nicotine content

[kevin]

So it,s 7 pm in New Zealand and i,m sitting around with a few friends after a bunch of Vodkas, and they are all ignorant to snus (actually never heard of it ) and after much up ing it they all have derogatory coments, and the biggest one is that i am essentually (after swapping for ciggarettes) putting more nicotine in to my system, so does some one out there have the exact formula (nicotine content) per portion or pris , to exact content per cig, i have read several forums but get confused when they start mentioning percentages etc, so is there a simple comparison, which has more nic, much appreciated Kev

[Shownarou]

The snus has more nicotine. Less nasty chemicals though. What's wrong with some good ole' vitamin N?

[lxskllr]

Snus has more nicotine, but it's released over a longer period of time. Cigarettes give a larger initial hit, but stop as soon as the cigarette's gone(of course).

[kevin]

so i have shown my friend both of these replys and his answer is..... so ask them the difference betwen a pack of malboro red a day and a snuser...... is there a simple answer cheers Kev.

[Shownarou]

Snus isn't going to cause cancer. Simple enough?

[snusjus]

A Marlboro Red delivers 1.1mg of nicotine. One regular strength portion of snus also delivers ~1.0mg of nicotine in one hour.

[Multinic]

Ok, this is my interpretation of nicotine delivery statistics:

A regular strength (8 mg) portion delivers between .8 and 1.6 mg of nicotine if it is used in a normal (stationary) way for 30 minutes. It will deliver more if you keep it in longer, but the rate of nicotine absorption is a decreasing function of time. If you squeeze the pouch or suck on it, you may absorb a greater total amount of nicotine, but the rate of delivery decreases at a faster pace. Consequently, a strong portion delivers between 1.1/1.2 and 2.2/2.4 mg from a half hour of normal use, and an extra strong portion between 1.5/1.7 and 3.0/3.4 mg.

A normal cigarette tends to deliver between .6 and 1.2 mg of nicotine (between .6 and 1.0 in the EU, where strong cigarettes are prohibited). This is however only true if you smoke like the machines that measure nicotine absorption. A lot of smokers will inhale more deeply or cover filter perforations/air vents in order to increase the strength, so that the actual amount may actually exceed the reported amount, especially for "light" cigarettes.

So let's say that you're smoking a pack of cigarettes a day where you absorb about 1 mg of nicotine per cigarette. That would then roughly correspond to 17 portions of normal-strength snus per day, provided that you spit them out after 30 minutes and do not play around with them. With extra strong snus, this means a daily requirement of 8 or 9.

Interestingly, Swedish users seem to follow the guidelines and consume almost a tin a day, while snuson users seem more economical: they like to maximize the amount of nicotine per portion, and can thus feel satisfied with perhaps 10 or even 5 portions per day (depending on strength), under the assumption that they have a nicotine dependency that corresponds to a pack-a-day smoker (the benchmark used in epidemiological studies of mortality and morbidity effects from smoking, and near the global average).

The difference between being a pack-a-day smoker and a 17-portion per day Swedish user or an 8-per-day squeeze-every-last-drop-out-of-it snus-on user is that the life expectancy of the smoker (assuming no successful cessation in the future and initiation of the current level at age 18, with no prior use) is between six and eight years, while for the snuser it is less than one month, using the same estimation procedure. Most important, the risk of lung cancer, COPD, and emphysema is the same for a never-smoker and a life-long exclusive user of snus. Almost all other diseases are either drastically diminished or at least moderately diminished in snus users as compared with smokers. The most probable risk reduction estimates are in the neighborhood of an overall 99% risk reduction, with a 95% reduction being the most conservative estimate and a 99.9% reduction the most optimistic one.

Note, however, that even allegedly risky smokeless products (American chewing tobacco etc) are much closer to snus than to cigarettes in their overall effects, and that cigar or pipe smoking is slightly safer than cigarette smoking.

Sorry about the academic style of this post: maybe I should have my head examined (and, no, I didn't copy and paste - this is based on my recollection from reading dozens of journal papers that made me decide to quit smoking).

[Ainkor]

Great post Multinic. I think you nailed everything except for one small detail that people hear about the dangers of snusing and that is pancreatic cancer.

The number thrown about that I have read is that it is a 50% increase in pancreatic cancer risk versus no tobacco use. To put that in perspective, there are 5 per 10,000 incidents of pancreatic cancer in non tobacco users and 7 per 10,000 in snusers.

The only link I could find was a rather vague abstract about the study used:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17498797

-Ainkor

[sagedil]

We have covered this stuff before. See the article on Swedish Math's site that explains how the nicotine from snus is absorbed.

http://www.swedishmatch.com/en/Snus-...cotine-uptake/

[kevin]

Multinic just what i was looking for, appreciate all these replys, many thanks, Kevin.

[jackolantern]

Don't forget to tell them that in small doses, nicotine is almost harmless. In many ways, it is similar to heroin (don't use that in the argument). In large doses, it will drop you dead. But in the normal amounts that your average living user ingests, the only real health concern is that it is addictive. It is everything else that is in cigarettes that is dangerous. And snus does not have that. Some real proof on that is nasal snuff users. In all my research, there has never been a single case of a nasal snuff user having any serious health problems, and they are ingesting nicotine.