To visitors, Sweden is as remarkable for what is absent as for what is present. Walking around Stockholm, you hear little noise from traffic, because Swedes have so aggressively adopted electric vehicles. (They also seem constitutionally averse to honking.) Streets and sidewalks are exceptionally free from debris, in part because of the country’s robust anti-littering programs. And the air bears virtually no trace of cigarette smoke. During five days I spent in Sweden this January, I could count the number of smokers I encountered on one hand, and I saw no one pulling on a vape. In November, 2024, Sweden was declared “smoke-free” because its adult smoking rate had dipped below five per cent. As smoking has declined, so have related illnesses, such as emphysema; Sweden has one of the lowest rates of lung cancer in the E.U. This shift is broadly described in academic papers as “the Swedish Experience.”
And yet the Swedes have an immense appetite for nicotine, the addictive chemical found in tobacco. About a third of Swedish people consume nicotine, and they mostly get their fix from snus—small, gossamer pouches that look like dollhouse pillows, which users nestle in their gums. Snus pouches deliver nicotine to the bloodstream through sensitive oral membranes; Swedes refer to the resulting buzz as the nicokick.
“Snus is the first thing I take every morning when I wake up,” Niklas Runsten, an energetic thirty-three-year-old podcast producer, told me. “It’s the last thing I take out before I brush my teeth.” We were sitting in his office, in Stockholm, and he was fondling a brown, hockey-puck-shaped tin. “I’m awake approximately seventeen hours a day, and I probably have a snus in my mouth for sixteen hours and thirty-two minutes,” he said.
Scandinavians have a proud history of snus usage. During the mid-seventeenth century, ground-up sniffing tobacco became popular in the French royal court and made its way to Sweden. Later, working-class Swedes started adding liquid to the powder and placing it against their gums, as a claylike paste. The preportioned pouches that are common today were introduced in the nineteen-seventies, as more people turned to snus in order to stop smoking. In the early nineteen-nineties, when Sweden held a referendum on whether to join the E.U., which had a bloc-wide snus ban, voters adorned their cars with bumper stickers that read, “E.U.? Not without my snus.” Ultimately, Sweden was granted an exemption from the ban in exchange for stricter warning labels.
The most committed Swedish snus enthusiasts sometimes talk like sommeliers, capable of detecting subtle differences in tobacco quality and flavor. Before he shut down Fäviken, his two-Michelin-star restaurant, the renowned Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson was known to offer patrons a portion of snus at the end of their meal. In Skansen, a part of Stockholm that’s home to a children’s petting zoo and farmstead tours, there is a Snus and Match Museum, funded in part b
