Snus Has Saved Many Lives in Sweden – And Can Save Many More

Abstract

In Sweden, there has been a massive transition from cigarette smoking to snus, the Swedish kind of low toxicity oral tobacco. This product poses very little health risk compared to cigarettes, as illustrated by the fact that Sweden has Europe’s lowest level of mortality attributable to tobacco. The current study tries to estimate how much higher the Swedish mortality would have been if there had been no snus in Sweden. Actual Swedish data are compared with two scenarios without snus – a group of comparable countries, and a hypothetical Sweden with no snus use. Both scenarios suggest that around 4,000 lives per year have been saved by the use of snus.