Jump to full article: Wired, 2009-06-19
Author: Michael Calore
Intro: Like trendy boozers pouring absinthe over antique spoons or rockabilly fans digging up vintage clothes and restoring classic cars, nasal snuff users are drawn in by an anachronistic habit with a colorful past. Decorative snuff boxes and fancy snuff bottles add to the international allure of an exotic vice with a fascinating history.
With smoking banned in many bars and nightclubs — hangouts that once were synonymous with a haze of tobacco smoke — snuff, electronic cigarettes and other smokeless methods of ingesting nicotine are growing in popularity. While these methods of consumption cut out the tar and carbon monoxide associated with smoking, they do not eliminate the addictive properties of nicotine, the stimulant found in tobacco.
Though users rave about how benign snuff is, the substance’s safety as an alternative to cigarettes is largely untested. While users aren’t inhaling tar or producing second-hand smoke, definitive research on the safety of nasal snuff is lacking, mostly because dry snuff is such a microscopic segment of the tobacco market. Most studies in the United States and Europe have tended to focus on oral snuff, which is a known cause of mouth, head and neck cancers. . . .
Professor A. Phillips Griffiths, a regular snuff user since the 1940s who writes on his Snuffs and Snufftaking website, says the habit is catching on with a new generation.
“I’ve been told by the people I know who make and sell the stuff that it’s becoming quite popular with young people,” says Griffiths, who became curious about snuff as a teenager after finding it referenced in a work by Charles Dickens. He cites the latest smoking bans in his native Britain as the likely cause of the most recent uptick.
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