From congressional hearing rooms to bodegas, restaurants, and even smoke shops, Americans have long demanded natural goods, greater transparency, and an end to the manipulation of our health for profit.
There was a time when 42 percent of American adults smoked cigarettes and other tobacco products. By the 1990s, when the country started to wake up from Big Tobacco’s lies, consumers saw a wave of lawsuits, a historic $206 billion settlement, and sweeping reforms across the industry. Sound familiar? In a landmark lawsuit filed last year, a Philadelphia teenager alleged that consuming processed foods from companies like General Mills, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola led to fatty liver disease and Type 2 diabetes.
And while attention continues to be focused on ultra-processed products and sugary beverages, a new threat has found its way onto convenience store counters and wellness labels. Some call it “Gas Station Heroin.”
The aforementioned case in Philadelphia drew national attention and eventually revealed that the very scientists who once worked to enhance the addictiveness of cigarettes were later enlisted to engineer products designed to override the brain’s natural satiety mechanisms.
We have seen this before. At the height of Big Tobacco’s power in the 1960s, it buried the science on tobacco’s negative health impacts, branded cigarettes as benign, and built an empire on addiction. Now, the global cartel behind Gas Station Heroin is employing the same playbook: Take natural plants, chemically alter them in foreign labs, market the hyper-potent as harmless, and spend millions of dollars in federal lobbying to fight regulation.
These new synthetic substances — which include tianeptine, nitrous oxide, intoxicating hemp, and synthetic isolate alkaloids like 7 and Pseudo — are deceptively packaged as natural supplements, knockoff prescription opioids, and other novelty products with the intention of skirting regulations and getting users hooked. Even the FDA has warned about the dangers.
Gas Station Heroin has the same strategy. Sold in convenience stores under names like “Neptune’s Fix,” “Galaxy Gas,” “Cookie Cat Crunch,” and “Cosmic Ludes”, these unregulated drugs are branded as wellness products or copycat snacks despite some being up to 13 times more potent than morphine.
Just like “Big Food” manufacturers leaned on “low-fat” health halos, lab-made synthetic substances, all the while hiding behind “all-natural” advertising. In reality, Gas Station Heroin is engineered and distributed with the same profit-first mindset that powered the cigarette and junk food empires.
And far too often, profit drives public policy in the nation’s capital. Food and beverage companies spent $106 million lobbying Congress in 2023, double the amount spent by alcohol and tobacco groups combined.
Gas Station Heroin manufacturers may not yet be filling lawmakers’ coffers, but their tactics risk becoming strikingly similar without sufficient enforcement of current federal laws around public health and pernicious marketing.
Let’s be clear: No one wants to criminalize natural botanicals. As we’ve witnessed time and time again, overcriminalization isn’t the solution either. During his first term, President Donald Trump and Republicans shortened sentences for some non-violent drug offenses, and that made sense. Overcriminalization isn’t only counterproductive to public safety — it’s unjust.
We can’t go back to the old punitive policies that historically have disproportionally impacted marginalized communities, including African Americans and other people of color. What we should do is embrace plant-based remedies that respect the body’s limits and reject dangerous synthetic substances. Gas Station Heroin has no place in our country.