Three Times When Smokeless Tobacco Didn’t Agree With Me (Pt 1)

First off, let me say that for anyone that reads this I understand that smokeless tobacco can be harmful to your health so I'm not condoning it. With that said, when I was younger I used smokeless tobacco. I don't now but there was a couple of times that it affected me. Here's one of those times.

In high school I was at the drive-in in my hometown. A bunch of us were fooling around as guys will do. One of my friends was a regular user of Skoal. I had never tried it. Now I did use Red Man and/or Beechnut chewing tobacco. Normally I would use it out in the field during summers while baling hay. It helped to keep the dust out my mouth. (Or so I thought!) So I put a dip of the Skoal into my mouth trying to keep it contained in one area. If you've ever dipped the stuff you know what I mean. It's an art to keep the stuff together in your mouth because initially it doesn't want to stay there. It wants to find every empty spot between your cheek and gum.

After a few minutes of having the stuff in my mouth, I started to get this buzzing feeling in my head. I started getting a high that I'd never experienced before, and with this high came another sensation. I couldn't put one foot in front of the other. Better yet, I couldn't walk around the front of the car. As hard as I tried, when I would try to maneuver from one side of the car to the other, it wouldn't happen.

I tried to make the turn to the left and gracefully move around the vehicle but I kept walking straight...my body wouldn't turn! I know I was sending the message to my brain to go around the car but it just wasn't happening!

I guess the "buzz" that you get from the Skoal eventually wore off but I'll never forget the sensation that I felt for the first time.