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Smokeless tobacco use among North Dakota teens doubled in two years — and pouches are the suspect

The state's 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows past-30-day smokeless use rising from 3% to 7% among high schoolers, while vaping declined. Health officials point to nicotine pouches: easy to hide, 'tobacco-free' on the label.

PouchDaily Desk·
nicotine pouchesNorth Dakotayouth useYRBSsmokeless tobaccoregulationUnited States

North Dakota's 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey came back with one number that has health officials there paying close attention: the share of high school students who used smokeless tobacco in the past 30 days more than doubled, from 3% in 2023 to 7% in 2025. Officials say nicotine pouches are likely a big part of that jump.

The results were presented on 2 October to the State Board of Health by Fargo Cass Public Health, and they land on a split screen. While smokeless use rose, vaping kept heading the other way: 31% of high schoolers reported having ever used an e-cigarette in 2025 (down a point from 2023), and daily vaping slipped from 6% to 5%. The pouch market has spent years winning adult smokers over to a lower-risk format — but this is the same growth curve showing up in a teenage population, which is the last place any manufacturer wants it.

Why pouches specifically

Fargo Cass Public Health's health promotion director, Abby Lange, pointed to a few mechanics rather than one cause:

  • Concealment. A pouch makes no vapour, so it doesn't set off the detectors schools installed during the vaping wave — and unlike traditional dip, there's nothing to spit. Adults like pouches for exactly the same reasons.
  • The "tobacco-free" label. Lange said students treat tobacco-free labelling as a safety guarantee: "Well, this is said that it's tobacco free, so it must mean that it's healthier or safer." Tobacco-free is a regulatory fact about the leaf, not a claim about risk, and the distinction clearly isn't landing.
  • Fitness positioning. Officials report pouches being promoted on social media as a pre-workout product, a use case that never involved tobacco at all.
  • Strength creep. Lange noted pouches up to 14 mg exist, and estimated a typical 6 mg pouch delivers around 3 mg of nicotine — roughly double what she attributes to a cigarette.

She also flagged packaging: child-resistant pouch packaging is an FDA recommendation, not a legal requirement, after nicotine poisonings among young children rose.

Caveats worth keeping in mind

The 3% to 7% shift is a change in self-reported answers from a biennial survey, and on a small base — three points is a few hundred students, seven points a few hundred more. "Smokeless tobacco" as a survey category also doesn't isolate pouches from dip and snus, so the pouch share has to be inferred from officials' on-the-ground observations rather than the survey itself. And North Dakota is one state with a strong dipping tradition. But the direction matches what other youth surveys have hinted at, and a doubling in two years is hard to wave off as noise.

What's next

The next YRBS runs in 2027, and health departments elsewhere will compare notes against their own surveys in the meantime. For the pouch industry the signal is straightforward: youth-use numbers are now the metric most likely to drive the next round of restrictions — flavour limits, marketing rules, packaging requirements — at both state and federal level. Categories that self-regulate on youth access tend to keep their regulatory room; ones that don't tend to lose it.

SOURCES