At the sleek, black Copenhagen trailer – a fixture at state fairs and rodeos across the Rocky Mountain West – visitors can learn about the history and craft of making chewing tobacco.
They can watch videotapes of bull-riding champions in action and then see them hoist cans of chew. Hostesses hand out samples of apple and peach blends of “long cut smokeless tobacco.”
Soon there will be another fixture at the fairs and rodeos – the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The department is planning to use a small slice of the more than $37 million of increased tobacco- tax revenues – set aside in the next two years for smoking education programs – to combat snuff and chew.
“We’re planning some fairly significant efforts around spit (tobacco) with the tobacco-tax money,” said Karen DeLeeuw of the health department’s tobacco control program.
It will not be an easy sell.
Pete Zick started chewing as a firefighter in Phoenix. And the habit translated easily to his current career. He raises cattle east of Colorado Springs.
“I have (a pinch) in all the time” at work, the 37-year-old said.
Zick says he knows it causes cancer, but he isn’t worried. And Zick says he could quit anytime.
While the South consistently leads the nation in smokeless-tobacco use, the West is close behind – especially the rural West, where use is nearly four times the national average.
In 24 rural Colorado counties, more than 20 percent of adult men reported using smokeless tobacco in a 2001 state survey. The national average was 5.7 percent in 2000, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Among Colorado high-school boys in rural counties, 17 percent described themselves as smokeless-tobacco users.
Wyoming has the highest percentage in the nation – 28.6 percent of high-school boys reported using chew.
That’s what prompted Niki Sue Mueller to create Wyoming’s Through With Chew program – the first of its kind in the nation.
In Colorado, steps to combat smokeless tobacco may include chew-specific additions to the state’s telephone Quit Line and more work in schools, especially in counties with the highest rates of use, DeLeeuw said.
“When we know there’s a community, for example, that has a big rodeo, and we know there’s going to be exposure to spit marketing,” DeLeeuw said, the state will work with the local health department to come up with tobacco-education billboards and advertisements.
Still, efforts against smokeless tobacco face growing advertising by tobacco companies.
In 2001, the five-largest tobacco companies spent $236.7 million pitching smokeless tobacco – an almost 90 percent increase in seven years, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
That figure doesn’t include promotions like the Copenhagen trailer, which travels nationwide, said Mike Bazinet, spokesman for U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co.
The traveling rigs, which invite adults to sample the lore, as well as the taste, of smokeless tobacco, are “a socially responsible way to market,” Bazinet said, noting his company entered a settlement agreement with 45 states in 1998 that includes restrictions on advertising.
One reason smokeless tobacco hasn’t gotten the attention smoking does is that the approximately 11 million users are dwarfed by the more than four times as many people smoking cigarettes in 2003, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s kind of a hidden addiction,” said Dr. Jon O. Ebbert, a Mayo Clinic researcher.
Ebbert said he hopes to get funding to study a nicotine patch for chew users and a lozenge to satisfy not only the nicotine craving but the chomping habit as well.
Kicking the chew habit isn’t easy, says Dr. Richard Meckstroth of the West Virginia University dentistry school.
“There is a higher concentration of nicotine in it,” Meckstroth said. “It is really tough for them to give it up, more so than for smokers.”
Staff writer Erin Emery contibuted to this report.
