A Nicotine Analogue I Had Known and Didn't Love: 6-Methylnicotine

Summary

6-Methylnicotine is a sketchy analogue of the good old nicotine: a slight tweak of its structure, somewhat worse toxicity data, and very little public research. In the last few years, some US companies started making and marketing products containing the (S)-enantiomer.I’m a big fan of sublingual nicotine as a nootropic — I wrote about two years of using nicotine lozenges in my post “A Love Song to Nicotine”. 6-Methylnicotine is marketed as “smooth, long-lasting cognitive enhancement without the peaks and valleys” and “less addiction potential compared to traditional nicotine products.”I am very much attracted to the allure for increasing brainpower to better serve the global technocapital the readers of this blog — I am currently on Day 22 of Inkhaven, a 30-day workshop for writers where you must publish a blog post a day or you get kicked out. So of course I had to try it, for science™ and for writing productivity.A photo from marketing materials, but let’s pretend this is me writing this post.There are two companies that sell and market oral products with 6-methylnicotine: Sett sells Zyn/Velo-style pouches with either 3mg or 6mg, branding it as Ceretine™ Chewbizz sells gum with either 2 or 4.7 mg, under Nixodine-S branding.I tried both. As expected both have very similar effects.Annoyingly, both products also contain 80 mg L-theanine — an amino-acid from tea that’s often sold as a standalone calming / anti-anxiety supplement. It’s the main reason tea hits smoother than coffee: counteracting the jitteriness of caffeine. People who take caffeine in pills sometimes stack with L-theanine.Somehow both companies settled on the same exact dose to add to their products to sand down the rough edges of this new stimulant — to prevent anxiety and overstimulation. 80mg is not a huge dose. A typical supplement capsule contains 200 mg. Its oral bioavailability is ≈50%. We don’t have good data on whether sublingual/buccal use changes much, but at least we have a higher bound of...