Another form of nicotine...

by chris
(aurora, il, usa)

My nicotine addiction if from dip tobacco aka pinch tobacco...not chewing tobacco...there's a difference. There isn't as much info on quitting dip, except that dipping 10 times per day is the same as smoking 2 packs of cigarettes. That's 40 cigarettes!! I used to smoke about a pack per day. I was nicotine free for 6 months until I started getting depressed for personal reasons and I didn't want to go back to smoking. So I started purchasing cans of dip. Some people say smoking is a nasty habit. It doesn't even come close to how nasty dipping is. Just like you would pinch someone on the arm, you use the same two fingers to grab a "pinch" of dip to put in your lower lip. However, even from the start I would take about 5 pinches worth. It was so much that it was obvious that I was dipping because my lower lip was protruding so far out. After getting moist tobacco on your fingers (nasty), to keep from grossing people out you would have to find some sort of container that wasn't clear to spit the tobacco juice into. At first I was getting flavors like wintergreen or mint, but soon realized that I enjoyed the natural flavor of the tobacco more than flavored kinds. There is a little sugar and quite a bit of salt in dip. It's what makes you salivate and find the need to spit the juice out. After 1 day, I would empty a 16 ounce bottle of pure tobacco spit about 3 times per day. That's 48 ounces of spit from dip!! As you can imagine, from spitting this

often, it's easy to become dehydrated. Also, if I wanted to eat, swallow a pill like Aspirin, or drink anything, I would have to take the dip out of my lip, wash the inside of my mouth out with water until all tobacco debris was gone and then eat or drink or whatever. About addiction to dip and chew. A pinch of dip has 5 to 6 times as much nicotine in it than 1 cigarette. I've tried quitting dip twice before and it makes quitting cigarettes like a walk in the park. The one sole reason for smoking in the past and/or dipping has been out of boredom or mild to medium depression. I have a Boy Scout trip coming in 2 weeks. I'm an adult leader. I first thought that I would just use smaller pinches to make it less noticeable that there was something in my lower lip. But I'm setting an example for these kids and besides my own personal reasons for wanting to quit anyway, I don't want to make an impression on these Scouts that tobacco-use is an okay thing to get involved in. I curse the day I had my first cigarette when I was a kid. Most kids are pretty innocent and smoking a cigarette out of peer-pressure or curiosity or whatever the reason may be, you never think that using tobacco occasionally can eventually become regular and then when trying to quit, experience all the withdrawal symptoms, etc. I will just end this long as heck paragraph with the fact that after those 3 days of being nicotine free, it's just like people say: "It's all mental after that."