Rant 152 / Snuff?

4chan has been down for a long time. I've been visiting their cooking and travel sections for some time now, and this downtime made me bored. Those hackers have been DDoS attacking 4chan for DAYS! Apparently, its a 3-5Gb DDoS attack.

A DDoS attack can be described as a spam of "hi" messages from computers to servers. A computer, when connecting to a server, always begins with a form of "hi". If you spam it like crazy, which isn't that hard since this message is in the range of mere bytes, one can overload the server and kind of kill it. This present one hitting 4chan is estimated to be in the range of 3-5 gigs, which is some serious firepower.

So now I'm bored. I went to wikipedia and typed in a random word. This time, I typed "snuff". This is a word I remember from one of the short stories in Foundation by Isaac Asimov. In the book, it was implied to be some form of powdered drug taken nasally by the wealthy.

Apparently, snuff is a real thing. It is actually powdered tobacco that used to be the drug of choice by the social elites in Europe, including Napoleon. Take a pinch and sniff, and that's all it takes. Seems interesting that such a drug isn't used widely to replace cigarettes. In fact, since there's no burning involved, it may even appear to be a healthier choice.

This drug obviously won't get into your lungs. It's not supposed to be and anything that gets past your nose will get stuck to your phlegm. But smoke is different. Cigarette smoke dulls your cilia, which sweeps stuff out of your windpipe, and gets the stuff right to your lung. Therefore, instead of both nasal and lung cancer, you'll only get nasal cancer, if it is even proven to be carcinogenic.

But it's not. Tests that show that snuff is carcinogenic have been done in the US, but the US used mainly oral snuff back then( oral snuff is a paste which users rub onto their gums and is also illegal in most European country). In their reports, and even in wikipedia, they refer to all types of snuff as "snuff" and makes not mention of whether it is the paste or the powder that it is describing.

Few tests have proven that nasal snuff is dangerous. Better still, it contains no tar and other shit that cigarettes companies put in. Just the nicotine that tobacco naturally contains. The nicotine in cigarettes is the thing that gives smokers the high and thus hook them, while those "tar and other shit" are the main killers. I'm not saying nicotine is not dangerous, but it's way less that than everything else in a cigarette. By the way, no teeth stains and bad breath too.

What might be dangerous is the frequent nasal irritation in heavy users and nicotine. But if you're not a heavy user, then the main danger is just the nicotine. Now compare this with SMOKING.

Because of these, nasal snuff is actually tax-free in the UK, which makes it considerably cheaper than cigarettes there. Instead of quitting totally, smokers can switch to this! They can continue getting their high from the same amount of nicotine but only get the risks from it and nothing else. How much better can it get?

I know smoking is hard to quit. Seen some failures before. Maybe they should consider importing snuff. It's probably way cheaper than those chewing gum or patches (it's just ground tobacco after all), and it allows smokers to continue with their love for tobacco. Plus it's relatively much healthier. Why not?

Maybe it also has to do with the image. I'm guessing that it will irritate your nose and make you sneeze. Probably make your nose runny too. According to a snuff-fan's website, the more expensive but finer stuff is more "sneezy" while the coarser powders are less of an irritant. Weird, but good for those who can't afford the best. Even though the image is not as cool as cigarette smoking, I'm sure with enough aggressive advertising, the image can be changed too.

Not the healthiest alternative, but I'm sure it's the next best thing. After all, even a Pope, Benedict XIII, used to love it.