#1129 What is snuff?

What is snuff? Snuff is a form of powdered tobacco that you can inhale, giving you a quick nicotine hit.

Snuff has been around for a long time. Native people living in the area that is now Brazil used powdered tobacco leaves as snuff. They ground the leaves using a rosewood pestle and mortar, which gave a scent to the tobacco. The indigenous people also smoked the tobacco as well. They used it in religious ceremonies, social events, and even for relaxation. People probably started smoking tobacco over 5,000 years ago. The Spanish first noticed tobacco, both smoked and as snuff, on Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, which he was convinced was India. The indigenous people gave him gifts, one of which was a leaf that the local people made out to be very valuable. This was tobacco. On Columbus’s second voyage, a monk in his company saw the locals inhaling a powder made from the leaves through a tube. Spanish and Portuguese seamen who sailed to the Americas on successive voyages brought the tobacco leaves back to Europe with them. People started growing it and it was used as a medicinal herb.

In the 1560s, the French ambassador in Lisbon, Jean Nicot, became enamored with the plant and started sending seeds back to France for cultivation. He became so involved with the tobacco plant that it was named Nicotiana tabacum after him. We owe the word nicotine to him. By the late 16^th century, Europeans had begun to smoke tobacco and to inhale the powdered tobacco leaves. Nicot actually gave some to Queen Catherine de Medici of France to cure her of her chronic headaches. He used the powdered form of the leaf and had her inhale it.

Smoking and inhaling tobacco spread all over Europe and it was in Holland that snuff got its name. In 1600, the practice of inhaling powdered tobacco was called “sniffing tobacco”. In Dutch, “sniff” is “snuffen” and “tobacco” is “tabak”. Powdered tobacco was called “snuffentabak”, which was shortened to “snuftabak”, and then shortened to “snuff”.

Tobacco smoking and tobacco taken as snuff became hugely popular. It spread all over Europe and out to the New World. In the 17^th century, it was realized that tobacco would grown in the Americas and farms grew into plantations. The produced tobacco was shipped all over the world. The need for labor became so great that tobacco plantations are one of the three biggest crops that encouraged the slave trade. The other two crops were cotton and sugar. Cotton was by far and away the crop that used the most slave labor, but tobacco cultivation used a lot of slaves as well.

Snuff is absorbed into the bloodstream much faster than smoking tobacco, and this makes it very popular. It is absorbed so quickly because there are so many blood vessels inside the nose. All of these blood vessels are there to warm up the air you breathe in. The blood vessels are behind the nasal tissue and when you inhale snuff, it coats the nasal tissue and is then absorbed into the blood vessels, before being carried straight to the brain. It is a very fast delivery system, and it is why people inhale cocaine as well.

Because it is inhaled rather than smoked, many people think that snuff is a much safer way of getting nicotine into the system, but that is not true. Snuff and other smokeless types of tobacco use a lot of chemicals that are carcinogens. These chemicals are used in the manufacturing process or added to the tobacco afterward. There are more than 25 carcinogenic chemicals in snuff. Snuff has been shown to cause oral cancer, esophagus cancer, pancreatic cancer, heart disease, and strokes. It is also just as addictive, if not more addictive, than smoking cigarettes. Generally, the safest kind of tobacco seems to be no tobacco.

There is another product called snus, which is similar to snuff. Snus was invented in Sweden and it is an oral form of snuff. Snuff is a dry tobacco powder that you inhale. Snus is a moist tobacco concoction that you chew. As you chew it, it releases nicotine that mixes with your saliva and you can swallow, getting the nicotine hit. People who chew snus tend to spit a lot and it can cause problems with the mouth and the teeth. And this is what I learned today.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_in_the_American_colonies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smoking

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/13464-nosebleed-epistaxis