Nicotine Tablets: Sublingual Nicotine Melts

WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. For adults 21+.

Search "nicotine tablets" and you get three different shelves mixed together. There are old NRT microtabs, sold as medicine in some markets. There are retail dissolvable tablets, the ones in mint tins at a gas station, often Rogue. And there is BRST: a 2mg peppermint melt you put under the tongue.

They are not interchangeable. They do not share a how-to, a regulatory lane, or a published blood study. Format map for the whole neighborhood: nicotine tablet vs gum, lozenge, and pouch. This page sorts the format so you do not buy the wrong job. It also teaches what "sublingual" actually means, because that word is the product.

BRST Nicotine Melts are 2mg, ten ingredients, made in a US facility. You place one under the tongue, back toward the molars, and you keep still for about five minutes, with no spit, no pouch, and no chew-and-park. Rose et al. (2022) put this tablet against a 2mg Commit lozenge and measured a 14-minute peak versus 82.5 minutes. That paper is the only published head-to-head blood study of BRST, not a Rogue trial, not a Microtab trial, and not a pouch trial. BRST is a PMTA tobacco product, not FDA NRT, for adults 21+ only.

What people mean by nicotine tablet

"Tablet" is a shape word. It covers at least three products an adult can actually buy.

Nicorette Microtab, and other pharmaceutical sublingual or oral NRT tablets, are medicines where they are marketed as such. Typical labeled dose is 2mg. The lane is FDA-approved nicotine replacement therapy, or the local equivalent. If the box says NRT, believe the box.

Rogue nicotine tablets are dissolvable oral nicotine tablets in retail. They come in 2mg and 4mg, in more than one flavor, in a tin you can find without opening a browser. They are an adult nicotine product, not NRT. For a lot of searchers, "nicotine tablet" currently means that tin.

BRST is a peppermint melt, 2mg only, sold at trybrst.com. Placement is sublingual: keep still. It is a PMTA tobacco product, not NRT.

If the result is a 4mg mint tin at a gas station, that is usually Rogue, not BRST. We are not going to claim this melt invented the tablet, or invented under-the-tongue nicotine. Microtab already used the route as a medicine. Rogue already owns the retail shelf. The claim is the melt: this formula, this placement, this clock.

What sublingual actually means

Sublingual is a location. It is the floor of the mouth, the thin tissue under the tongue. That membrane is non-keratinized, which is a technical way of saying it is not built like the tougher lining of the gums. Blood vessels sit close to the surface and run parallel to it, so a compound that dissolves there can enter venous blood without going down the throat first.

That shortcut is the point. Anything you swallow goes to the gut, then the portal vein, then the liver, which extracts a large share of nicotine on that first pass. Benowitz and colleagues (2009) describe the standard picture: inhaled nicotine from a cigarette peaks in about 5 to 8 minutes at roughly 15 to 30 ng/mL venous nicotine, because the lungs skip that first-pass cut. Swallowed nicotine does not: it is late, and it is smaller than the label suggests.

Buccal products use a different patch of mouth. Gum, a classic lozenge, and a pouch sit against thicker cheek or gum tissue and dwell there, which means more swallow, more first-pass, and a later peak. That can be a feature if you want a long sit. It is a problem if you wanted the early rise and bought milligrams instead of a route. Background: the science of nicotine absorption and how sublingual delivery works.

Sublingual only works if the unit stays where you put it. Talk, drink, chew, or park the tablet in the cheek, and you have changed the experiment. You turned a sublingual dose into a swallowed one. The anatomy does not care that the box said "tablet."

How a BRST melt is built

Rose et al. (2022) describe the 2mg tablet this way. Nicotine is dissolved in oleic acid, a fatty acid you already know from olive oil, and absorbed onto silica particles that are compressed into a tablet. Saliva hits it, the tablet comes apart, and nicotine moves with the water in saliva into sublingual tissue.

That is a delivery design, not a dose design. Ten pharmaceutical ingredients, nine of which show up in food, and nicotine is the tenth. No tobacco leaf, made in the USA, and the how-to on the pack and on this page is the same: under the tongue, back toward the molars, keep still about five minutes, no spit.

In the same paper, six smokers used this 2mg tablet and a 2mg Commit lozenge. The tablet peaked at 14 minutes and 4.4 ng/mL, the lozenge at 82.5 minutes and 5.3 ng/mL, and in the first four minutes the tablet rose at 0.4 ng/mL per minute while the lozenge sat at 0.0. Total exposure was lower on the tablet (949.5 versus 1189.9 ng·min/mL), which the authors tie to swallowed nicotine from a fast-disintegrating unit. The 24-person subjective arm, with no placebo, saw craving move from 2.6 to 1.0 at five minutes, and relief scored 4.2 versus 4.6 for a usual cigarette, which is a rating rather than a blood-level share of a cigarette.

We will not promote this tablet as the first of its kind. We will say it is the one with that lozenge paper, that formula, and that how-to. Full methods: BRST pharmacokinetics. The lozenge comparison, walked like a study: nicotine lozenge vs tablet.

How BRST differs from Microtab and Rogue

Microtab is the medicine. Where it is sold as NRT, it has a labeled use and a clinician conversation that this page will not run. It is sublingual in the pharmaceutical sense. That does not make BRST a generic of it. Different formula, different regulatory lane, different country mix, different job. If you are on a labeled NRT tablet, stay on that label.

Rogue is the retail tablet people already know: two strengths, several flavors, and a dissolvable oral unit you can buy without knowing the word sublingual. Follow their tin. Their instruction is not "park under the tongue, back near the molars, and do not fidget." We do not have a head-to-head blood study versus Rogue, and we will not invent one.

BRST is not trying to out-SKU Rogue. One flavor now, one strength, and the pitch is the melt: 2mg that lands because of route, discrete, with no pouch and no chew-and-park. If you buy milligrams, Rogue 4mg looks like the adult portion. If you buy route, start with one BRST 2mg and wait.

Rogue retail details change. Confirm the tin in front of you.

How to take a 2mg melt

Take one 2mg peppermint melt. There are 20 in a pack.

Place it under the tongue, back toward the molars. That back corner is easy to miss if you have only ever used a lozenge or a pouch. Front-and-center under the tip of the tongue is not the same pocket.

Keep it still about five minutes. Do not chew, park it in the cheek, or spit, and skip food and drink while it sits. The tablet is built to break down fast. Stillness is what keeps nicotine on the thin tissue.

Adults who want a second tablet take it after the first has finished. Do not stack two at once to improvise 4mg. Do not treat peak chasing like a game.

That how-to is why 2mg lands for a lot of adults who arrived from a 4mg gum piece or a higher-label pouch. The unit is smaller because less of it is supposed to die in the liver. Technique still matters. A swallowed melt is just a swallowed melt.

Tablets vs gum, lozenge, and pouch

These are published figures from separate studies, not one trial of every product. Time to peak is the clock people feel. Peak height is more nicotine in blood, not automatically a better product. The only BRST row that is a head-to-head is the lozenge row.

A 6mg pouch can put more nicotine into blood by the one-hour mark. A 4mg lozenge can out-peak a 2mg tablet on height. A cigarette still wins raw speed and peak. BRST is the fastest oral option we sell that is not a vape: 2mg, no smoke, no spit, no pouch on the gum line. The tablet's job is the early rise.

Versus gum, the story is chew-and-park and the wad you throw away. Azzopardi extracted about 33 percent of a 4mg piece. Walkthrough: nicotine tablet vs gum.

Versus lozenge, the story is Rose. Fourteen versus 82.5 minutes at 2mg. Walkthrough: nicotine lozenge vs tablet.

Versus a pouch, the story is gum-line sit time around an hour. Lunell put ZYN 6mg at 14.7 ng/mL at 66 minutes. Walkthrough: nicotine tablet vs pouch and BRST vs Zyn. All four formats on one page: tablet vs gum, lozenge, and pouch.

When the format question is settled, shop BRST nicotine melts. Buy the 2mg melt, not a bigger label.

Frequently asked questions

Are “nicotine pills” the same as nicotine tablets?

Often, yes — people type “nicotine pills” when they mean a small oral tablet or melt, not a pharmacy capsule. That search still mixes NRT microtabs, retail dissolvable tablets, and melts like BRST. Same messy shelf as this page. There is no separate “pills” product class here.

Are nicotine tablets the same as nicotine lozenges?

No. Lozenges are slow buccal dissolves. BRST is a sublingual melt. Rose 2022 measured both at 2mg.

Are nicotine tablets FDA-approved NRT?

Some tablets are. Microtab, where sold as NRT, is a medicine. BRST is not FDA NRT. It is a PMTA tobacco product for adults 21+. Check the label.

Is BRST the first nicotine tablet?

No. Microtabs and Rogue exist. BRST is a 2mg sublingual melt with a published lozenge blood study.

How much nicotine is in a BRST tablet?

2mg per melt. The claim is delivery, not a 6mg label. Do not double a tablet to improvise 4mg.

How fast do nicotine tablets work?

BRST peaked at 14 minutes in Rose 2022, with a measurable rise in the first four minutes (0.4 ng/mL/min). That is the number we have for this tablet, not a class-wide average.

Can I take more than one?

Adults can take tablets one after another, after the first has finished. Do not stack them.

A note on what this is (and is not)

BRST is a PMTA tobacco product for adults 21+. It is not FDA-approved nicotine replacement therapy, and this page is not medical advice. Nicotine is addictive. Cross-study numbers come from different trials, doses, and use protocols. The only published head-to-head blood study of BRST is Rose et al. 2022 versus a 2mg Commit lozenge.

Sources

• Rose et al. (2022). Novel rapid-acting sublingual nicotine tablet as a cigarette substitution strategy. *Psychopharmacology* 239, 2853–2862. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06171-z

• Azzopardi et al. (2022). A randomised study to assess the nicotine pharmacokinetics of an oral nicotine pouch and two nicotine replacement therapy products. *Scientific Reports* 12, 6949. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10544-x

• Benowitz, N.L., Hukkanen, J., & Jacob, P. (2009). Nicotine chemistry, metabolism, kinetics and biomarkers. *Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology* 192, 29–60. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2953858/

• Lunell, E., Fagerström, K., Hughes, J., & Pendrill, R. (2020). Pharmacokinetic comparison of a novel non-tobacco-based nicotine pouch (ZYN) with conventional, tobacco-based Swedish snus and American moist snuff. *Nicotine & Tobacco Research* 22(10), 1757–1763.