Smokeless tobacco use is on the rise – according to national statistics, but also according to anecdotes from Ridgewood High School (RHS) Principal Jack Lorenz. At a presentation Tuesday night given by a prevention specialist with The Center for Alcohol and Drug Resources, a program of Children’s Aid and Family Services, a handful of Ridgewood parents listened and learned about the dangers of smokeless tobacco and why it is growing in use, especially among youth.

Jamie England, the specialist with the Hackensack-based Center for Alcohol and Drug Resources, said that 1,200 people die every day from smoking-related deaths, “and the companies need to replace them. There’s no point in marketing to people over age 25, since the chances of them beginning to smoke that late are much less – so they can start by marketing chew tobacco to kids as young as 12.”

At RHS, Lorenz said he was aware of an increase in smokeless tobacco usage, particularly in the past eight months.

“We’re finding disgusting things in washrooms,” Lorenz said. “This year was probably the worst. … It’s of great concern to me.”

Smokeless tobacco comes in many forms, including looseleaf, “plug” tobacco – such as a new Camel brand called Snus – and snuff, England said. Many are made with harmful chemicals such as cadmium, lead, formaldehyde, arsenic and cyanide, as well as fiberglass and sand, which cut the gum so the tobacco can directly enter the bloodstream.

England provided theories about why so many harmful chemicals are put into tobacco: to improve flavor, to help it stick together, and, in the case of cigarettes, to increase burning productivity – but stressed that there was “no definitive answer.”

Statistics from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration show that New Jersey’s rates of chewing tobacco were 6.9 percent in 2002, 5.5 percent in 2007, and 9 percent in 2009.

While lower than the national averages, the overall trend is toward an increase in usage, England said. In particular, the increase is notable in young men ages 12 to 21.

The trend can partly be accounted for by increased tightening of restrictions on smoking in public places, as well as a more aggressive marketing strategy which appeals to youth, she suggested. For example, chewing tobaccos are often mild or flavored with cherry or mint, and sometimes placed at eye level in convenience stores to “normalize” their presence.

There is also a perception in films or advertising that chewing tobacco is popular with athletes, especially in sports like baseball, NASCAR racing, and football.

“They use positive imagery in advertising … like, ‘This is my hero, so it’s OK he does this,’” she said.

England emphasized that, contrary to tobacco companies’ allusion that smokeless tobacco is less dangerous than smoking, it can cause different kinds of cancer: not only mouth and gum cancer, but, due to the ingestion of the chemically-tainted saliva, also gastric and esophageal cancers and damage to the liver, pancreas and kidneys.

“It’s smokeless, not harmless,” she said.

The presentation was sponsored by a grant obtained by the Ridgewood Municipal Alliance Committee, chaired by Sheila Brogan, who is also a trustee at the Board of Education.

Brogan said the committee might follow up later this year by encouraging high school administrators to address students more directly about the trend, through health classes and sports coaches. Brogan and Lorenz also suggested the district may look into participating in the “Great American Spit Out” in February.

Maple Leaf netminder Jonas Gustavsson marvelled this week at a little known statistic about former NHL star Steve Larmer that doesn’t appear in record books: He puffed his way through more than a pack of cigarettes each day of his career. The topic was athletes and smoking — Wednesday in Toronto, Larmer helped launch a quit-smoking aimed at young athletes — and the genial Gustavsson found it hard to believe after being told the former Chicago Blackhawk and New York Ranger forward performed at such a high level in a 13-year career while being addicted to cigarettes.

“I wouldn’t be able to do that,” said Gustavsson. “I haven’t tried so I don’t know how it feels like. But I guess that would be tough. Your lungs get smaller so I guess it’s tougher to breathe. When you work out, you have to use those lungs. That must have been tough. I wouldn’t try it.”

Larmer certainly wouldn’t recommend it, either.

“It’s probably the most regretful thing I ever started,” he said during an interview at St. Mike’s Arena to promote a website designed to help people stop smoking.

Back in Larmer’s era, the ’80s and early ’90s, there were often a half-dozen smokers on every team. The players lit up on the way to the rink and between periods. Many were stars of the day: Guy Lafleur, Mike Bossy, Rick Vaive among others.

“Denis Savard and Larmer were two of the best players I ever played with, but they both smoked liked chimneys,” said former Leafs defenceman Bob McGill, who played, and smoked, with Larmer for four years in Chicago.

Mario Lemieux smoked early in his career. Wayne Gretzky was known to favour a cigar, as did basketball legend Michael Jordan. Many top athletes have been caught on camera having a smoke, including soccer stars like Wayne Rooney and Zinedine Zidane.

On an official Leafs’ fan page on the nhl.com network, you can find a photo of Leafs’ captain Dion Phaneuf with a cigarette in his mouth during his days as a Calgary Flame.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who admits to smoking cigarettes in the NHL these days. Those around the game say some still do it but do it less publicly due to the anti-smoking bylaws and stigma attached to smoking.

Using snuff and chewing tobacco, however, still appears to be popular among many players, including Washington superstar Alex Ovechkin.

“If you look at the tobacco chew, I think that’s still pretty prevalent in hockey,” said Chris Broadhurst, athletic therapist with the Leafs and Phoenix Coyotes for more than 20 years. He now works at the Toronto Athletic Club. “That gets directly into your system. That’s just as alarming a rate as the actual tobacco smokers.”

Gustavsson is among several Leafs who uses snuff or chews tobacco, including Tyler Bozak and GM Brian Burke. Gustavsson is a snuff-user going back to his days in Sweden, where it’s quite popular. He finds taking a pinch of tobacco and putting it under his lip helps him relax.

“I don’t know. It’s weird,” he said. “I don’t do it during the games or during the intermissions. It’s just between the games. It makes me feel relaxed and it feels nice to put one up there. It’s more like a pleasure thing.”

Still, he’s not entirely comfortable with it.

“I guess it’s a bad habit,” Gustavsson said. “When I was younger, guys started to smoke and I felt like I didn’t want to do that, so I tried this instead with lots of other guys. I’m not a saint, but I guess that’s much better and doesn’t affect my hockey career. Maybe I should quit one day, too.”

Under the league’s collective bargaining agreement, players aren’t permitted to endorse or sponsor tobacco products or use them around fans, in the arena or at team functions. There are also annual tours by NHL/NHLPA doctors that warn players of the dangers connected to nicotine, including oral cancer. The NHLPA has medical consultants available to players who are looking for advice on tobacco use.

Major League Baseball is reportedly considering a ban on smokeless tobacco because of growing pressure from U.S. Congress.

Dr. Anil Gupta, a cardiologist at Trillium Health Centre who is part of the quit-smoking campaign launched yesterday, said smokeless tobacco can be addictive and have a negative impact on performance.

“It’s not about nicotine; it’s the 5,000 other chemicals that come in cigarettes and other tobacco-like products,” said Gupta. “If you want to make a comparison, those same products that are in tobacco from cigarettes, from cigars, or other types of products, they’re the same stuff that’s in lighter fluid, oil paints, oils, cleaning solvents, industrial materials. All that stuff has the same material in them. You wouldn’t go around chewing on those things.”

Larmer’s stats are certainly impressive enough and may yet land him in the Hockey Hall of Fame — 441 goals, 1,012 assists, a big part of the 1991 Canada Cup victory and the Rangers’ Stanley Cup in 1994. He was a finely-skilled offensive and defensive player. Heck, he even set the Chicago “iron man” record of 884 consecutive games.

But Larmer believes his smoking held him back.

“I think, without a doubt, it hurt my performance,” he said. “You recover better between shifts, you recover better between periods, you recover better between games if you’re not a smoker. Therefore, your performance would have been better.”

He said he tried to quit “dozen of times” during his career but always failed, returning to smoking as a crutch to deal with daily pressures. He advises that people seek help from a professional, as only five per cent of people can stop on their own.

It was only after he retired in 1995 and got some straight talk from his then 7-year-old daughter Bailey, who was bringing home anti-smoking literature from school, that he was able to quit cold turkey.

“She’d say, ‘You better be around,’ or ‘You’re going to die tomorrow if you don’t stop today,’” recalls Larmer. “They’re things that make you think about it and help motivate you to quit, absolutely.”

CHICOPEE, Mass. (Mass Appeal) – It’s an inevitable fact of life – your children will experience peer pressure at some point in their childhood. It’s is so important for them to know the negative consequences… that come with the decisions they choose to make. A warning for viewers – some of the pictures shown may be disturbing to some viewers.

Dr. Kelly Bouchard, member of Massachusetts Dental Society tells us more about this important topic.

Dangers of Oral Piercing

Fractured teeth
Sensitive teeth
Nerve damage
Infection (mouth has bateria)
Gum recession
Allergic reaction/choking hazard
Dangers of Chewing Tobacco

Oral cancer
Leads to teeth breaking down
Cavities on teeth
Addictive
Tips for quitting

Write a list of reasons
Pick a date to quit
Tell your family and friends
Find a hobby/activity to keep busy
Sugarless gum/candy, Nicotine gum

HANOI, Vietnam — When pregnant Cambodian women suffer morning sickness, they often reach for an unlikely source of relief: a wad of chewing tobacco.

Many become hooked, and the World Health Organization warned Thursday it is a tradition putting the health of both mothers and babies at risk.

The largest tobacco survey ever conducted in Cambodia found that about half of all women older than 48 regularly chew tobacco, and about one in five rural women first took up the habit during pregnancy, to soothe their prenatal nausea.

The survey conducted by WHO and other researchers found that midwives are the country’s biggest users of smokeless tobacco, with 68 percent chewing it. About half of traditional female healers use it as well.

“Chewing tobacco appears to be strongly influenced by beliefs passed on by older relatives,” lead author, Dr. Pramil N. Singh from Loma Linda University in California, said in a statement. “The behavior is seen as a rite of passage into womanhood. Further research is needed to find out whether village health workers actively promote its medicinal use.”

The tobacco leaves are typically mixed with lime and betel nut, a mild natural stimulant that produces a bright red juice and has been used for centuries across the Asia-Pacific. Cambodian women place the concoction inside their mouths for an extended period, increasing their risk of suffering oral cancer.

As with pregnant women who smoke, those who chew tobacco also put their babies at risk for problems such as low birth weight, decreased lung function and stillbirth.

“Some women believe that when they chew tobacco, they look better,” said Dr. Mom Kong, director of the nonprofit Cambodia Movement for Health. “And some start chewing tobacco when they get pregnant to cope with morning sickness in the first trimester of pregnancy. Some crave something sour. But some women get addicted while using it during the pregnancy.”

As many as three-quarters of all men in some Southeast Asian countries smoke cigarettes, but fewer than 20 percent of the region’s women ever pick up the habit. While about half of older Cambodian women chew tobacco, only about 4 percent of them smoke, compared to nearly half of all men in the country.

The rate of Cambodian women using tobacco increased with age. Similar trends have been observed in Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Taiwan, India, Palau and China.

Dr. Susan Mercado, WHO’s tobacco control adviser for the Western-Pacific region, said it’s common for women, men and children across the region to chew tobacco with betel nut, especially in the Pacific islands where cigarettes are sometimes unrolled and chewed. However, she was unaware of pregnant women using tobacco to lessen morning sickness symptoms anywhere but Cambodia.

“It’s very, very concerning because the impact is not only on the woman but also on the unborn child, and the risk could be quite severe,” she said. “Countries need to have very specific programs that target whatever kind of tobacco use is prevalent. Just because everyone is saying the big problem is second-hand smoke … the problem may not be second-hand smoke for women, it’s actually chewing.”

The study, conducted from 2005 to 2006, involved about 14,000 adult Cambodians nationwide. It was published online in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.

In 1980, two studies were reported in the Journal of the American Dental Association by dental researchers led by Drs Robert Going and Stephen Hsu. They were interested in the sugar content of tobacco in relation to how it might raise the risk of dental cavities.

They found that on average 34 percent of the weight of pouch tobacco is some kind of simple sugar. For plug tobacco, it was 24 percent and for snuff 2 percent. Most of that sugar was either glucose, the form we focus on in the blood in diabetes, or sucrose which is converted in people to glucose.

Incidentally, the sugar content of the tobacco as it is sold was dramatically higher than the sugar content of the tobacco leaves – meaning that much of the sugar was added.

In 1981, a man with diabetes in poor control was described in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine from the Marshall University School of Medicine and the Huntington, W.Va., Veterans Hospital. Despite his being in the hospital and following all the diet instructions he was given, he couldn’t get his blood sugars under control until someone thought about his chewing tobacco. It was labeled “candified” and tasted very sweet.

The man was not willing to stop chewing. However, he stopped swallowing the tobacco juice from chewing and that alone was enough to drop his blood sugars from the 300 to 400 mg/dl range down to 160 to 200. The doctors didn’t get to find out how much more it would have dropped if he had stopped chewing entirely.

Sugar in Chewing Tobacco

The range of sugar contents for the pouch tobaccos tested was between 24 and 65 percent and for the plug tobaccos 13 to 50 percent. If your friend is chewing 3 cans per day and each has 1.2 ounces, that is about 100 grams of tobacco per day, and provides on average about 34 gm of sugar, with the range between 13 and 65 grams of sugars per day depending on the brand; in other words, that’s like 3 to 16 teaspoons of granulated sugar per day.

Even without having the specific content for his brand, that is pretty eye-opening. I don’t know whether the addition of sugar to smokeless tobacco has changed since 1980.

Cutting Back

So, to answer your question, it is possible that cutting back on some forms of smokeless tobacco, particularly pouch and plug tobacco, could have a substantial effect on blood sugar control in people with diabetes. The best way to answer the question in an individual is to see what happens to the blood sugar if chewing is discontinued for one or several days.

Whatever the result, however, that should not detract from the really important message: the cancer risk is the overwhelming reason to stop using smokeless or chewing tobacco.

We’ve all seen that scene in “The Sandlot” when all the kids try chewing tobacco because all their favorite baseball players do it.
This has become a common motif in anti-tobacco campaigns: trying to stop visible figures from doing it because young, impressionable fans who idolize players might just try it and get addicted.

It seems the issue of chewing tobacco has fallen out of the spotlight lately. Its use in Major League Baseball has declined due to policies bans in the minor leagues, but there are still many players who do it.

I was somewhat naive about the whole issue until about my sophomore year in high school, when I found out that my team’s pitching coach dipped. (Dip is fine-cut tobacco that is placed between the lip and the gums, while chew is shredded tobacco leaves or plugs placed in the cheek.) After that point, I began picking up on it when watching baseball on TV.

There are a lot of players who do it—many you might not think of.

I won’t name names, because I don’t think it’s particularly appropriate, nor do I want to start a witch hunt for who does and who doesn’t. But, for example, I can tell you that at least a quarter of the Boston Red Sox do it.

Right now, there’s one team that has taken measures against chew. The Minnesota Twins have outlawed it because their (former) home field (the Metrodome) doesn’t get cleaned or drained by weather. It seems to be a step in the right direction.

Ultimately, the question is, is it such a bad thing?

Chewing tobacco is essentially equivalent to smoking, with different consequences. The problems tend to surface in the oral region rather than in the lungs, which can get really ugly on the outside. It’s clearly a more visible habit than smoking if players are doing it on the field and people are noticing.

What has to be weighed is whether banning chewing tobacco in MLB would cause a significant decline in its popularity in youths.

Perhaps one team could try banning it, and the effect on chewing tobacco popularity in that team’s general area could be studied.

The one caveat, as always, is the potentially monstrous backlash from the players that could result in tobacco bans.

By Dave Meisel, Bleacherreport

The right to chew lives on.

That will be a relief to many of the coal miners Lou Shelly works with at Rocky Mountain Power’s Deer Creek mine.

“It caused a lot of stress for a lot of people for [the company] to say you can’t chew anymore,” said Shelly, who testified last month before an United Mine Workers of America arbitrator. Miners had challenged a ban on smokeless tobacco use at the Emery County mine.

Arbitrator Fred Butler ruled in the union’s favor Friday, determining that Energy West Mining Corp.’s new policy, officially implemented (but not enforced) July 1, violated the company’s collective bargaining agreement covering 276 Deer Creek miners and 17 prep plant workers.

Energy West is the mining subsidiary of Rocky Mountain Power and its parent companies, PacifiCorp and MidAmerican Holdings Co., which enacted the policy at all of their properties.

Butler ruled that chewing tobacco is a prior practice that should be allowed to continue because it is not in conflict with the existing collective bargaining agreement.

In addition, Shelly and other union witnesses at the arbitration session argued that many miners are addicted to chewing tobacco. They find it relaxing while they work deep beneath the ground, far from designated areas where use of tobacco would be permitted.

“It’s a totally different life underground,” said Shelly, who does not chew tobacco. “Chewing is almost like a rite of passage for many
Advertisement
miners.”

Added Dave Maggio, international representative for the union’s Price-based district: “Now the men can go back to chewing tobacco, mining coal and doing their jobs instead of piddling around” with rules that do not enhance safety.

A company spokesman did not respond late Friday to a request for a comment.

mikeg@sltrib.com

11 Sept. 2009 Sltrib

SINGAPORE – A 36 year-old Singaporean man pleaded guilty for distributing sachets of chewing tobacco and was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment on August, 7, 2009.

As a distributor, Shankar s/o Magalimgam was paid $1.50 as commission, for every 30 sachets successfully delivered.

On August 4, Shankar was on his way to replenish his stocks of chewing tobacco when Singapore Customs (SC) officers found him behaving suspiciously in his car at the carpark of Block 614, Choa Chu Kang, Street 62.

Shankar had rented a car to make his deliveries to customers. A total of 12,600 sachets of Han’s Chhap Scented Khani chewing tobacco was found concealed in the boot of his vehicle.

The amount of duty evaded added up to $20,525.40.

Shankar had connections with the two foreigners, also arrested the same day, who were running an illegal collection centre for stocks of illegal cigarettes and chewing tobacco in their rental flat.

Since April 2009, Shankar had made several successful deliveries of chewing tobacco.

Singapore Customs warns that buying, selling, conveying, delivering, storing, keeping, having in possession or dealing with contraband cigarettes are serious offences under the Customs and GST Acts.

The public are also strongly advised not to buy duty-unpaid cigarettes. For possessing a packet of duty-unpaid cigarettes, buyers face a minimum fine of $500 or prosecution in court.


Copyright © Sep 08, 2009 Asiaone

Chewing tobacco is sold primarily on the North American market, mainly in the southern US. Swedish Match is the leading producer of chewing tobacco in the US. Well known brands include Red Man and Southern Pride. The chewing tobacco segment shows a declining trend.

During the second quarter, sales increased by 39 percent, to 314 MSEK (227). In local currency, sales of chewing tobacco increased by 5 percent, as federal excise tax related restocking partially mitigated normal volume declines and price increases took effect. Operating profit increased by 67 percent, to 129 MSEK (77). In local currency, the operating profit increased by 26 percent. Operating margin was 41.0 percent (34.1).

Sales for the first six months amounted to 599 MSEK (437) while operating profit amounted to 227 MSEK (146). In local currency, sales for the first six months were up 3 percent, while operating profit grew by 17 percent. Operating margin was 38.0 percent (33.4).

During the second quarter, the Company began producing chewing tobacco as part of a production agreement with National Tobacco. Production will be fully up and running during the second half of the year.