The mints and snuff are made with specially cured tobacco that contains fewer so-called tobacco-specific nitrosamines powerful carcinogens formed from nicotine and other alkaloids during tobacco fermentation than regular cigarettes.
For centuries, people who live in the high Andes have chewed coca leaves, whose alkaloids act as a mild stimulant and help to ward off cold and hunger.
As he worked in the Sandoz research laboratory in Basel in Switzerland on April 16th 1943, isolating and synthesising the unstable alkaloids of the ergot fungus, Albert Hofmann began to feel a slight lightheadedness.