HEALTH INFORMATION WITH REGARDS TO NASAL SNUFF

Snuffing safer than smoking - it's official

Read article from The New Zealand Herald republished on 2nd April 2007 on the SmokeLess New Zealand web site.

Extract from a report by Dr. M. A. H. Russell and others.
Published in ‘The Lancet’ of 1st March, 1980
Our findings suggest that a new age for snuff is a feasible alternative to cigarette smoking. Snuff could save more lives and avoid more ill-health than any other preventative measure likely to be available to developed nations well into the 21st century.

Extract from a report by Dr. M.A.H. Russell.
Published in ‘The British Medical Journal’ of 26th September, 1981
Switching from cigarettes to snuff would substantially reduce the risk of lung cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and possibly coronary heart disease as well.

M. A. H. Russell, Addiction Research Unit, Institute of Psychiatry
The Maudsley Hospital, Denmark Hill, London.
If the smokers of Britain switched from cigarettes to snuff or nicotine chewing gum, 55,000 fewer of them would die each year from lung cancer or chronic bronchitis. This is because 90% of the deaths from lung cancer (34,000 per year) and chronic bronchitis (28,000 per year) are attributable to smoking. The damage is done by inhaling tobacco smoke and this would not occur with use of snuff or nicotine chewing gum. Lung cancer and chronic bronchitis could be prevented equally well by giving up smoking or, better still, never starting it.

Extract from a letter to ‘The Society of Snuff Grinders, Blenders and Purveyors’
from the ‘Cancer Research Campaign’ dated 8th March. 1985.
Although as you point out, there are certain types of so-called snuff used in some parts of the world that do carry a risk of nasal cancer, there is no evidence of any association with cancer or other health risk in the snuff produced in this country.

For this reason, snuff seems an entirely acceptable substitute for cigarette smoking and could be recommended particularly for addicted cigarette smokers since if they could substitute snuff taking for cigarette smoking, they would greatly reduce the risk to their health. There is some general reluctance about promoting any habit-forming behaviour among young people but if adults are already smokers, any safe means of helping them to stop is to be welcomed.

BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 293 – 16TH AUGUST, 1986
Since nasal snuff is unburnt it contains – in contrast to tobacco smoke – no tar, carbon monoxide, or oxides of nitrogen. Since it is not inhaled it cannot carry a risk of lung cancer, but what is the risk of local damage? Root, Aust and Sullivan reported the case of a farmer who had placed snuff in the left ear for 42 years, eventually developing a squamous carcinoma of the external auditory meatus.

Though I have never seen nasal or antroethmoidal cancer arising in any patient within Britain who had used snuff, it is a possible explanation for the extraordinary high incidence of upper jaw neoplasms in the Bantu tribes of the Transvaal, among whom the use of indigenous snuff is widespread. Campbell and Cooper found as much 3:4 benzopyrine in Zulu snuff, which contains charred aloe stems as well as tobacco, as in cigarette smoke condensate. - D. E. N. Harrison