The fundamental difference between the shamanic use of snuff and consumption of industrial cigarettes is that the Amazon snuff is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides and does not contain any of the ingredients that are added to cigarettes such as aluminum oxide, nitrate potassium, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate and others which make up about ten percent of the whole cigarette. During smoking, a cigarette releases four thousand substances, most toxic.
Among these substances, some are even radioactive, making cigarettes the main source of radiation in the everyday life of an average smoker. According to a research, Smoking one to two packs per day equals in radioactivity to two hundred and fifty lung radiographs per year. Cigarette smoke is directly involved in over twenty serious diseases, which seventeen are types of cancer. By contrast, Amazonian snuff is considered as a remedy.
Snuff or Mapacho tobacco as it is known in the Amazon area , is the sacred medicine of the people across the America continent . It is often said that the snuff is the plant called “Grandpa” by which all other plants gradually emerged. In the Amazon, the snuff has an almost universal appeal as medicine, among most of the indigenous groups. It is made in different ways, either smoked, snorted, or drunk. When we use smoking as a way of cleasing energy; space and a person. In North America the passage of the pipe is a symbol of this type of use. When important decisions were to be made, before anyone spoke, he and the entire group inhale snuff pipe first. Thus, it was said that the man was going to speak straight from his heart and therefore , he will tell the truth.
