Sweden is on track to become Europe’s first smoke-free country, thanks in large part to the popularity of snus, a type of moist snuff that is applied under the upper lip. However, some people are concerned that the tobacco industry is promoting a “fairytale” that is too wonderful to be true. According to the government, snus, used by one in every seven Swedes, has helped reduce the number of smokers from 15% of the population in 2005 to 5.2% last year, a record low in Europe. A country is deemed smoke-free if less than 5% of its population smokes on a daily basis.
Since 1992, snus has been prohibited in the European Union. When Sweden joined the EU three years later, it obtained an exemption. Thousands of doses of snus wind through a complicated web of machinery at the Swedish Match facility in the western city of Gothenburg, generating the sachets. In 2021, the company sold 277 million snus boxes in Sweden and Norway. “It’s been used in Sweden for 200 years.” “It’s part of Swedish culture, just as wine is part of many other European countries’ cultures,” Swedish Match spokesperson Patrik Hildingsson told AFP.
Clad in a white lab coat, he described the manufacturing process. “Tobacco comes from India or the United States. It goes through this silo and is then packed inside the pouches like tea bags and then into these boxes.”There are two types: traditional brown snus, which contains tobacco, and white snus, which is made of synthetic nicotine and often flavored.
Traditional snus is mostly sold in Sweden, Norway, and the United States
Traditional snus is mostly sold in Sweden, Norway, and the United States. White snus, which was introduced roughly 15 years ago, is illegal in the EU because it does not contain tobacco. It was outlawed in Belgium and the Netherlands this year. However, it is extremely popular among Swedish youth, with its use quadrupling among women aged 16 to 29 in four years. In Sweden, 15% of people use snus on a daily basis, a percentage that has climbed marginally in recent years. At the same time, despite the fact that cigarettes are less than half the price in Ireland, the country has experienced a significant decline in smokers.
Just five percent of Swedes say they smoke regularly, according to 2022 data from the Public Health Agency, putting Sweden 27 years ahead of the EU’s 2050 smoke-free target. “It’s very positive,” Swedish Health Minister Jakob Forssmed told AFP. “A very important decision was the smoking ban in restaurants in 2005, and then at outdoor restaurants and public places in 2019,” he said.
“Many Swedes also say that switching to snus helped them stop smoking.” The government has also backed the snus industry, hiking taxes recently on cigarettes by nine percent while cutting those on traditional snus by 20 percent. “With all these regulations, it’s almost impossible to smoke. Snus doesn’t smell, and the nicotine rush is much stronger than with a cigarette,” said Thorbjorn Thoors, a 67-year-old window repairman who has used snus since his teens and quit smoking decades ago.
Like with smoking, it will take years to determine “to what extent these products were harmful.”
But the decision to lower taxes on snus does not sit well with Ulrika Arehed Kagstrom, head of the Swedish Cancer Society. “It came as a complete surprise, and I was really disappointed,” she said. “It shows that they really completely bought the fairytale from the tobacco industry, which is trying to find a new market for these products and saying that these are harm-reduction products. “We don’t have enough research yet,” she insisted. “We know that snus and these kinds of nicotine products cause changes in your blood pressure, and there is a risk of long-term cardiovascular disease.”
Arehed Kagstrom is concerned that, like with smoking, it will take years to determine “to what extent these products were harmful.” According to a study published in June 2023 by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, the risk of throat and pancreatic cancer was three and two times higher, respectively, among habitual snus users. However, research published in the International Journal of Cancer in 2017 showed that there was no link between cancer and snus.