Just A Pinch Between My Cheek And Gum

Maybe it’s not Obama’s year after all — people in New York have started chewing tobacco:

On a recent Friday evening, two New York City gentlemen in their 20s were sitting at Vol de Nuit, a Belgian beer bar in the West Village. After some conversation, they removed a couple of small, tea-bag-like packets stuffed with tobacco out of a circular black plastic container the size of a hockey puck and, between sips of Pilsner, placed them inside their respective upper lips.

First came the burning sensation, followed by a slightly unpleasant taste, and then, the nicotine buzz.

“It combines the cleanliness of not smoking with the pleasure of tobacco,” said one of the men, who wished only to be identified by his first name, Lucas, of the substance, a product imported from Sweden called “snus” (rhymes with “loose”). “It’s like a secret. Nobody really has to know you’re doing it.”

In a city where the act of lighting up in a bar or restaurant increasingly seems a part of ancient history, where smokers now huddle in angry little knots under scaffolding, shunned by polite society, could snus be the up-and-coming vice of choice?

“We sell out of them like candy — it’s very popular,” said Mario Chebly, manager of the smoke shop Shisha International on West Fourth Street, of packages of snus, which retail for a recession-friendly $5 apiece (some stores are now pricing cigarettes at $10 per pack). It was a little after 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, and Mr. Chebly was standing beside a refrigerated display case of General brand snus, flanked by shelves of Marlboros and Dunhills. He’d sold 14 containers of the moist oral tobacco to “nice, good-looking, professional people” since opening at around 11 that morning.

. . .

The use of snus brings a certain class, if that’s possible, to this consumer category. It’s quite discreet, and unlike the chewing tobacco or dip favored by baseball players, doesn’t require spitting. And while snus tins do come with the requisite warnings of mouth cancer, gum disease and — yikes! — tooth loss, for some nicotine addicts, it seems like a slightly healthier alternative to hacking up a lung each morning, or smelling like they just bathed in an ashtray.