Yes, people have used tobacco products for a long time. However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day. They spit, exhaled, etc. Chewing tobacco and snuff are not acceptable and they ruin your teeth/gums. Smoking is not acceptable and it ruins your lungs/breathing ability. This stuff is socially OK, because no one can tell you are using it (no spit or smoke).
Check out all the reports of GI issues on reddit (QuittingZyn). This stuff causes all sorts of GI issues from the top of the stomach to the bottom of the bowel.
We developed, in Snus, an apparently cancer-free chewing tobacco. We developed, in Zyn, a cancer-free, hygienic chewing tobacco with fewer GI issues. We developed, in e-cigarettes / vapes, a cancer-free, COPD-free, carbon monoxide free cigarette.
These should be regarded as public health miracles even if there remain some symptoms of partaking. If 80% of the population is addicted to Zyn or vapes but there are no smokers, you get far better health outcomes than a situation where 20% of the population are smoking and 5% are chewing.
Again, maybe not where you are, but there are definitively countries where both adults and children have tabacco under their lip for most of their waking hours, with no spitting or exhalation involved, as they're inside school/offices, can't really just spit there, even the non-synthetic stuff, as that's relatively new.
Zyn is specifically synthetic isn't it? You still seem to be mostly focused on synthetic nicotine, but the same behavior been observed for many, many decades with non-synthetics too.
Swedish Snus has been around a long time, isn't linked to cancer at all, and has no bad effect on your teeth and gums. Snus is actually associated with vast drops in cancer rates, because it usually replaces smoking. Snus is also no-spit - I think the difference between it and chewing tobaccos is that they are roasted and that snus is steamed. Makes a huge difference healthwise.
I don't have anything to say about the synthetic stuff, I'm not familiar. It's a bizarre industry that cropped up during a period where snus was trying to get into the market and the tobacco companies were trying to keep them out.
Somehow, cigarette companies lobbied to get snus caught up in cigarette taxes, even without the actual health risk. They were only even required to put the weakest possible warning on the package, because the health effects of snus have been well-studied and they're not associated with anything serious, except for nicotine addiction itself (which makes it a good substitute for smoking.)
The big US cigarette companies marketed a few horrible "snus" lines, with the marketing and goal that they would be a replacement product for when a smoker couldn't take a smoke break, and they were weak. I assume these synthetic lines developed to avoid taxes in some way by pretending to be a sort of medical product rather than a tobacco product, like a nicotine gum.
Snus is actually a better Nicorette, I suspected that the nicotene replacement industry had something to do with the sabotage of snus. Snus is cheap, free of health consequences, and doesn't lead you to associate something as addictive as chewing with nicotine consumption. Snus just quietly sits behind your lip, the minis are undetectable by the people you're interacting with, and they smell nice so they don't ruin your breath. Why would you choose a more expensive synthetic alternative?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus
It is basically the same thing but not synthetic. Supposedly nicotin pouches are not as harmful because they do not have tobacco leaves.
I am a bit ambivalent about it, on one hand people don't smoke as much because snus which means I don't get as much second hand smoke.
On the other hand it is WAY easier for kids to get started on it as they don't need to hide it after they put it in their mouths. I know a few people who are heavily addicted to it (one even keeps one in when he is sleeping) and they all started in their early teens.
Also see this other comment on this thread about this issue:
I don't think this is necessarily true everywhere/for everyone, it's really not common in Sweden to walk around spitting just because you have tobacco under your lip, as people sit in offices and stuff with this in their mouth, can't really go around a spit indoors.
The Snus saliva (actual snus) just gets swallowed. Same with Zyn and others.
BTW, colon cancer is rising among men in their 40s, and there is no known reason why.
Quoting chemical highlight 25-1 from "Organic Chemistry" 6th edition by Vollhardt & Schore:
Nicotine appears to play a dual contributory role, because its metabolites are outright carcinogens and because the parent system itself, while not causing cancer, is a tumor promoter.
The metabolic pathway has as the initial step the N-nitrosation of the azacyclopentane (pyrrolidine) nitrogen. Oxidation and ring opening (compare Chemical Highlight 21-3) then take place, giving a mixture of two N-nitrosodialkanamines (N-nitrosamines), each of which is a known powerful carcinogen.
Upon protonation of the oxygen in the nitroso group, these substances become reactive alkylating agents, capable of transferring methyl groups to nucleophilic sites in biological molecules such as DNA, as shown below. The diazohydroxide that remains decomposes through a diazonium ion to a carbocation, which may inflict additional molecular damage (Section 21-10).
You can read more at https://archive.org/stream/VollhardtOrganicChemistryStructur...
IE, e-cigarettes used to be promoted as safe, until the popcorn lung incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#E-cig... (TLDR, some e-cigarettes used diacetyl as a flavoring, which is safe to eat but very toxic to inhale.)
(Kinda stinks because nicotine is a cool drug.)
The outbreak was initially hard for users to trace in particular because of how brands worked in that (again, moderately illegal) industry - a "brand" was basically a paper label/bag production line shipped in the clear from a printer, to hundreds of individual manufacturers, who negotiated their own distribution. Conclusions like "Mellow Mallow Blurple is a safe brand, I tested it" ended up being invalid.
Not true, see the above link.
https://www.inverse.com/science/59207-vitamin-e-acetate-thc-...
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/58581-dank-vapes
All you need to defend a Wikipedia claim staying in the article is a journalist writing something, and journalists with zero idea of what they were talking about outnumbered informed writers a thousand to one.