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.