Regarding lxskllr, I understand why people are getting upset by him because he comes across very harshly, but I don't think he is trying to troll anybody. I'm not sure what exactly he was getting at with the sunflower comments, but I do agree that smokeless tobacco is not nearly as dangerous as we have been lead to believe. Understand that I'm not saying it's safe, but it is far less dangerous than smoking. Most people don't realize, for example, that smoking puts you at a much higher risk of oral cancer than chewing tobacco.
American chew and dip is fermented, a process which results in the creation of carcinogenic chemicals called nitrosamines from the tobacco. These same nitrosamines are also present in high quantities when tobacco is fire-cured for use in cigarettes.
In chewing tobacco, nitrosamines are found in concentrations high enough to cause cancer, but only after a very long (lifetime of) exposure. When you smoke, you are inhaling these nitrosamines along with hundreds of other chemicals from the combustion of tobacco, including carbon monoxide, directly into your mouth and lungs. To classify these habits as equally risky is really kind of silly, but in our crusade to label all tobacco use as unequivocally dangerous we sort of lost sight of what is rather obvious - one is a lot worse for you than the other.
Furthermore, Swedish snus is pasteurized rather than fermented, a process which results in only trace levels of nitrosamines. Snus has been used for hundreds of years in Sweden, and it is still very popular and ubiquitous over there even today. The rate of tobacco use in Sweden is comparable to that of any other first-world nation (roughly 25% of adults use tobacco), yet they have BY FAR the lowest lung cancer rates of any developed country in the world (
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/images/graphics/g1-04-02.gif).
The primary reason? More men in Sweden use pasteurized tobacco (aka snus) than smoke cigarettes. Their government also closely controls snus production and sets strict standards for allowable nitrosamine levels in their snus, which are a small fraction of the levels found in American dip. Note that American snus products (like Camel SNUS) are not held to any such standards - so they are generally not considered to be real snus.
So I am not saying there is any such thing as "safe" tobacco. But there absolutely is a difference in risk factors, and there absolutely has been a lot of misinformation given to the American people in this regard. Here is an article that discusses this issue:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/10/tobacco_truth_gets_smoked_99840.html
I particularly like this quote: "A 2005 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that only 11 percent of smokers who were aware of smokeless tobacco think it is safer than cigarettes, while 83 percent disagree -- which is the equivalent of believing it's safer to drive without a seat belt than with one."
To use my own highly scientific model (adapted for consumption by ATOT), the risk graph looks something like this:
(BAD FOR YOU) smoking >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> dipping >>>>> snus >> coffee (NOT AS BAD FOR YOU)