Carinogens On Your Lips

Well, RJ Reynolds may finally have done the unthinkable. After more than 15 years of smoking, and smoking Camel Filters for all but the initial six or eight month Marlboro "training wheels" Reds period, it may very well be a Camel product that leads me to put down the coffin nails and try out that whole "breathing air" thing.

Surely it's a culmination of a variety of things. Matters of finances, lifestyle, and health adding up to lay more and more pluses on the side of not smoking. And these days, what can really be considered a plus to being a smoker?

Taxes have come and the promise of more coming. There's a market down the street that's always been the cheapest place around and a pack o' crack went from $3.75 to $4.95 overnight. Cartons from $35 to $45. For a smoking household of two, that's an instantaneous increase of $60 to the monthly expenses. $60 added to the $210 already being spent on cigarettes, that is. $3240 a year. You could probably do something better with that chunk of change.

You can't comfortably smoke in public anymore, which was always a lot of fun. At least in Oregon, and probably a few other places. The rest of you, your time is probably coming too.

The only real plus to smoking I can come up with is that greedy addicted one.

I LIKE IT I LOVE IT I WANT IT, GIVE ME A FUCKING CIGARETTE!

I mean, smoking isn't really even cool anymore.

But I digress.

At the same time as Oregon's statewide smoking ban was coming into effect on January 1, 2009. I began receiving emails from Camel about "What do you think of the concept of oral, smokeless tobacco products you could have anywhere?" Ooooooh. Yeah whatever. No really, it made sense. I thought it was good timing on their part, if they could pull it off.

Apparently though, by that point, they already had this stuff developed and out in test markets. So hot on the heels of their hinting at the idea of the thing, it started to appear. Camel Orbs, Camel Sticks, Camel Strips, and CamelSNUS. Innnnnteresting.

Now, I was curious about these products, not as a replacement for smoking, more as an add-on to smoking. Something for those times when you can't smoke, or are totally inconvenienced to go find a place where you can smoke. So when the displays and such started popping up, we inquired about them. Mostly we found out they were going to be around $5, while real live cigarettes were still $3.75. Still they seemed like they might be worth a shot if they weren't a daily habit, an emergency backup of sorts.

Camel solved any hesitancy for me though, when they sent us coupons to try their new Orbs out for free. So yesterday Ariel went out to replenish our cancer stick supply, and cashed in a couple of the coupons. She returned with some "Mellow" flavor Camel Orbs, in a futuristic "child-proof" tic-tac dispenser. Complete with instruction manual.

I probably should have held off on trying these things out until I started craving a cigarette, for science's sake, to be able to gauge how effective they were. But I didn't. I shook the thing around, pried it apart with two hands, and dispensed the little brown pill thing.

Popped it into my mouth and was immediately assaulted by horrendously sweet foulness slowly melting to grainy glop on my tongue. I probably should have spit it out, but I wanted to do it right, absorb it all, see if the result could somehow be worth the experience. I tried sliding it away from my tongue, up between my lip and my gums. This just seemed to distribute the flavor rapidly through my saliva to take over my entire mouth and further enhance the foulness. Ever so slowly it melted away on my tongue. I really wasn't sure at times that vomiting wasn't a possible outcome of this experiment.

As soon as it was finally over and done with, I started searching the net, thinking surely there would be people out there decrying the grand foulness of this product. I searched "Camel Orbs Taste", my google shorthand that I was sure would lead me to various instances of Camel Orbs tasting like crap, shit, poo, goat ass, etc.

The second google result was "CamelSNUS vs. Swedish Snus", followed by a snippet of commentary that included both "Camel ORBS" as well as words like "throw-away" and "disgusting". So I felt I was on the right track to the vindication of my new found hatred through the shared views of others.

As it turns out, these products are still pretty damn new, and possibly not available in all areas yet. So most of the commentary regarding them is still just speculative opinion. I found one livejournal post of a guy who tried the "Frost" flavor and seemed to be saying they were gross while concluding that he liked them. I dunno.

Where I ended up was snuscentral.org, and not directly to the page containing the throw-away and disgusting statements, as the forums are only open to members. So I pretty quickly got entirely distracted from my original mission and started reading about Snus.

WTF is Snus?

I'd seen displays for the CamelSNUS, and knew it had it's own weird little refrigerated display. But I had figured SNUS for a made up name of their own invention. Instead it turns out to be a tobacco product they've been making in Sweden for a couple hundred years. It's tobacco you hold in your mouth, but that you don't have to spit. It comes both loose, like chewing tobacco, or in "portions" little sacks made of tea bag like material that you can neatly tuck between your lip and gums and absorb the nicotine.

So it's smokeless, discreet, and not messy and gross like chewing tobacco. But here's the really big thing. Swedish Snus is treated as a food product in Sweden. Meaning it falls under the mandate of their version of the FDA and has it's production, ingredients, and health effects being looked at and having to fall under certain guidelines.

As a result of this, Swedish Snus is steam pasteurized, and in the process destroys most of the carcinogens found in tobacco. This results in a tobacco product that is 98% safer than cigarettes. Nicotine is still not a healthy thing to put in your body, it's bad for your heart, and possibly for your pancreas. But 98% healthier than cigarettes is a pretty big thing. The potentially cancer causing carcinogens in tobacco products are called TSNA's. The more there are, the more risk for cancer. Chewing tobaccos such as Skoal and Copenhagen range from around a 40 TSNA level up to around 130. Swedish Snus ranges from about 0.4 to 2.8.

Now as for the CamelSNUS, we don't know what the TSNA level is, nor what's in it, or how it is made. Tobacco products aren't regulated by the FDA in such a way that they have to disclose that sort of information to the consumers.

What we do know though, is that CamelSNUS will probably cost about $5 or so, and comes with 15 small "portions" to a tin. Swedish Snus comes in a few different sized portions, and contain as little as 4mg or currently up to 17mg or so, with most normal portions seeming to be right about 8mg. The standard seems to be 24 portions per tin, with tins being between $2 and $4.

Digging around it turns out a great many people have quit smoking by switching to Snus. Especially in Sweden and Norway, but also in the US. From their stories, it seems quite a few have simply picked up Snus and put down cigarettes. That easy.

Sure, they are still addicted to nicotine, but they've gotten rid of all the other negatives to smoking cigarettes. Like... smoking them. Smoke here, smoke there, smoke everywhere. Sucking burning shit into your lungs; something that should probably be reserved for recreational activity only. Not to mention smelling like smoke, not being able to smell to know you smell like smoke, and even if you could smell after years of smoking you can't really breathe deeply enough to get a good whiff of anything anyhow. Oh, and all the coughing, throaty, lung cancery shit.

As with smoking, people who've switched to Snus seem to vary in the amount of their daily usage, but the majority seem to be in the 8-10 portions a day realm. Of course, with various strengths of portion to choose from, that can amount to a variety of levels of nicotine intake. But, financially speaking, 8-10 portions from a tin of 24 means a tin lasts a couple to a few days, and at less than the cost of a pack of smokes, that promises pretty decent savings.

So I'm going to get me some. There's a fairly staggering variety to choose from. We searched local tobacco shops today to see if we might be able to find even a single kind to sample, but alas, no one even knew what I was asking for. So I'm ordering up a variety to try out. It's an exciting prospect. So exciting I've hit that rare point of being more hopeful than cynical.

Mostly, I guess, I'm really very curious to see what it's like to not smoke. I started smoking when I was 14, and I've never tried to quit. Ever. I'll be thirty at the end of this next summer, so having spent the majority of my adolescence and entirety of adulthood to date with a daily habit. With a cloud of smoke trailing me through my daily existence, I really wonder what life would be like without that.

So we'll see. The experiment could be a complete failure, but for a pretty meager investment it is certainly worth a shot. If nothing else, I cannot imagine it could in any way compare to the absolutely foul taste of failure that Camel Orbs left in my mouth.