Now, tobacco, or to use our own regional word, tambaku, is not something good. But imagine my surprise when I came across this reel on Instagram that led me down the rabbit hole of an interesting item, with an even more interesting history to it.
An Instagram user here explains what Snus, a Swedish tobacco product, is.
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The person in the clip shows a small white tin, pinched out a flat little pouch the size of a stick of gum, and tucked it under their upper lip with an offhand motion as if doing nothing unusual.
No lighter. No spit cup. No grimace. They just kept talking. The comments section was an interesting mix of jokes and trivia, with one writing how, “Yeh India me bhi milta thha, per India me chala nahi” while another commented “Isko bolte hai chaini khaini.”
The thing is, this is extremely different to how tobacco is often consumed in India, either through being smoked or people spitting it around, painting the walls red. The visible evidence of paan and gutka and the stained corners it leaves behind is truly a crowning jewel to our cities.
This, though, was the opposite, quiet, almost clinical, like taking a vitamin. Here is what Snus really is all about.
What Is Snus?
Snus (pronounced “snoose”) is a smokeless tobacco product. It is finely ground tobacco that has been pasteurised, heat-treated, not fermented and not smoked, then either left loose or, more commonly today, sealed into small porous pouches that look a little like miniature tea bags. You place one under your upper lip, where it sits against the gum line, and leave it there for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour.
There’s no chewing, no burning, and critically, no spitting; the moisture is largely absorbed or contained within the pouch itself, which is part of why snus has been able to slide into daily life in a way cigarettes never could indoors.
Nicotine is released slowly and absorbed directly through the oral mucosa, the soft tissue lining the mouth, which is a genuinely strange mechanism to encounter for the first time if your only mental model of tobacco is combustion. You don’t light it. You don’t exhale anything. You sit with a damp little pouch tucked against your gum and go about your day, and after a while, you simply discard it.
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The product’s roots run deep into Swedish history. Tobacco use for oral consumption in Sweden dates back centuries, but the modern, pasteurised form of snus as we’d recognise it today took shape in the early 1800s.
Ettan, one of the oldest snus brands still in existence, dates back to 1822, when Jacob Fredrik Ljunglöf created its recipe. Working with the chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry, Ljunglöf developed a method using tobacco, salt, water, and potash that could produce a stable, pasteurised snus in about a week, replacing a slower fermentation process that had taken months.
Another of Sweden’s classic brands, Göteborgs Rapé, has a less tidy origin story: its recipe evolved through trial and error among sailors docking in the port of Gothenburg, who couldn’t afford high-quality tobacco and started blending in spices and herbs to improve their personal mixes.
The EU Ban
While this product is consumed easily in Sweden, it is banned all over the rest of the European Union.
The EU’s ban on selling tobacco for oral use has been in place since 1992, and it was written into law specifically to prevent products like American “Skoal Bandits”, and by extension, similar oral tobacco, from spreading across the region.
When Sweden negotiated its accession to the EU a few years later, it made the preservation of its own snus market a condition of joining. Article 151 of the Act of Accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden granted Sweden a specific derogation from that prohibition, and that carve-out has held ever since, reaffirmed, expanded upon, and challenged in EU courts, but never overturned.
Norway, which isn’t an EU member at all, was never bound by the directive in the first place and has its own long-standing legal snus market. Everywhere else in the EU, selling snus is illegal, even though buying a pack of cigarettes on the next street corner is not.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: WHO, NIH, BBC
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Tobacco, swedish Tobacco, nictoine, noctine pouches, no spit tobacco, tobacco addiction, interesting, interesting product, swedish tobacco EU ban, european union
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