Unmasking addiction: How the tobacco industry is hooking nicotine for a new generation

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BSTRACT

World No Tobacco Day (WNTD) 2026, themed ‘Unmasking the appeal: countering nicotine and tobacco addiction’, highlights the evolving strategies employed by the tobacco and nicotine industry to attract consumers and sustain dependence, particularly among adolescents and young adults. Contemporary nicotine use extends beyond individual choice, increasingly influenced by product engineering, sensory modification, sophisticated marketing, and emerging digital environments. Modern tobacco and nicotine products are designed to enhance attractiveness and consumer acceptability through flavours, sweeteners, colours, discreet packaging, cooling sensations, and lifestyle-oriented branding. Advances in nicotine formulation and delivery, including high-concentration nicotine salts, may facilitate efficient nicotine absorption and reinforce dependence. At the same time, social media, influencer marketing, gaming ecosystems, advergaming, non-fungible tokens, and metaverse platforms provide evolving channels for promoting tobacco and nicotine products to younger populations, often challenging conventional regulatory frameworks. Addressing this changing landscape requires coordinated interventions across the prevention continuum. Primordial and primary prevention should reduce environments that normalise nicotine use and prevent initiation, while secondary and tertiary prevention should facilitate early identification, cessation support, and reduction of long-term consequences. Digital surveillance, platform accountability, age-verification mechanisms, counter-messaging, and stronger regulation of tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship are increasingly important. WNTD 2026 provides an opportunity to recognise nicotine addiction as the consequence of interacting commercial, technological, behavioural, and pharmacological influences. Coordinated regulatory, public health, and primary-care action is essential to counter engineered product appeal, prevent youth initiation, address nicotine dependence, and protect future generations.