Or else imagine the face your spouse might make if you said, "Would you try on these panties I found in my sister's closet?
Furrowed brow, curled upper lip, squinty eyes. It was a face that gave me far too much immature glee. But I get it. In my social circle, chewing tobacco elicits universal disgust. It brings to mind marrying your second cousin, jaw cancer, and cups of warm brown spit at awful frat parties long ago. In much of the rest of America, smokeless tobacco is huge and getting huger. By , about six million Americans regularly stuffed tobacco in their mouth, and sales were rising by about 6 percent a year.
As you might imagine, a large number of users are baseball players and good ol' boys. But according to my admittedly unscientific research, it's also catching on among Wall Streeters.
I've met several finance guys who semi-secretly keep a tin in the back pocket of their suit. Smokeless tobacco is big enough that it's the target of a crackdown. By , ten major league stadiums will have banned it. My editors—who are all from Texas, for some reason—were shocked that a Yankee like me had never tried it. They prescribed a fix: Take oral tobacco street name: "dip" or "chaw" for a month and report back.
So on a random Thursday morning, I take a cherry-sized pinch of Skoal Classic Mint and tuck it next to my gum. Tastewise, I'm prepared for the worst. One helpful Internet commenter warned that dip tastes like "Big Foot's dick. The clean taste of mint mixes with the dirty tobacco—it's an odd paradox, like I'm licking an ashtray filled with Tic Tacs and Marlboro butts. Physically, it's more of a challenge than I thought. The tobacco stings my cheek like orange juice on a canker sore.
And I have no control over my wad. It's supposed to stay compact, but strands of tobacco migrate all over my mouth. The spit builds up fast. I put my empty Poland Spring bottle to my lips and do my best. But instead of the bullet I've seen ballplayers emit, I let loose a messy, chin-dribbling drool. As for the feeling: It's fantastic, until it isn't. For the first five minutes, I feel like someone is pumping helium into my cranium.
One of the best head rushes I've ever had. I can't stop smiling, like a demented flight attendant. Then, with alarming speed, comes the nausea. I don't throw up—a common dipping-tobacco rite of passage—but I feel profoundly uneasy, like I'm in a two-seater airplane bouncing through a snowstorm above Buffalo. I sweat. Light hurts my eyes.
I space out, staring at my iPhone and trying to remember why I took it out. I burp repeatedly. I obviously need some guidance. I search the Internet for "How to Chew Tobacco. The Web is loaded with images of receding gums, caramel-colored teeth, missing jaws, and white patches called gator lip, along with testimonials on how smokeless tobacco is absolutely, positively not a safe alternative to smoking. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that it might contain delicious arsenic, lead, and mercury.
But the public has a right to know. So I forge ahead. I stumble onto a YouTube channel founded by a man who calls himself the Dip Doctor. The Doctor is perhaps not the best person to dispel chewing-tobacco stereotypes. He wears a camouflage cap adorned with a Confederate flag.
He owns a company called Mud Jug that sells portable spittoons with names like Backwoods Badass Outlaw. But still, he's passionate and knowledgeable, so I call the Dip Doctor real name: Darcy Compton to get some dos and don'ts. He's got plenty. I tell the Dip Doctor about my wife's less-than-enthusiastic reaction to my experiment. His response is immediate: "Don't ever quit dippin' for a woman. It's been four days and I'm getting bolder. I've been dipping wherever I go: the subway, the street, Starbucks, picking up my kids from school.
I work at one of those shared offices where a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds are beta-testing new social-media platforms while downing bok choy smoothies and discussing yoga studios. I sit in the corner and quietly spit my chunky tobacco juice into a thermos. I feel rebellious and dirty and unhealthy. Also focused. This stuff is like Adderall.
For about half an hour after I put in a dinger, I'm on fire. This sucking and chewing allows nicotine to get into the bloodstream through the gums, without the need to swallow the tobacco juices.
Smokeless tobacco has been around for hundreds of years. It became more popular in the U. But nicotine is in all forms of tobacco. This chemical is so addictive that nicotine addiction often starts after the first use. People addicted to nicotine need more of it to get the same feeling as the first time. Many people still believe that smokeless tobacco is a safer alternative to smoking, but this isn't true. Using smokeless tobacco is as dangerous as smoking cigarettes, and can cause serious damage to the body.
Oral cancer cancer of the mouth is the cancer most often linked to smokeless tobacco use. In general, chewing tobacco and dry snuff had low levels of free nicotine, while levels in moist snuff products were considerably higher. What does this mean for the smoker who switches to smoke-free products? There are no simple answers. Inhaling smoke provides a bolus, or spike, of nicotine within seconds of the first puff, but the small amount is metabolized quickly.
Some smokeless products are capable of delivering a similar peak level, but at a slower pace, and research shows that with smokeless products, the falloff from peak levels is much slower. The broad range of free nicotine levels among these products is good news for smokers.
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