As I’ve mentioned before, while I was in Sweden as a guest of Swedish Match, I spent my free time chasing down non-Swedish Match snus that you can’t get in the USA.

One example: Lucky Strike White portions.

I used to get this stuff occasionally when I first quit smoking in 2007. I liked it back then because it was kind of a straight tobacco taste and the tin was pretty cool. Then I started learning a little more about snus, and the words on the side of the tin, “It’s Toasted,” started to worry me. Did that mean they put this snus in a toaster? Is that going to be bad for my face?

I don’t remember the progression precisely, but it was around the same time I got hooked on Goteborgs Rape white. I recall staying up really late one night and drunkenly falling in love with its oily flavor. At some point, however, Goteborgs Rape became the only snus that I can’t use at all. For some reason it makes me queasy. No. 2 doesn’t make me ill, by the way. This is probably an emotional problem.

Anyway, “It’s Toasted” no longer appears on the tins. I was right back then in that thinking something that was toasted might be bad for you. But I was wrong in that Lucky Strike, despite what the tin said, was not toasted.

Anyway, this snus tastes alright. It’s a little citrus and a decent tobacco flavor. But the thing that bugs me about these is that they’re really fucking small portions.

Math time. (As usual, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). The tins have 19.2g of snus and there are 24 portions in a tin. 19.2g/24 = 0.8g

That’s 20% smaller than I’m used to. As a new snuser, I didn’t notice it, but now it feels like a mini — although they could have changed it since then, I don’t know.

Even stranger is that the bag doesn’t seem smaller. It’s like they reduced the size of the hot dog but left the bun the same. Check out this picture: Ettan White on the left, Lucky Strike White on the right.

They look about the same, but the Lucky bag is noticeably flaccid.

One more thing I want to share…

How to open Lucky Strike from the F&L website a while ago. Can’t find it on there now…

PACT and FDA has made snus blogging a little depressing lately. It seems stupid to make a hummus snus experiment or review some snus we can’t get anymore right now. I also think I’ve kind of blown my wad on how dumb most of these new laws are.

Let’s go back to an old topic that is neither dull nor trite: Health. It’s been a while since Chad and I got back from Sweden, and I’ve been putting off writing about what was probably the best presentation we were given. Dr. Lars-Erik Rutqvist was the last one from the Swedish Match to speak to us, and it was pretty incredible.

Just like Chad and I, Lars used snus to quit smoking. Unlike us, he’s a doctor — an oncologist, I believe. The upshot of it all was: snus is safe. Now, he’s a little bit more nuanced of a guy than I am, so he might not have said those words exactly, but that certainly was the impression I got. To illustrate the minor dangers associated with it, he compared it to coffee, a very addictive substance with small amounts of known carcinogens.  Where’s the ban on mailing coffee? Why aren’t we worried about our kids getting irrevocably hooked? Why isn’t it taxed $1.32 per ounce here in stupid Texas?

(note: Dr. Rutqvist did note that Brad Rodu first brought this analogy to his attention, and Dr. Rodu’s blog is well worth reading.).

It’s the smoke that does so much harm. Imagine if you smoked caffeine. It would be horrible for you.

I know what some may say. “But what about mouth cancer studies I learned about in my public school health class?” A lot of those studies anti-tobacco folks tout are quite old and none are about snus. Just the other day, thisisswedishsnus.com provided some nice links on the science behind harm reduction. Chad has a dozen health-related links over at snubie. And snuscentral has a few dozen.

So millions will die. (Obama too, perhaps, as he hasn’t yet responded to my offer for more snus.)

After all, that’s why these dumbfuck laws are so tragic. Snus makes it fairly easy to stop smoking. Around the U.S., disgustingly wretched state governments in Iowa, South Dakota and Massachusetts (a state, I always mistrusted due to the fact that women there seem to genuinely give a shit about baseball) have banned the mailing of snus altogether. They can’t order online. This is particularly shitty when you think of people who live outside of a city where General is available. In South Dakota, you’re pretty much fucked, I imagine. It’s huge and there’s probably not a city worth a turd in the whole place.

Still, even in little Massachusetts, you’ll likely only find snus in Boston, which could be hours away. Read this letter a woman wrote to the Mass. Attorney General.

Fucked up, isn’t it?

What can you do? I don’t know. We could sign this petition, but our government doesn’t care what we think.

Been awhile folks.

As I’m sure you’re aware, PACT joined us this past week. While the tax part is annoying, I understand it. Your government wants your money, it can get it however it wants to, more or less.

It the USPS ban that so fucking stupid congress and the president should be sent to clown school. I’ve never once heard of a kid who got smokes on the Internet. I’m not saying it’s never happened. Rather, if you want to keep tobacco out of kid’s hands, you should ban tobacco sales in convenience stores and raise the age limit to buy tobacco to 21.Why? Because stupid kids under 18 get their friends who are exactly 18 to by smokes from them at convenience stores. And about 1 in 10 guys who work at these places will sell to anyone. Why? Probably just stupidity, laziness or greed.Perhaps all three.

Luckily, it may well be unconstitutional to ban the mailing of tobacco. Some 140 Seneca online tobacco sellers got a restraining order allowing them to continue to ship via the post office.

They claim the law violates:

the Commerce Clause
the Import-Export Clause
the Due Process Clause
the Equal Protection Clause
the 10th Amendment
Native American treaties

Now, I have no idea whether these claims are true or not. But I do like that there are so many of them. I also think it would be awesome if this shit got struck down. However, I doubt it will.

Meanwhile, people trying to buy snus online over the past week or so have had problems. I’m going to quote a reader of my blog and my response here:

—

Mark Mitchell commented: Hmmm. As the good Doctor and brother Chad have without doubt noticed things are not going as swimmingly for The Northerner as they, and pretty much everyone else, had hoped. The PACT transition is proving to knotty in the extreme. Of course the fullness of time will insure that order emerges from the current chaos but a heck of a lot of ill will is being generated in this confused and testy interregnum.

I responded: I’ve read about the problems people are having and it is unfortunate. However, we’re just one week since they implemented their new software. They’ll surely figure their shit out. If it takes a month, I wouldn’t be surprised. They now have to deal with about 50 tobacco licenses, 50 sets of reports and pay taxes to 50 jurisdictions. It’s a fucking nightmare, and seems all but impossible. Keep in mind how many snus shops got out the business to avoid this mess. As far as ill will goes, again, I get it, but it’s misdirected. Call you congressman. Your representatives did this on your behalf. Anyway, whatever ill will it generates doesn’t matter much. Where else are we going to buy from?

—

Now, if you read anything about snus anywhere on the web, you knew PACT and the FDA were on the way. Here’s what I did to prepare:

I’m sure Northerner will figure out what’s going on before I run out.

And, awesomely, the General fridge at my cigar bar now has a cool dispenser contraption:

As you can see, we’re low on snus. Order’s on the way, I hear.

Several things going on that I want to mention. Northerner is updated and FDA compliant. As well, they’re only shipping with UPS, ahead of the PACT Act requirement. Right now, shipping 50 tins (portions) from Northerner costs about $14. Not horrible. Shipping 10 tins is about $13. Yikes.

Northerner has said that the new tax collection scheme will be implemented any day now, but definitely by Monday (6/28). The clock is ticking… The the details are here. Most interestingly, is their availability list:

- Gotlandssnus (Gotlandssnus and Jakobsson’s brands)
- Swedish Match (all brands)
- V2 Tobacco (Thunder, Offroad, Rothbrix and Fellinni)
- Gellivare (Gellivare and Landströms)
- Gajane (all brands)

Some surprises here. We’ve been trying to find out definitively whether or not Skruf was going to be available. Northerner had been saying it would be while SnusCentral had been saying it wouldn’t. I tried to contact Skruf, and they did not respond. Larry got in touch with some bigwig over there a few weeks ago, and got a somewhat cryptic answer. Be that as a it may, for now, Skruf is a no show to the PACT party.

Also, Gajane came through. There had been question marks for a long time as their usually secretive weirdos. This is good news as their Oden’s line seems like it has many fans.

Like Northerner, Buysnus is now only shipping with UPS to the U.S. Over there, one roll costs about $10 to ship. Five rolls costs about $30.

And swedishsnus.com, for now, is still shipping with the regular post. Interestingly, they’ve created a some kind of joint venture with clubsnus.com. How this will work out, I don’t know (a short press release is at clubsnus.com). Swedishsnus has kept the dirt-cheap prices from when it was run by Swedish Match. Could be interesting to see what happens. However if the regular mail option goes away, shipping could be quite pricey. UPS shipping for one roll now costs $30, while five costs $41.

Clearly, going forward, you’ll need to make big orders to have it any make economic sense. Otherwise, it’ll probably be cheaper to go to your local retailer. Especially if you can work out a bulk deal with him.

Of course, this assumes you like General Snus, for now.

Thunder Frosted and Wintergreen, Jakobsson’s Wintergreen and Oomph will be showing up in stores in the near future.

If I were the General, I’d get my extra strong in my refrigerators asap.

The FDA tobacco control act goes into effect today. There’s been plenty of speculation and interpretation as to what it means for us. Now that’s here, I’m just going to sit back and watch the snus shops and the manufacturers and see what they do. The real danger isn’t what’s upon us in the next 24 hours, but what may come in the future. I hope they’re satisfied for a while as far as blindly banning tobacco goes. You’d think that the FDA would look at shit like science to make decisions. Not the case today. With luck, they will in the future.

But don’t count on it.

PACT is about a week away, and all our refrigerators are overflowing with snus. Some places more than others. Here in Texas, you can get ready to spend another $1.32 per tin of portions. More for loose, as we have a weight based tax. Other states, it’s significantly less. In Alabama, for example, it’s 4 cents per tin. Watch the snus arbitrageurs. As well, we’ll need to keep an eye on just what shipping is going to cost, but I know my next order won’t be for a few months. By then we’ll have had many people complaining about snus shipping prices all over the Internet.

While I fully intend to keep ordering my snus love, Roda, I’m very lucky (clever?) in  that I can get General snus at my bar. And before too long, Northerner will have Jakobsson’s Wintergreen, Thunder Frosted, Thunder Wintergreen, and (probably) Oomph at my shop and other cool retailers around the country. Although I don’t actually use any of those four snus, my wife does (Oomph). My friends do (Thunder Frosted). Someone must like wintergreen, I guess, but I’ve yet to meet him.

What’s the point? If I knew that, I’d be writing for Salon or Newsweek or something. I just do snus, high finance and dick jokes. Give a brother a break.

Nicotine content. Reverse merger. What’s the difference between a prostitute and drug dealer?

Wait. Here’s the point: This is not the Snuspocalypse. Not today. Swedish Match, Northerner, Fumee Cigars (and other awesome retailers), and many more are trying to keep snus in your hands. Heck, starting the other day you could go over to snuson, give them $100 and walk away with 50 tins of snus and some kind of royal forum title. Apparently there’s only Gotlandssnus available now, but that will become a steal of a deal if you live a shitty high-tax state like me.

Oh yeah…

A drug dealer can’t wash his crack and resell it.

I’m out…

DrSnus

This part of the series on my trip to Gothenburg is about the presentations Swedish Match gave. There were 4 that I haven’t yet discussed, all quite interesting.

The first was done by Connie Andersson who is the tobacco and flavor guy. I just googled him and his title says “Product Specialist” on linkdin, so there you go. He’s the guy who makes Kardus, and probably all our favorite snus. He also wore red pants. If there were a snus superhero, it just might be him.

Conny had us smell a bunch of snus and then make our own. I made some pretty good snus (garlic lime) and pretty horrible snus (herb honey rum). The honey rum was decent, but the herbs made it weird… No matter.

I captured Conny’s snus flavor travel kit in one of the two pictures I took while in Sweden (with my camera phone):

The other is Chad reporting his luggage lost to SAS:

Chad (at the fartherst window) was only without his luggage until Friday evening…We were about to go get him red pants like Conny’s when his bags showed up.

One interesting tidbit was the price of some of the flavorings used is out of this world. The rose oil they use in Grov, I heard, costs something like $500 a vial. They probably don’t use much.

I also talked to Conny extensively while we were both quite hammered and I think we hatched a plan to take over the world. It was a good plan, I think, but I forget the details.

The second class of Swedish Match’s snus school was this guy named Nik Krohn, who I recognized from the last IPCPR in New Orleans. He’s a brand marketer and he told us about the user profiles for the four most important brands to the company: General, Ettan, G-Rape and Catch. I was experiencing a severe hangover at this point. But I do recall something about: General users are douchebags, G-Rape users are hipsters, Ettan users are hillbillies and Catch users are smokers.

OK, that’s not exactly what he said. But if you replace my dysphemisms with euphemisms, we’re about there. He said that their research showed these user profiles to be quite accurate. I wanted to ask him about my favorite, Roda, but I worried he’d say it’s for lady boys. I did ask him, however, how they communicated with their users.

The answer:

The tin.

I knew they couldn’t make commercials for snus, but it occured to me they might be able to make them for Onico. I asked and they, indeed, could. There aren’t any currently running on TV, but I found some older ones that seem legit.

Here they are:

At this point we ate lunch. I think it saved my life. I hadn’t really drank like that in well over a year. It was 3AM and the sun was coming up when we left the club. I slept through my alarm. Markus had to call me a half a dozen times to get my ass out of bed…

Re-energized, we met up with a guy named Bengt Börjesson. He buys tobacco. Sounds easy right? Well, there’s a hell of a lot involved. I wish I took notes as he had a killer flow chart. Basically, the process is filled with quality checks throughout — basically checking to make sure there’s no nasty shit. Bengt flies around the world to check out the farms and tobacco samples get analyzed for bad shit at every turn.

One interesting thing my beer-soaked brain recalls was that they buy from two tobacco growing conglomerates. Why? Good question. Well, if they refuse a big batch, these two companies take the product back no problem and can find something else to do with it. Smaller companies apparently don’t have the capacity to pull that switcharoo off every time. I suspect the rejected tobacco probably goes to make Marlboros in Kazakhstan.

There was one more presentation. It was my favorite and will be the subject of my next post unless I get a bug up my ass about something or there’s some breaking news story…

Like this Street Fighter 2 Guile version of G-Rape:

Action Figure not included.

If you were a doctor, would you live in BF Texas for four years in exchange for $160,000?

As it turns out, probably not.

According to the Lubbock Journal, the $1.32 minimum tax on smokeless tobacco that went in to effect last year isn’t getting doctors to live in shitty places. Why? Living in a shitty place sucks, and $160,000 or $1.32 per tin doesn’t change that when you’re a doctor. Who’s the doctor going to drink beer with? Who’s he going to date? Is he going to send his kid to that one room school?

No. If he’s going to live in this state, chances are he’ll live outside Dallas or inside Houston — not that these places lack shitty qualities — and drive his BMW to Whole Foods on paved roads.

Poor rural Texas. No doctors for you.

Lucky legislators. I’m sure they’ll find something to do with the cash…

Swedish Match just announced that they’re changing N&J Black to N&J White. The difference? The bag and tin. It should be available in early July.

Last week I told you about this, but I didn’t have a picture. Instead I did an artistic recreation:

That’s pretty close, if you ask me.

I know last time I promised I’d tell you about the interesting people that Chad and I got to speak with. Too lazy today. Instead, I’m going to take you to the part of my story after all the Swedish Match festivities had ended.

Mostly, Chad and I walked around and looked at snus. We didn’t buy too much, but when we did, it was the contraband shit you can’t get in the U.S. without a hassle. At some point, I had a bag full of this snus and I really felt like I was cheating on Swedish Match. In fact, if one of them had run into me on streets of Gothenburg and they asked what I had in the bag, I would have rather copped to pornography and heroin.

Anyway, non-Swedish Match snus is pretty hard to find with any regularity. But since this was our big chance to try it, we searched. Pretty much every shopkeeper in Gothenburg got a visit from us. We eventually pieced together a decent selection of snus that’s unavailable here. I haven’t tried any of it yet.

I eventually will give it a try as it’s my journalistic responsibility to try it for you. Maybe after I go through these two tins of Roda I opened up today. The first because I was out anything worthwhile that was open and the second because I couldn’t find the first one since I put it somewhere stupid and couldn’t find it within 30 seconds so I ran to my stockpile of it.

Other than snus searching, we didn’t do all that much. Central Gothenburg is a clusterfuck on a nice Saturday afternoon. It really seemed that everyone in the city was walking around in and around the central mall. Instead, we went to a museum and saw, among other crap, a Rembrandt and some panty paintings.

You know what a Rembrandt looks like, so here’s the panty pic courtesy of Chad:

Chad and I also took a boat tour of the canals. The tour guide went back and forth from Swedish to English and she kept using a word that sounded like “toilet” in Swedish but never said the word “toilet” in English.

At one point — it’ s worth pointing out that they didn’t tell us this before hand — we had to practically lie on the ground to avoid be decapitated by a bridge. Here’s that moment:

There was a monster truck show in town, and a Sex and the City II release party. We didn’t go to either. Oddly, someone got shot dead at the Sex and the City party. However, the monster truck show went off without a hitch…

We saw one of the trucks in the mall.

I think that’s Raphael.

As it turned out, forgetting my camera wasn’t too big of a deal as far as snus pics go. When our factory tour leader — a woman who stood no more than 5′ tall — showed up, she told us we couldn’t take any pictures inside the place. Quite frankly, the way she bossed us around was pretty intimidating. I mostly stayed out of trouble from her, except when I said “You can smell the rape in the air” near the batch of GR N. 2.

The company is pretty secretive. In fact, a local reporter who wanted to interview us couldn’t get cleared to enter the place. But that was cool with me. I was so jet lagged the first day and so hungover the second day… perhaps more on that later.

However, even if I had detailed videos of the whole place, I don’t know anyone that could reverse engineer, say, General Onyx. I guess someone out there might be able to, though.

So Swedish Match has two factories. The first one is downtown, the other is in the country. The first is pretty old, the second is pretty new. The first one makes loose and original snus, the second makes white portions. I imagine the first as a barber shop, the second as an operating room.

At each factory, we were able to see — as far as I can reckon — the whole snus making process, more or less. I’m happy to report that it looked good to me. Here’s Chad’s pic of the newer snus factory.

It surprise me how much snus got thrown out. At nearly every step, some test was being done on the product. For example, the star formation machine scans the tin after the snus is supposed to be in place. If one little portion is slightly off kilter, the whole tin gets tossed in the bin. This is probably cleaner and cheaper than some factory worker pushing it back down with his thumb.

Cheaper? I’ve always figured snus is pretty inexpensive to make… once you have the machine, of course. Well, here’s some extremely imprecise math to help illustrate. Again, this is just an estimate. In fact, just an estimate of the tobacco content — not anything else.

Tobacco is stored at the new factory. They had some nine months of tobacco in there — a couple hundred million tins of snus worth, give or take. Boxes upon boxes upon boxes or 200 kg of tobacco. Someone asked what one of those cost. The answer was something like, about 10,000 crowns but it changes depending on all sorts of factors such as the weather, demand, etc.

We also learned that the tobacco in the boxes had about 10% water. So, 200,000 grams at 10% water is 180,000 grams of dry tobacco. Let’s assume that snus is 50% water and 50% tobacco (it’s close). That means we get 360,000 grams of snus from one box. That’s 15,000 tins of 24 grams. 10,000 crowns/ 15,000 tins = .66 crowns. At current exchange rates, that’s about 8.5 cents worth of tobacco.

Again, it’s a very rough number and it doesn’t account for a lot of stuff, like water, electricity, flavoring, plastic tins, labels, portion material, factory workers, trips for world-famous snus bloggers, etc. etc. Also, I think this is a high-end number (for the tobacco) as snus also contains some part tobacco stem (who knows how much?), which has got to cost less than leaf. As nicotine content varies in a leaf, adding stem can get it to the right level.

You probably know that there are a lot of different types of tobacco. What type of tobacco do they use? All kinds. The biggest thing they look for is super-low levels of bad chemicals that you can find in tobacco. The second most important thing was “quality.” Although kind of vague, it seemed to me to mean the general sexiness of the leaf. I don’t know. The impression I got was that specific types of plants, where it comes from, and where on the plant it comes from don’t matter as the snus making process nukes the nuance out anyway. Of course, the tobacco is all air and sun cured — as opposed to fire cured — as fire introduces nasty shit you don’t want to put in your face.

This is already past my personal TLDR length, so we’ll call that the end of the factory descriptions unless I think of something Earth shattering to share. Next time, we’ll go into some of the interesting people we got to speak to.