What Is Smokeless Tobacco?
Smokeless tobacco, also called spit tobacco, chewing tobacco, chew, chaw, dip, plug, and probably a few other things, comes in two forms: snuff and chewing tobacco.
Snuff is a fine-grain tobacco that often comes in teabag-like pouches that users "pinch" or "dip" between their lower lip and gum. Chewing tobacco comes in shredded, twisted, or "bricked" tobacco leaves that users put between their cheek and gum. Whether it's snuff or chewing tobacco, you're supposed to let it sit in your mouth and suck on the tobacco juices, spitting often to get rid of the saliva that builds up. This sucking and chewing allows nicotine, which is a drug you can become addicted to, to be absorbed into the bloodstream through the tissues in your mouth. You don't even need to swallow.
You don't smoke it. You don't swallow it. All you do is slosh it around your mouth and spit out the brown juices every few seconds. OK, so it actually is pretty disgusting. But so what? After all, it's called smokeless or chewing tobacco. That means you chew and spit it, not smoke it, so it can't be as bad as inhaling tobacco smoke into your lungs, right?
Wrong . . . unfortunately, smokeless doesn't mean harmless. The fact is, chewing tobacco is every bit as dangerous as smoking it.