
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 18, 1995                   TAG: 9505180033
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SNUFFED

MORE EVIDENCE to suggest that the tobacco industry manipulates the nicotine kick users get from its products is provided by a series of studies on moist snuff publicized in the spring issue of Tobacco Control.

Moist snuff is smokeless tobacco that is placed between cheek and gum, there to release its poisonous, potentially addictive drug into the bloodstream. How much nicotine can be delivered depends, scientists maintain, on the pH of the snuff. The higher the pH - that is, the more alkaline it is - the more nicotine is able to pass through the mucous membranes into a person's blood.

Science News reports that two teams of scientists, one at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore and the other at the American Health Foundation in Valhalla, N.Y., found that pH values and nicotine content varied from brand to brand. One team calculated that only 7 percent of the nicotine in Skoal Bandits Wintergreen is un-ionized, and thus able to pass through the mucous membrane, while that figure rose to 20 percent in other Skoal brands and to 79 percent in Copenhagen.

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, meanwhile, analyzed data on young snuff users and found that of 26 teen-agers who used the relatively mild Skoal products, half had gone on to other brands four years later, one-third to the potent Copenhagen.

Who woulda thunk it?

Surely not tobacco marketers, who are shocked - shocked - by suggestions that cigarette makers have any strategy for snaring customers when they are young and their delusions of invincibility are intact, knowing with cynical certainty that a good number will become addicted and, with any luck, enslaved to their cravings for nicotine for a lifetime.

Can the public be so harsh as to think they would do anything for a buck? No, it is not pH that determines the rate at which nicotine enters the blood, the U.S. Tobacco Co. blandly assures its critics, but behaviors and other factors. Primarily, one might suppose, that first dumb act of taking a pinch and tucking it between cheek and gum where, for about 28,000 people a year, oral cancer and gum disease start.

by CNB