Starting next week, the federal government will impose new restrictions on nicotine pouches to make it illegal to sell them anywhere but from behind a pharmacy counter.
Beginning August 28, the pouches, which go by the brand name Zonnic, will be completely banned from convenience store and gas station shelves. Berry Frost and Tropic Breeze flavours will be recalled and only menthol and mint-flavoured pouches will be allowed in pharmacies.
“All the stuff that’s clearly designed to target youth — it’s over,” Health Minister Mark Holland told CBC News on Thursday.
Ottawa has been promising to crack down on sales of nicotine pouches for nearly 10 months. National health groups have warned about the risk of teenagers using them and becoming addicted to nicotine.
“It has been so deeply disturbing to see so many young people becoming addicted to these nicotine pouches who’ve never had any interaction with cigarettes,” Holland said.
Holland has accused Imperial Tobacco, the cigarette manufacturer that makes the pouches, of using a loophole in Canadian law to get approval from Health Canada.
The federal government is cracking down on the sale and marketing of flavoured nicotine pouches, which it claims are designed to attract teens. Starting August 28, they can only be sold from behind pharmacy counters, and some flavours are banned outright.
“We were duped,” Holland told CBC News last November.
The federal government passed legislation this June giving the health minister more powers to unilaterally restrict sales, advertising, manufacturing and importation of products that are harmful or are not being used as intended.
“We never know what hole they’ll slither out of next to try to attack our children,” Holland said, referring to tobacco companies.
The federal government says it will give Imperial Tobacco six months to make changes to its packaging and advertising. The new containers must include an addiction warning on the front label. Any advertising that could be appealing to youth must be changed by the end of February.
Holland said the new measures may come too late for some.
“I’m very concerned that there are kids who are already addicted. I am very concerned that tobacco companies have already achieved their goal,” he said. “It repulses me.”
Eric Gagnon, vice-president, corporate and regulatory affairs at Imperial Tobacco Canada, said he believes Holland has a “personal vendetta” against the company, which went through a two-year approval process to legally sell nicotine pouches.
“Apparently because we’re a tobacco company, we’re treated differently than anybody else,” he told CBC News. “The biggest losers right now are the adult smokers that have been using Zonnic.”
It’s not an outright ban
Under previous health minister Jean Yves Duclos, Health Canada approved Zonnic in July 2023 through natural health product regulations as a method to help adults quit smoking. Similar flavoured pouches have been authorized for sale in Europe for recreational use.
One small flavoured pouch — which the user places between their gum and cheek — releases nicotine equivalent to smoking three to four cigarettes. Health Canada says the pouches are intended for someone who smokes more than 25 cigarettes a day and is trying to quit.
Because Zonnic does not contain tobacco and isn’t inhaled, it does not fall under any existing provincial or national tobacco or vaping legislation.
Until today, there were no restrictions on the pouches’ flavours, packaging or advertising, or where they could be sold. Outside of B.C. and Quebec, young people could freely purchase Zonnic at convenience stores and gas stations.
Imperial has argued Zonnic isn’t intended for minors and says it instructs convenience store clerks to check for identification before selling it. The company also has said that having Zonnic visible and available in stores could encourage smokers to quit. Imperial has lobbied hard against the federal restrictions.
“People say they like it more and more,” Ottawa convenience store owner John Zyadh told CBC News. “People say its more safe for their health and they save a lot of money compared to cigarettes.”
Health groups have not called for an outright ban on the nicotine pouches. Instead, they’ve called on Ottawa to crack down on how the product is presented and marketed — the candy-like flavours, the colourful packaging, the fun ads that appeal to youth — and to make it harder for those under 18 years of age to purchase them.
“We’re not asking for smokers to be denied the opportunity to use them. What we’re just asking for is curbs on the way they are presented and marketed,” said Cynthia Callard, executive director for Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada.
With teenagers preparing to head back to school, the new restrictions can’t come soon enough, Callard said.
“The fall term in school is very important with respect to the norms that are set by kids and the introduction of new products, whether it’s fidget spinners or vaping products or nicotine pouches,” she said.
Ottawa not properly tracking teen use, experts say
It’s not clear how many teens tried the pouches in the year they were readily available — or have become addicted to nicotine as a result — because Ottawa isn’t tracking the product.
Zonnic hit the Canadian market around the same time Health Canada stopped any major data collection on tobacco and nicotine use, said Callard.
The Canadian Tobacco and Nicotine Survey, which provided rapid statistics on youth and adult use, was cancelled last year. CBC News repeatedly asked Health Canada why the survey was cancelled; the department said it was meant to be a short-term survey to replace another nicotine survey it eliminated in 2019.
“It mysteriously disappeared,” Callard said.
That big gap in data-gathering opened up at a critical time in public health, as vaping was becoming more popular and nicotine pouches were being introduced, said David Hammond, a public health researcher at the University of Waterloo who studies nicotine use in Canada and other countries.
“To some extent, we are flying blind,” he said.
Hammond said data that his research team has collected in just the past few weeks suggests the use of nicotine pouches is rising among young people in Canada.
That would line up with what happened in Canada when vaping was introduced, he said.
“Our experience with vaping, which can be an effective method to help smokers to quit, is that some of that has happened,” he said. “But the clearest evidence is that we have more young people using nicotine products today than we did a decade ago. That’s the first time in many, many years where that’s happened.”
Hammond said the government also should be tracking whether pouches are helping adults quit smoking cigarettes, as Imperial has claimed.
“We still have 4 to 5 million adult smokers in Canada. Many want more help to quit, but I tell you a lot of them will stay away from this product because it’s branded and marketed as something a kid would use, rather than a therapeutic aid,” he said.
More data is needed to keep track of an evolving tobacco industry, Hammond said.
“It’s a very difficult area to play whack-a-mole … for any government,” he said.
“We need to get past this, where the industry throws out products and we’re blind until a year or two later.”