I still have an occasional pipe or cigar now and then. I went a long time without wanting them once I gave up cigarettes. I was afraid that the mere act of burning tobacco would drive me back to cigarettes, but it isn't like that at all. Even when I smoked cigarettes I never inhaled pipes or cigars, but my tastebuds were still wrecked and I never really got to appreciate the nuances of premium tobacco like I can now thanks to snus.

I'm pretty much back to where I was when I was ten or eleven years old. My cousin and I would steal my Grandpa's Blue Ribbon cigars (sometimes Dutch Master) and go hide in the woods and smoke them like we were bigshots. We did this every now and then. I would savor the "high" I'd get from those stogies, and the drunk dreamlike walk back home through the forest that I would barely remember later in the day. Later on we would start stealing Red Man chew or Copenhagen dip and I noticed that our trips out to the woods were becoming more and more frequent. That was the start of my nicotine addiction, as far as I can tell.

Once I hit about twelve I had graduated to cigarettes, and when I learned how to "for real" smoke by inhaling it down to my lungs, I noticed none of the pleasant, calming tranquility that I got from cigars. Instead I noticed an insane hypodermic injection of that "warm" feeling I got when I chewed and dipped. This truly was the only way to take tobacco.

Flash forward twenty years and the nicotine that I get from Swedish snus is sort of in between what I got from Cigarettes and dip. I get the required amount of nicotine satisfaction (similar to cigarettes) but it lasts longer (like when I dipped). Cigarettes gave me an instant fix, but it was short lived. Dip took  forever  to deliver nicotine to my brain, but it lasted a great while. Snus seems to hit me harder and faster than dip, and it has enough nicotine that I don't have to use a pack a day (like cigarettes or dip). It truly is the best nicotine delivery device on the planet.

And now that I no longer smoke and I have my nicotine addiction appeased, I can enjoy a cigar or pipe once or twice a week and not crave a cigarette. However, if I was able to get over my nicotine addiction I would probably never pick anything up ever again if I could help it. Since I'm a realist and I realize that for better or worse I'm always going to have Vitamin N [nicotine] coursing through my system, there's no way in heck I would give up snus. Even if I could make it two days or two months, the temptation would be too great to pick up something unhealthier. Swedish Snus helped me quit cigarettes and snus helps me stay quit.

I've seen it happen to many times to friends and relatives that have quit smoking. They're fine for a few months, a few weeks, sometimes even a few years- but I can honestly say that I don't know a single person that quit cigarettes at one point and didn't have a relapse down the road.  I however know of many smokers that switched to real snus and never looked back. I'm one of them and now I'll live to tell about it.

Happy and Healthy,

RR HUBBARD
The World According to Feck
Reporting for SnusCENTRAL.org

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