WARNING: Nicotine may cause focus, motivation, and joie de vivre (which is why they hate it)

According to Salon, nicotine use is apparently the preserve of stupid men, right up there with weight lifting and a fondness for firearms.

This is how you know a substance is having a moment. When something offers even a modest benefit — focus, alertness, a slight edge — it attracts not curiosity but alarm. The kind usually reserved for the stuff that will actually kill you: heroin, fentanyl, toxic masculinity.

Nicotine is not cigarettes. This distinction matters, though it is treated as apostasy in contemporary wellness discourse. Nicotine, isolated and controlled, has been studied for decades. In small doses, it produces a measurable cognitive lift: sharper attention, faster reaction time, improved working memory.

That isn’t influencer folklore. Far from it. It’s why exhausted academics used it to push