Sometimes, as part of the snuff-taking subculture, we are so involved in snuff and snuff-taking, that we can forget just how little the average person knows about snuff. Today, I had a reminder of just how little most people know about snuff.
A very good friend came over to our house with his teenage daughter (19), and the topic of snuff came up. I just sort of assumed that my friend’s daughter would know what snuff was. I was letting my friend smell the Old Mill Pure Virginia Toast, and his daughter wanted to smell it too. She thought the snuff smelled good, so I opened a McCrystal’s Anisette for her to smell. She liked the smell of that as well.
Then she asked, “What do you do with that?” I told her that I snuff it up my nose. She looked at me like I was a little crazy, but she was curious. She asked, “And you get a nicotine hit from it?” I told her that it definitely gave a nicotine hit.
She looked over at her father and asked, “Is this a new thing that just came out?” He laughed and explained that snuff had been around since the beginning. She was floored. She had never heard of snuff, had never known anyone who used it, and was floored that you could draw tobacco into your nose and get nicotine from it.
She was really nice about it, and a little curious. But, it reminded me that snuff-taking is absolutely not part of the common knowledge of the average person in the United States. Everything sort of begins and ends with cigarettes and dip, with vapor as the newcomer on the stage. But, snuff-taking is just enormously rare. As one of the safest ways to use tobacco, that’s a little disturbing when you think about it.
Mark
