The night the scientists came to Wellington's snuff takers

On the evening of 24 July 1980, a team from the Addiction Research Unit in London turned up at a meeting of snuff takers in Wellington, Somerset, to take blood samples. Wellington had what the researchers called "a colony of keen snuff users", with its own snuff-taking competitions, and the reigning British champion was in the room that night. He volunteered.

The result was a short paper in the British Medical Journal in September 1981: "Nicotine intake by snuff users", by M A H Russell, M J Jarvis, G Devitt and C Feyerabend. The authors knew of only one earlier study of nicotine intake from nasal snuff, and that one had only measured urine.

Why Wellington?

The researchers ran a smokers' clinic at the Maudsley Hospital. Britain had about 500,000 regular snuff takers at the time, by the paper's count, yet in ten years only three had come to the clinic. So the team went to the snuff takers instead, with the help of Garry Cox of Wellington, who organised the evening and arranged the use of the local health centre.

Twenty-seven people took part between 6pm and 10pm. Four had never taken snuff before. Twelve took it now and then (most less than once a week) and eleven took it every day. Each of them gave a blood sample a minute or two before a pinch, then another roughly ten minutes after.

What they found

Within ten minutes, one pinch raised a daily snuff taker's blood nicotine about as much as one cigarette raised a heavy smoker's. The daily snuff takers' peak levels came out very close to those of 136 of the clinic's heavy smokers.

People who took snuff more often absorbed more nicotine. The four first-timers showed no sign of absorbing any, and the authors put that down to the organisers starting them on small doses of a very mild snuff. Those organisers, they wrote, "were great proselytisers and well knew how to avoid an unpleasant initiation". The occasional snuff takers got little from a pinch either. The daily snuff takers got far more, though a few of them still got little despite a pinch every day. That gap probably comes down to the strength of the snuff and the size of the pinch, in the team's view, though they measured neither.

The champion's turn

The champion appears in the caption to one of the paper's graphs. Championship rules meant taking 50 spoons of various snuffs as quickly as possible. Each spoon was "about half the size of a mustard spoon", and "a single sneeze in competitions leads to disqualification."

For the study, the champion (then 65) took 50 spoons of Wilson's Sharrow Mill Best in about 85 seconds. That was well off his best. He'd been known to do it in 46 seconds, according to the caption. His blood nicotine afterwards was more than one and a half times the highest level the team had seen in over 400 heavy smokers at their clinic. Nobody, as far as the team knew, had recorded a figure that high in a human being before.

A second volunteer tried an older contest, five grams of snuff in 60 seconds. Competitions had since dropped it. He managed about four grams of Fribourg & Treyer Prince's Special.

Why the numbers matched

Two groups of people, one sniffing powdered tobacco and one smoking it, ended up with very similar levels in the blood. "It would be a remarkable coincidence," the authors wrote, "if factors such as flavour, strength of tobacco, social influences, and so on just happened to produce similar blood nicotine concentrations resulting from two such different behaviours." Their most plausible explanation was that the nicotine level itself shapes the ritual, whichever way the tobacco is taken.

On the shelf

You'll find Fribourg & Treyer Prince's Special and the Wilsons of Sharrow range on Mr Snuff.

Source: Russell MAH, Jarvis MJ, Devitt G, Feyerabend C. "Nicotine intake by snuff users." British Medical Journal 1981; 283: 814-817. Read the paper on PubMed Central.