A Nicotine Analogue I Had Known and Didn’t Love: 6-methylnicotine (22/30)
I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days at Inkhaven. This is number 22.
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.
The products
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.
The L-theanine additive
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 100%.
I still wish I could evaluate the pure compound. Some readers of this blog are thinking: “Bro, stop complaining about L-theanine already, just acquire tolerance to it over a few weeks, and then report back”. I got you, my brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings in Christ. This is exactly what I’ve been doing over the last 3 weeks of Inkhaven.
I’ve been taking 600-1200 mg of L-theanine every night to calm down from using 2-3 different stimulants:
my ADHD prescription one, lisdexamfetamine (10-15mg daily)
caffeine (≈250 mg daily)
nicotine (5-12mg, 4.5 times a week)
A very sustainable lifestyle, I know.
My impressions of 6-MN
I’ve tried 6-MN three times so far in doses of 9-12 mg consumed over 1-2.5 hours. Unfortunately, my hopes of finding a better cognitive enhancer for writing didn’t come true. The compound has some merits, but it’s a worse tool overall.
I’m buzzed and stimulated, but it’s much harder to apply this to anything productive writing-wise. It’s as if my mental engine is just spinning in idle without transmitting it to the gears of actual work. I also feel somewhat dissociated, like I’m watching someone else move the cursor, type words, open tabs on my laptop.
As soon as I swap the gum or pouch for a regular 2 mg nicotine lozenge, my productivity starts to pick up.
The primary advantage of 6-MN is less physical side effects. It’s a smoother experience, with less muscle tension. I suspect my blood pressure and heart rate might also be lower, but I haven’t measured either.
Caveats
I have ADHD, it might be more useful for someone without it.
I’ve built ~3× tolerance to nicotine over the last 3 weeks.
L-theanine — my tolerance to it blunted its effects, but I could definitely feel some
The different delivery systems (pouch/gum vs lozenge) are also confounders.
Other people’s impressions
I gifted a tube of pouches to Gwern, a writer whose post on sublingual nicotine led to me using nicotine as a cognitive enhancer. His opinion: hard to distinguish from nicotine, feels more mild, not worth using given that it’s more expensive and much less widely used than regular old nicotine.
Collisteru, a fellow Inkhaven resident:
I feel manic, focused, and euphoric. I ran across E Hall second floor a few times. I feel hot, but this could just be my space heater.
I can’t tell if my writing output / quality is better or not, I suspect it’s equivalent but would have to assess when not high.
Writing certainly feels more fun.
A reddit user used it to quit 2 tubes of Zyn a day habit (30×6 mg pouches, 180 mg/day):
I’ve been a degenerate 2 can a day user of Zyn 6mg for quite some time. [...] I switched to 100% Sett pouches on 9/19 with relatively minimal withdrawals and now only use like 4-6 of their 6mg pouches. Which was a massive reduction from using the Zyns. My heart rate has gone down 6 points and my blood pressure is better than what it was on nicotine.
Receptor binding materials from Sett’s website
The chart above comes from Sett’s website, where it functions mainly as marketing: trust us, we did the science™.
The X-axis is labeled “Log – Nicotine Equivalent” but the actual units aren’t specified. We cannot, unfortunately, precisely say “a 3 mg pouch corresponds to the –6 point on this curve”.
I asked GPT-5.1 to do some guesstimating. It says that the units for FLIPR are typically mol/L, and that plasma nicotine in regular smokers during the day is about 10–50 ng/mL, which is between -7.2 and -6 after you convert ng to nmol and take log10. This is where the curve for α4 and α3 gets above 1.0 nicotine equivalent. If there was a properly labeled chart, I would’ve spent time verifying the math and the sources, but for now I’m leaving this analysis as is.
The interesting bit is the α6 plot. The curve tops clearly below the 1.0 nicotine line, which suggests that it’s a partial agonist at this receptor. Can we “fix” worse α6 binding by taking a larger dose?
In On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics I described how I liked to stare at receptor binding affinity tables for psychedelics. With psychedelics, you can’t really compensate for weaker 5-HT2a agonism by taking a higher dose: you might get a more intense experience, but it still lacks “depth.” My very speculative hypothesis is that something similar might be happening here — 6-MN just feels “flatter” and less effective than nicotine, even when the stimulation starts to get uncomfortable.
Take this section with a grain of salt. I wish we had proper data on this compound — this is only a single proprietary study by the company making a product with 6-MN.
A Shulgin-Style Nicotine Analogues Research Program
In the same On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics I described how I tried two dozen psychedelic. Most were Sasha Shulgin’s discoveries. Shulgin would modify existing known chemicals and then test the compounds on himself and his friends.
I wish there were a Shulgin-style research program for nicotine analogues. Nicotine clearly works as a cognitive enhancer for some people, but it’s also just the first nicotinic drug we stumbled on in nature. It seems likely that in the vast space of “things that hit nicotinic receptors” there are very interesting compounds.
Big Pharma unfortunately explores these compounds for smoking cessation and some neuropsychiatric conditions. Still, there are already compounds that could be interesting for cognitive enhancement, e.g. Varenicline, Cytisine and GTS-21.
I’m sure the nicotinic “holy grail” is out there. But it’s definitely not 6-methyl-nicotine.
i appreciate inkhaven as a nootropic research group