Posted on 03/17/2008 10:21:46 PM PDT by buccaneer81
New 'snus' taking on smoking ban Monday, March 17, 2008 3:07 AM By James Nash THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH It might have a funny-sounding name, but snus is no laughing matter to activists who led the 2006 campaign to ban smoking from public places across Ohio.
Snus, a nugget of tobacco wrapped in a porous tissue, will be under the lips of thousands of people in central Ohio this year if product launches by three tobacco companies are successful.
The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. started selling Camel Snus in central Ohio in July. Lorillard Tobacco Co. introduced its lower-cost Triumph brand in central Ohio this year, and the Liggett Group is including Columbus among the seven cities in which it plans to test-launch its Grand Prix snus this summer.
Pronounced "snoos," snus is Swedish for snuff, but it differs from conventional American smokeless tobacco in that it is pasteurized rather than fermented and is contained in tea-baglike pouches that are removed without spitting. Higher-end snus, such as the Camel brand, is refrigerated. A tin of snus costs about the same as a pack of cigarettes.
The tide of snus comes about a year after a tough anti-smoking law took effect across Ohio, barring people from lighting up in virtually all public buildings.
R.J. Reynolds acknowledged that the ban, and similar anti-smoking laws in other states, played a role in its decision to market snus. A Lorillard advertisement for Triumph in Ohio also alludes to the smoking ban: "No smoking? No problem."
"If you aren't allowing smoking and you have adults who are choosing to use tobacco products, shouldn't they have an opportunity to use a legal product that doesn't interfere with other people?" asked David P. Howard, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds.
Representatives of the American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids held a news conference Wednesday to decry the spread of snus in Ohio. They noted that, while smokeless tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer or emphysema, it is blamed for mouth cancers and heart disease caused by increased heart rates.
"All of these manufacturers are getting into smokeless because they see that cigarette use is decreasing," said Shelly Kiser, director of advocacy for the American Lung Association of Ohio. "This has serious implications for Ohio."
Kiser and Beverly J. May, regional director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the new smokeless products will discourage people from quitting their smoking habits by making it easy to switch to a smoke-free substitute in restaurants, bars and other public places, then return to smoking at home.
Ads for Camel Snus, in fact, note that it can be used on airplanes and in nightclubs and other public places.
jnash@dispatch.com
The market always finds a way.
My daughter studied in Sweden last year and said snus was all the rage there among the college crowd. Thank goodness she didn’t pick up the habit.
Exactly.
I’m not a gambling man but there are two things I know:
1. Never bet on the white guy in a boxing match.
2. Never bet against the free market capitalist in a fight against central planning government bureaucrats.
I’ll gladly try the stuff. I just like nicotine.
They won’t try to ban smokeless. The anti tobacco crusaders will just go back to their day jobs. You can’t ban stuff if it’s not stinky and smelly.
It’s not like they banned steroids or cocaine or anything...oh wait.
The activists got all these smoking bans on the strength of second-hand smoke harming bystanders. Now, they’re revealing that they’re just Smoke Nazis trying to control individual behavior.
Looks like they're aiming for the mass market in this case. If they can get the chicks using it, they'll have succeeded.
The social engineering experiment has gotten out of control.
There are at least 1,400 worse things that your daughter could come home and tell you than she smokes cigarettes or uses Snus. Consider yourself lucky.
This article just proves once again that it doesn’t matter what you do - there will always be someone somewhere willing to bitch about it.
I guess Dallas was a test market, because I’ve been seeing this snus for a while now. It’s all over the 7-11s.
LOL! But snus are the perfect black market commodity. Small in size, easily concealed and almost undetectable in use.
The ad slogan should be, "If you can chew gum, you can use snus!"
Uuuhh, yeah.
It’s a great racket. Eggheads get to make more money churning out bogus research than they ever dreamed. All paid for with our tax dollars through Gubmint grant money.
For the right grant, they will torture the data until it tells you whatever you want to hear.
You want proof that smokeless tobacco is deadlier than Ricin?
Give em a couple of million in grant money. Great work if you can get it.
Yup. I read another article. Columbus, Dallas, Raleigh, Orlando, Indianapolis and Kansas City are the test markets.
Great way to get cancer of the mouth. My MIL was a lifelong smoker, and died not from lung cancer, but from cancer of the mouth. She was emaciated and falling apart from the chemo already, but had all her teeth pulled too during that time as part of her treatment. She ended up having to be fed through a tube directly into her stomach. Then the incision for the stomach tube got infected, that went systemic, and she died from heart failure. She was only in her early 60’s, poor woman. It broke my husband’s heart watching his mother die that way.
I’ve been just a little bit graphic here because I think people are not very aware of just what a walk in the park mouth cancer is NOT.
I don’t think that anyone here said that mouth or throat cancer was fun.
i use it all the time (well the make called general)...great stuff..
Agreed. I've never smoked and at the age of 44 I'm not about to use snus. My only motivation in posting an article like this is my absolute disgust with the way governments have told private property owners (bars/restaurants) how to conduct their business.
If folks want to use tobacco, they're going to do it. And the government profits from it. The hypocrisy is about as bad as that shown by Eliott Spitzer.
Pouches of Copenhagen have been on the market for a long time. Very handy for us addicts.
I chewed Copenhagen for over ten years. What they also don’t tell you is the sugar content in the product. It ruined my teeth with all that sugar held close for that many years.
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