-liquid, best vape juice and quit smoking without a chemistry degree), are doing so in a market where the compound in their device may not be what they think it is, tested by nobody with any authority to test it. British users operate under a notification framework where the ingredients of every product on a legitimate shelf are known quantities before anyone inhales them.

The regulator arrives

The UK’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill was drafted around the substance and its analogues. Whoever wrote it had apparently considered the possibility that a heavily regulated industry might employ a creative chemist. The US Tobacco Control Act made a list. The list had one entry.

The FDA is aware of 6-methyl nicotine. It has sent warning letters. It has described the products as illegal. What it has not done is close the underlying gap in its statutory authority, which requires an act of Congress, which requires Congress to notice, which requires the news cycle to find the story more interesting than whatever else is happening that week.

The products are still on shelves. The chemists are, presumably, still in the lab. The next compound will take slightly longer to explain and will be on shelves in approximately eighteen months.

The editorial unit