Dear Butters.. Have you ever breathed into a bag of reptibark or sifted it to see the enormous amount of dust that it exudes? It's also dyed red, so if you want your snakes to be rusty brown on the bottom with their nostrils and heat pits caked with it, go right ahead and use it.

And your friend who is keeping his snake at 75 without any supplemental heat.. THAT is called surviving. What you want the snake to do is THRIVE, which his very likely isn't.

And where in the world did you learn that newspaper ink was toxic? It's made from vegetable ink! Very safe. If it was toxic, wouldn't you think everyone who handles a newspaper and gets black ink on their hands(aka everyone in the world pretty much) would have cancer by now? Newspaper is perfectly safe to use.

The dust in the wild is not manufactured, dyed dust(which reptibark is), and the animals in the wild have a MUCH different immune system than captive animals do.