http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Snu.../1135236122138
Snus by any other name...
Sales of moist smokeless tobacco are illegal in Finland, but that does not prevent users from getting the product
Snus by any other name...
Snus by any other name...
Snus by any other name...
Snus by any other name...
print this
By Mari Manninen
The girl lifts the round flat tin under her nose and takes a sniff of the black gunge inside.
It gives off a rotten smell, with a whiff of damp ashtray and a dash of horse urine mixed in.
She pulls her head away and grimaces: “Yuk!”
The girl passes the tin to her friend sitting next to her and it goes round the circle until all the local 8th-graders in the auditorium at the Paimio Town Hall have had a sniff of the strange substance.
This is old-school health education. The snus* lecture being delivered by Pirjo Naumanen - a local representative of Terveys Ry (the Finnish Health Association) - is in full swing, and Naumanen is warning of the dangers of this form of steam-cured tobacco.
Terveys Ry describes itself as a voluntary NGO for the promotion of health: “It supports the individual's ability to improve his/her grip on life, attempts to prevent smoking and drug abuse, and encourages the development of a healthy living environment and safe traffic.”
And nowadays their speakers are being asked more and more often to come to schools to explain about snus.
“In the vocational schools, this form of using tobacco seems to be becoming quite trendy. Young people have learnt how to order snus via the Net, and it is delivered to their homes by post”, says Naumanen.
In fact it is a wonder that the use of powder tobacco in Finland has not skyrocketed in the wake of the ban on smoking in restaurants, in many workplaces, and on aeroplanes.
With a bit of snus stuffed under your upper lip, you can sit anywhere without drawing fire or unwelcome attention.
One thing, of course, that prevents the more rapid spread of snus is that it is illegal to sell it in Finland.
Sales of the Swedish moist tobacco were banned right across the EU in 1992, three years before Finland joined, and the ban came into effect here when we signed up.
This doesn’t mean that use or possession is outlawed, providing that the substance has been brought for one’s own enjoyment from abroad.
And one does not have to look very far: Sweden is allowed to sell snus by special EU dispensation - public support for the stuff prior to the country’s 1994 referendum on accession meant that exemption from the EU-wide ban was a precondition of the Swedes’ going in.
Most of the snus consumed in Finland is of Swedish origin.
And this “Swedish connection” seems to have a knock-on effect here - using snus is relatively more common among the Swedish-speaking population of the country.
There is the cultural link with our western neighbour on the one hand, and no less important is physical geography: the fact that the vast majority of Finland’s Swedish-speakers tend to live on the coast, within easy reach of the ferries to Stockholm.
Antu’s upper lip is distended. Freda is playing with a tin of Ettan portionssnus (think of tea-bags containing moist smokeless tobacco rather than Earl Grey or English Breakfast).
Kimi is going without right now, as his stock of “hockey pucks”, the round tins of snus, has run out.
Antu, Freda, and Kimi all live in Kauniainen, the wealthy and strongly Swedish-speaking (41% of the population) enclave inside Espoo.
They are all at the Swedish-speaking upper secondary school in the town, and they all use prilla - one of the names given to the product - on a daily basis.
“About a puck a day at most, I guess. I almost always have some snus under my lip”, says Freda.
The National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES) carried out a study of snus usage among young adults in Kauniainen in 2006.
It turned out that one in five Swedish-speaking boys at upper secondary school (16-19 years) used snus daily, while among local Finnish-speaking boys of the same age-group and education the figure was just 3%.
Among Antu, Freda, and Kimi’s circle of friends there are dozens of snus-users. Some of the parents have used the stuff earlier.
The boys appear here under aliases they have chosen for themselves, for every now and then they buy snus from friends who have been over to Sweden, and that is of course forbidden fruit, since snus can only be imported for personal consumption.
The trio have some difficulty swallowing the STAKES numbers, and say that the Finnish-speakers use the stuff more than they cared to admit.
“Us Swedish-speakers are more open about these things”, says Antu.
They may have a point. Apparently snussing has been increasing among the Finnish-speakers of Kauniainen in recent weeks. At least that’s the feedback that is coming from the schools, says the city’s Head of Health and Social Services Ulla Tikkanen.
Perhaps it’s not just a matter of mother-tongue, then.
But it is certainly a subject on - or rather under - many lips.
“I like the feeling of having snus burning between my lip and gums”, says Freda.
The gums and lips experience a burning sensation when a biitti, or a piece of snus, is wedged between them.
But as the mucous membrane goes numb, the burning sensation fades away. For this reason, Freda and Kimi switch the location of the biitti from the right upper lip to the left from one week to the next.
When the nicotine in the moist tobacco powder does its work and powers into the brain, the result is a definite high, that can set your head reeeling.
Although Antu says he no longer really gets much of a nicotine hit off snus, because he uses the stuff so regularly.
The boys point out that using snus also opens up some other entertaining pastimes, like shopping and handcrafts.
Freda digs into his pocket and pulls out a tykki (literally translated, a “cannon”), which is a kind of thickish syringe-like object, with which a wad of loose snus powder - made of tobacco mixed liberally with water, salt, sodium carbonate, humectants, and aroma ingredients or sweeteners - can be rammed under the lip.
Antu, on the other hand, is fond of “kneading”, or rolling the pieces of moist snus into shapes, round or cubic.
On trips to Sweden, they go shopping for “towers”, the term of choice for a ten-high stack of tins, rather like buying a six-pack or 12-pack of beer.
And they try out different flavours. There are dozens of flavours and brands.
There is citrus, and bergamot, and licorice, and aniseed, and brands made with Cuban tobacco and spring water.
There are full-metal tins made of stainless steel and little pale-green cartons, and designs aimed at appealing to the machos and the female users alike.
Swedish snus cans and tins do their level best to come across as trendy, as fashion statements.
The purple Mocca Mint container looks like a little powder compact, and the bags of portionssnus inside smell of bubble gum.
Most of the tins contain individual portionssnus bags, in mini, large, and maxi sizes, from 0.5 grammes to around 1.7 grammes, and a standard tin will contain 24 grammes of snus in these “cushions”.
The portioned snus has now overtaken loose snus among Swedish users, as the little bags can be slipped under the lip without getting the fingers all stained, and can then be discarded after use into small “ashtrays” cleverly built into the lid of the tin.
The little tea-bag containers do not leak, and when you use them, you don’t get the unfortunate experience Antu once had at school.
A teacher prodded the rather obvious snus-bump in his lip with a finger, and the loose tobacco spread all over his mouth - and it really doesn’t taste that good on the tongue.
The growth of snussing among Finnish youth does not yet show up in the statistics.
Last year, the figures say roughly one in ten boys between 16 and 18 years used snus now and then or daily. This is much the same proportion as in 2006.
Whilst the overall consumption may not demonstrably have gone up that much, it is nevertheless possible that use has increased either in certain areas or among certain population groups, believes Arja Rimpelä, who compiled a recent study on health habits among the young.
“When you come to think of it, it is an incredibly commonplace habit, given that you cannot buy or sell snus in Finland”, says Rimpelä.
According to Statistics Finland, a couple of years ago some 70,000 adult males took snus either occasionally or on a daily basis - around 4 per cent of the population.
Snus has been hitherto pretty much a “man thing” in Finland, but the latest nationwide questionnaire survey gave indications that girls might also be getting lippy and getting in on the act.
Antu, Kimi, and Freda frown a bit and come down against snus for girls, at least loose snus.
Maybe the portions would be OK, but...
“I don’t want to come across as chauvinist, but snus is a bit more of a masculine thing”, offers Antu.
But the Swedes are ahead of the curve. Over there snus has been marketed for women, too.
And the accent is on the word “marketed”.
These days nobody in Sweden apparently bats an eyelid at a woman who pulls a petite tin of snus out of her pocket and stuffs a biitti under her lip.
One in fifteen Swedish women uses snus - and among men the figure is as many as one in four.
Clever marketing and product development is behind all this. Snus has gradually become a pastime right across Swedish society, even though amusingly enough it is not so long ago that the whole thing was looked down upon there as something only done by male unskilled labourer-types.
As recently as the 1960s, the tobacco industry in Sweden was seriously considering winding up the manufacture of snus altogether, since they were running out of users for the product.
Snus only rose to the status of a national icon in the early 1990s, during the country’s negotiations on accession to the European Union.
Then the Swedes, fired up by a well-timed tobacco industry campaign, started to demand special consideration for snus, sales of which the Union had banned a few years earlier. While the Finns were wrangling over special sweet deals for the agricultural sector, Sweden’s negotiators put up a stout and ultimately successful defence of the continued manufacture and sale of snus within the country.
Freda and Kimi switched over to snus about a year ago, when they were both trying to quit smoking. Both of them still smoke the occasional cigarette.
“I figured that I would quit smoking by using snus instead, and that the difficulty of getting hold of snus would eventually lead to my stopping that, too. But I didn’t stop”, says Kimi.
Antu used snus already back in comprehensive school.
“It started as an experiment, and it was cool. Then I noticed that it was relatively easy to get the stuff, because friends and acquaintances are often going on the ferries to and from Sweden.”
Antu puts forward one theory for why the Finnish-speakers might even be avoiding getting into snus - that they do not want to be associated with things that are seen as somehow “Swedish”.
Sport is another factor. In Kauniainen, handball is a very popular discipline among the Swedish-speaking population, and Antu - who also plays handball - calculates that several members of the men’s league team are snus users.
“But then again, in a predominantly Finnish-speaking sport like ice hockey there are plenty of players who use snus.”
To be fair, both Antu and Kimi say that were they able to choose again now, they probably wouldn’t start using snus. Antu intends to quit by the time he is thirty. “It’s just a matter of willpower.”
When the subject of the health hazards associated with snus comes up, the boys from Kauniainen seem to side more readily with the Swedish tobacco industry lobbyists than with Finnish researchers or health education professionals.
“Yes, it’s dangerous, but the dangers are exaggerated. For instance, they say you can get cancer easily. I have heard that 75-year-olds can get cancer from snus, but that is not going to affect us”, says Antu.
It’s not going to affect them, no, not even when inside of their upper lip and their gums are wrinkled and from time to time sore with small open lesions.
A kind of dimple has been scored into the gum where the snus biitti sits.
If a Finnish cancer specialist is asked to catalogue the effects of snus, the list is a long one: snus-induced lesions, changes in the oral mucous membranes, gingival recessions that can lead to teeth becoming loose or even falling out altogether, an elevated risk of pancreatic and oral cancers, slightly elevated risk of sudden death from myocardial infarction, and possible complications for the foetus in pregnant women, including reduced infant birth weight and pre-eclampsia.
Snus does not affect the lungs, since it is not inhaled like tobacco smoke, and the overall risk of getting cancer is lower than with smokers.
Given that it is steam-cured, unliked the fire-cured smoking tobacco variety or other chewing tobaccos, snus has lower concentrations of nitrosamines and other carcinogens.
All the other health drawbacks associated with cigarettes are nevertheless present in snus.
Snus can actually lead to a greater degree of addiction than smoking, since the hit given by snus lifts the nicotine levels in the bloodstream to a higher peak than with cigarettes.
Nicotine raises blood pressure and is a vasoconstrictor, and weakens the overall condition of the user, and it also increases the risk of sports injuries - a fact that often comes as something of a surprise to people who do sports and use snus.
“But snus is at least less harmful to the health than smoking”, argues Kimi.
This “harm reduction” argument, much loved by the snus industry, has gone down well with the Swedes.
The incidence of smoking in Sweden is well below average European levels - and according to the snus manufacturers it is precisely their product that has weaned the Swedes away from the evils of cigarettes.
On the other side of the argument, the health education camp warns that snus is an item that appeals particularly to the young, and leads - following the usual gate-theory arguments - to cigarette smoking or at least to physical dependence on nicotine.
In the case of snus, the same basic rules apply as with classified drugs. The harder it is to get hold of it, the less it is used.
Antu, Kimi, and Freda get their “towers” and their “hockey pucks” from Sweden.
In practice, they might not actually need to cross the water for their supply of biittis, könttis, or mälli.
There are also countless kiosks in Finland that sell snus under the counter. An illegally-sold tin can be had in the Greater Helsinki area for around EUR 6.00, or twice the price you would pay in Sweden.
There are many reports to the authorities about the illicit sale of snus. In the space of the last couple of years, the Finnish Customs have investigated several large snus-smuggling cases, with suspicions of the import and resale of thousands of kilos of the product.
We are thus looking at an illegal trade measured in the millions of euros.
People like Pirjo Naumanen from the Finnish Health Association still have plenty of schools to pass their message to.
In Paimio, Naumanen winds up her lecture to the 8th-graders.
“Yes, snus is going to be with us in Finland for ever and a day, simply because we are geographically so close to Sweden. What is important is that the use of the stuff should not start to spread more widely.”
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.5.2008
*Translator's Note: This article is certain to present problems of nomenclature. As the introduction points out, the product in question has many names, official and above all unofficial. Let’s just note we are describing moist powder tobacco, often from Sweden, that the user places under the upper lip for extended periods, with a view to extracting the nicotine contained therein. A much more detailed description, and the background to some of the snuff/snus debate, can be found in the two Wikipedia entries given below.
Previously in HS International Edition:
EU starts legal proceedings against Finland over wolf hunting and snuff sales (28.9.2005)
Åland-based shipping lines object ban on sales of smokeless tobacco (12.11.2007)
See also:
Customs intercept exceptionally large quantities of smuggled snuff (9.2.2007)
Links:
Snus (Wikipedia)
Snuff (Wikipedia)
Snuson.com (a messageboard dedicated to the subject)
Terveys ry (The Finnish Health Association)
Could Finland snuff out the Lisbon Treaty? (BBC, March 2008)
MAR
Snus by any other name...
Sales of moist smokeless tobacco are illegal in Finland, but that does not prevent users from getting the product
Snus by any other name...
Snus by any other name...
Snus by any other name...
Snus by any other name...
print this
By Mari Manninen
The girl lifts the round flat tin under her nose and takes a sniff of the black gunge inside.
It gives off a rotten smell, with a whiff of damp ashtray and a dash of horse urine mixed in.
She pulls her head away and grimaces: “Yuk!”
The girl passes the tin to her friend sitting next to her and it goes round the circle until all the local 8th-graders in the auditorium at the Paimio Town Hall have had a sniff of the strange substance.
This is old-school health education. The snus* lecture being delivered by Pirjo Naumanen - a local representative of Terveys Ry (the Finnish Health Association) - is in full swing, and Naumanen is warning of the dangers of this form of steam-cured tobacco.
Terveys Ry describes itself as a voluntary NGO for the promotion of health: “It supports the individual's ability to improve his/her grip on life, attempts to prevent smoking and drug abuse, and encourages the development of a healthy living environment and safe traffic.”
And nowadays their speakers are being asked more and more often to come to schools to explain about snus.
“In the vocational schools, this form of using tobacco seems to be becoming quite trendy. Young people have learnt how to order snus via the Net, and it is delivered to their homes by post”, says Naumanen.
In fact it is a wonder that the use of powder tobacco in Finland has not skyrocketed in the wake of the ban on smoking in restaurants, in many workplaces, and on aeroplanes.
With a bit of snus stuffed under your upper lip, you can sit anywhere without drawing fire or unwelcome attention.
One thing, of course, that prevents the more rapid spread of snus is that it is illegal to sell it in Finland.
Sales of the Swedish moist tobacco were banned right across the EU in 1992, three years before Finland joined, and the ban came into effect here when we signed up.
This doesn’t mean that use or possession is outlawed, providing that the substance has been brought for one’s own enjoyment from abroad.
And one does not have to look very far: Sweden is allowed to sell snus by special EU dispensation - public support for the stuff prior to the country’s 1994 referendum on accession meant that exemption from the EU-wide ban was a precondition of the Swedes’ going in.
Most of the snus consumed in Finland is of Swedish origin.
And this “Swedish connection” seems to have a knock-on effect here - using snus is relatively more common among the Swedish-speaking population of the country.
There is the cultural link with our western neighbour on the one hand, and no less important is physical geography: the fact that the vast majority of Finland’s Swedish-speakers tend to live on the coast, within easy reach of the ferries to Stockholm.
Antu’s upper lip is distended. Freda is playing with a tin of Ettan portionssnus (think of tea-bags containing moist smokeless tobacco rather than Earl Grey or English Breakfast).
Kimi is going without right now, as his stock of “hockey pucks”, the round tins of snus, has run out.
Antu, Freda, and Kimi all live in Kauniainen, the wealthy and strongly Swedish-speaking (41% of the population) enclave inside Espoo.
They are all at the Swedish-speaking upper secondary school in the town, and they all use prilla - one of the names given to the product - on a daily basis.
“About a puck a day at most, I guess. I almost always have some snus under my lip”, says Freda.
The National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES) carried out a study of snus usage among young adults in Kauniainen in 2006.
It turned out that one in five Swedish-speaking boys at upper secondary school (16-19 years) used snus daily, while among local Finnish-speaking boys of the same age-group and education the figure was just 3%.
Among Antu, Freda, and Kimi’s circle of friends there are dozens of snus-users. Some of the parents have used the stuff earlier.
The boys appear here under aliases they have chosen for themselves, for every now and then they buy snus from friends who have been over to Sweden, and that is of course forbidden fruit, since snus can only be imported for personal consumption.
The trio have some difficulty swallowing the STAKES numbers, and say that the Finnish-speakers use the stuff more than they cared to admit.
“Us Swedish-speakers are more open about these things”, says Antu.
They may have a point. Apparently snussing has been increasing among the Finnish-speakers of Kauniainen in recent weeks. At least that’s the feedback that is coming from the schools, says the city’s Head of Health and Social Services Ulla Tikkanen.
Perhaps it’s not just a matter of mother-tongue, then.
But it is certainly a subject on - or rather under - many lips.
“I like the feeling of having snus burning between my lip and gums”, says Freda.
The gums and lips experience a burning sensation when a biitti, or a piece of snus, is wedged between them.
But as the mucous membrane goes numb, the burning sensation fades away. For this reason, Freda and Kimi switch the location of the biitti from the right upper lip to the left from one week to the next.
When the nicotine in the moist tobacco powder does its work and powers into the brain, the result is a definite high, that can set your head reeeling.
Although Antu says he no longer really gets much of a nicotine hit off snus, because he uses the stuff so regularly.
The boys point out that using snus also opens up some other entertaining pastimes, like shopping and handcrafts.
Freda digs into his pocket and pulls out a tykki (literally translated, a “cannon”), which is a kind of thickish syringe-like object, with which a wad of loose snus powder - made of tobacco mixed liberally with water, salt, sodium carbonate, humectants, and aroma ingredients or sweeteners - can be rammed under the lip.
Antu, on the other hand, is fond of “kneading”, or rolling the pieces of moist snus into shapes, round or cubic.
On trips to Sweden, they go shopping for “towers”, the term of choice for a ten-high stack of tins, rather like buying a six-pack or 12-pack of beer.
And they try out different flavours. There are dozens of flavours and brands.
There is citrus, and bergamot, and licorice, and aniseed, and brands made with Cuban tobacco and spring water.
There are full-metal tins made of stainless steel and little pale-green cartons, and designs aimed at appealing to the machos and the female users alike.
Swedish snus cans and tins do their level best to come across as trendy, as fashion statements.
The purple Mocca Mint container looks like a little powder compact, and the bags of portionssnus inside smell of bubble gum.
Most of the tins contain individual portionssnus bags, in mini, large, and maxi sizes, from 0.5 grammes to around 1.7 grammes, and a standard tin will contain 24 grammes of snus in these “cushions”.
The portioned snus has now overtaken loose snus among Swedish users, as the little bags can be slipped under the lip without getting the fingers all stained, and can then be discarded after use into small “ashtrays” cleverly built into the lid of the tin.
The little tea-bag containers do not leak, and when you use them, you don’t get the unfortunate experience Antu once had at school.
A teacher prodded the rather obvious snus-bump in his lip with a finger, and the loose tobacco spread all over his mouth - and it really doesn’t taste that good on the tongue.
The growth of snussing among Finnish youth does not yet show up in the statistics.
Last year, the figures say roughly one in ten boys between 16 and 18 years used snus now and then or daily. This is much the same proportion as in 2006.
Whilst the overall consumption may not demonstrably have gone up that much, it is nevertheless possible that use has increased either in certain areas or among certain population groups, believes Arja Rimpelä, who compiled a recent study on health habits among the young.
“When you come to think of it, it is an incredibly commonplace habit, given that you cannot buy or sell snus in Finland”, says Rimpelä.
According to Statistics Finland, a couple of years ago some 70,000 adult males took snus either occasionally or on a daily basis - around 4 per cent of the population.
Snus has been hitherto pretty much a “man thing” in Finland, but the latest nationwide questionnaire survey gave indications that girls might also be getting lippy and getting in on the act.
Antu, Kimi, and Freda frown a bit and come down against snus for girls, at least loose snus.
Maybe the portions would be OK, but...
“I don’t want to come across as chauvinist, but snus is a bit more of a masculine thing”, offers Antu.
But the Swedes are ahead of the curve. Over there snus has been marketed for women, too.
And the accent is on the word “marketed”.
These days nobody in Sweden apparently bats an eyelid at a woman who pulls a petite tin of snus out of her pocket and stuffs a biitti under her lip.
One in fifteen Swedish women uses snus - and among men the figure is as many as one in four.
Clever marketing and product development is behind all this. Snus has gradually become a pastime right across Swedish society, even though amusingly enough it is not so long ago that the whole thing was looked down upon there as something only done by male unskilled labourer-types.
As recently as the 1960s, the tobacco industry in Sweden was seriously considering winding up the manufacture of snus altogether, since they were running out of users for the product.
Snus only rose to the status of a national icon in the early 1990s, during the country’s negotiations on accession to the European Union.
Then the Swedes, fired up by a well-timed tobacco industry campaign, started to demand special consideration for snus, sales of which the Union had banned a few years earlier. While the Finns were wrangling over special sweet deals for the agricultural sector, Sweden’s negotiators put up a stout and ultimately successful defence of the continued manufacture and sale of snus within the country.
Freda and Kimi switched over to snus about a year ago, when they were both trying to quit smoking. Both of them still smoke the occasional cigarette.
“I figured that I would quit smoking by using snus instead, and that the difficulty of getting hold of snus would eventually lead to my stopping that, too. But I didn’t stop”, says Kimi.
Antu used snus already back in comprehensive school.
“It started as an experiment, and it was cool. Then I noticed that it was relatively easy to get the stuff, because friends and acquaintances are often going on the ferries to and from Sweden.”
Antu puts forward one theory for why the Finnish-speakers might even be avoiding getting into snus - that they do not want to be associated with things that are seen as somehow “Swedish”.
Sport is another factor. In Kauniainen, handball is a very popular discipline among the Swedish-speaking population, and Antu - who also plays handball - calculates that several members of the men’s league team are snus users.
“But then again, in a predominantly Finnish-speaking sport like ice hockey there are plenty of players who use snus.”
To be fair, both Antu and Kimi say that were they able to choose again now, they probably wouldn’t start using snus. Antu intends to quit by the time he is thirty. “It’s just a matter of willpower.”
When the subject of the health hazards associated with snus comes up, the boys from Kauniainen seem to side more readily with the Swedish tobacco industry lobbyists than with Finnish researchers or health education professionals.
“Yes, it’s dangerous, but the dangers are exaggerated. For instance, they say you can get cancer easily. I have heard that 75-year-olds can get cancer from snus, but that is not going to affect us”, says Antu.
It’s not going to affect them, no, not even when inside of their upper lip and their gums are wrinkled and from time to time sore with small open lesions.
A kind of dimple has been scored into the gum where the snus biitti sits.
If a Finnish cancer specialist is asked to catalogue the effects of snus, the list is a long one: snus-induced lesions, changes in the oral mucous membranes, gingival recessions that can lead to teeth becoming loose or even falling out altogether, an elevated risk of pancreatic and oral cancers, slightly elevated risk of sudden death from myocardial infarction, and possible complications for the foetus in pregnant women, including reduced infant birth weight and pre-eclampsia.
Snus does not affect the lungs, since it is not inhaled like tobacco smoke, and the overall risk of getting cancer is lower than with smokers.
Given that it is steam-cured, unliked the fire-cured smoking tobacco variety or other chewing tobaccos, snus has lower concentrations of nitrosamines and other carcinogens.
All the other health drawbacks associated with cigarettes are nevertheless present in snus.
Snus can actually lead to a greater degree of addiction than smoking, since the hit given by snus lifts the nicotine levels in the bloodstream to a higher peak than with cigarettes.
Nicotine raises blood pressure and is a vasoconstrictor, and weakens the overall condition of the user, and it also increases the risk of sports injuries - a fact that often comes as something of a surprise to people who do sports and use snus.
“But snus is at least less harmful to the health than smoking”, argues Kimi.
This “harm reduction” argument, much loved by the snus industry, has gone down well with the Swedes.
The incidence of smoking in Sweden is well below average European levels - and according to the snus manufacturers it is precisely their product that has weaned the Swedes away from the evils of cigarettes.
On the other side of the argument, the health education camp warns that snus is an item that appeals particularly to the young, and leads - following the usual gate-theory arguments - to cigarette smoking or at least to physical dependence on nicotine.
In the case of snus, the same basic rules apply as with classified drugs. The harder it is to get hold of it, the less it is used.
Antu, Kimi, and Freda get their “towers” and their “hockey pucks” from Sweden.
In practice, they might not actually need to cross the water for their supply of biittis, könttis, or mälli.
There are also countless kiosks in Finland that sell snus under the counter. An illegally-sold tin can be had in the Greater Helsinki area for around EUR 6.00, or twice the price you would pay in Sweden.
There are many reports to the authorities about the illicit sale of snus. In the space of the last couple of years, the Finnish Customs have investigated several large snus-smuggling cases, with suspicions of the import and resale of thousands of kilos of the product.
We are thus looking at an illegal trade measured in the millions of euros.
People like Pirjo Naumanen from the Finnish Health Association still have plenty of schools to pass their message to.
In Paimio, Naumanen winds up her lecture to the 8th-graders.
“Yes, snus is going to be with us in Finland for ever and a day, simply because we are geographically so close to Sweden. What is important is that the use of the stuff should not start to spread more widely.”
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.5.2008
*Translator's Note: This article is certain to present problems of nomenclature. As the introduction points out, the product in question has many names, official and above all unofficial. Let’s just note we are describing moist powder tobacco, often from Sweden, that the user places under the upper lip for extended periods, with a view to extracting the nicotine contained therein. A much more detailed description, and the background to some of the snuff/snus debate, can be found in the two Wikipedia entries given below.
Previously in HS International Edition:
EU starts legal proceedings against Finland over wolf hunting and snuff sales (28.9.2005)
Åland-based shipping lines object ban on sales of smokeless tobacco (12.11.2007)
See also:
Customs intercept exceptionally large quantities of smuggled snuff (9.2.2007)
Links:
Snus (Wikipedia)
Snuff (Wikipedia)
Snuson.com (a messageboard dedicated to the subject)
Terveys ry (The Finnish Health Association)
Could Finland snuff out the Lisbon Treaty? (BBC, March 2008)
MAR
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