Whatcha smoking?

[Fraginstein]

yeah my doctor said I wasn't a candidate for doing angioplasty (the balloon) so...   But they said I was young for having this procedure & would heal up fast & if all went right (which it did) that if I quit smoking & eat good, I could still make 80+, & then the only meds I would be on is 1 for cholesterol, 1 for blood pressure  &  1 aspirin per day, that's it.  Only problem now is I've put on weight & need to loose about 25-30 lbs & then I'll be great;  I attribute the weight gain to quitting smoking, because nothing finishes a good meal like a nice fat smoke!  But I didn't smoke, so it's like the meal wasn't finished, so I had seconds, & then nibbled, then started rooting thru the frig & cabinets trying to find that something that finished the meal off to no avail  !   

 Everything you said about your dad/ grandpa, runs in the family... is like you just copied it from my paperwork... seriously.   I had just had a complete heart work up, the whole 9 yards a little over 7 years ago & past with flying colors... no blockages, nothing.... I had a poor diet & smoke 1.5 packs a day, but was VERY active in/with my job, very physical with lifting & sweating every day which kept the plumbing clear (kept the crud from sitting long enough to harden)    But then about 4 yrs ago I got laid off & then took on a management desk job & 4 yrs later BAM, heart attack/by-pass.

I'll admit, I've tried & done a lot of things, but I never stuck a needle in my arm & I've been able to take or leave whatever it was... except for smoking/tobacco!   
Turns out that EVERYONE has this artery clog/crud running thru their body, whether they smoke or not... the only thing that differs is the levels of said crud & what your body does with it;  which depends upon several things, genetics, physical activity & diet (which is everything you put into your body.)

I already had genetically elevated levels, along with a "crud" rich diet, but being on the hyperactive side & having an extremely physical job kept the crud in check.  But the smoking, it turns out smoking is just as bad for your heart as it is your lungs (which work directly together)     The smoking increases the crud levels & reduces your arteries natural ability to shake the crud loose & pass it on for some other part of the body to hopefully, eventually use.   Basically, your heart isn't the only thing that pumps the blood, your arteries do as well... you've seen a snake or a worm move... your arteries & veins almost move the blood along with a similar motion, kind of like milking a cow tit.  Smoking hardens the the arteries reducing their squeezing/milking ability, their natural ability to break up & push the crud along.   I was told most of this 7 yrs ago, but didn't listen, lol.        

   I didn't mean to lecture, we're going to do what we want to do... so I'll leave you with this...   Put down the tobacco & pick up a bud, but respect it!!!  And a little wine or a few beers with equal respect is good too, but leave the tobacco lay!    

At least now when someone asks me "what's up" I can honestly answer "about nine inches!" 

[bluemeanies]

Lol, I was expecting a weed thread also   

Probably a lot more peeps around here smoke more of that than tobacco.

I love these two portable vaporizers:

Pax by Ploom
Arizer Solo

If you're older than 35, I recommend switching to a vaporizer to give your lungs a rest. People swear by using something like the Arizer Solo and pulling it through a water filtered piece(bong). The Solo by itself (not pulling through bong), by far imo, gives the best taste of the herb that I've ever had from any other smoking method. Those medical strains are fucking delicious on the first few clouds from the Solo.

Hell, the Solo is even awesome for concentrates...butter, wax, shatter, iso, kief, hash, bho...just sandwhich between bud, or avb(already vaped bud), or 100% organic cotton.

And then save up your avb and infuse that into you're favorite oil/butter once you've saved up a nice sack.  This oil is going to be heavier in CBD, rather than THC...CBD is the stuff that's really beneficial for medical/pain relief stuff...you get that great body high/deep relaxation...without the head stuff/anxiety(if you get that from reg smokeing)/self-examination type high.

Add a few tablespoons of some concentrated avb infused oil, I prefer coconut, to your morning coffee and have an incredible body high all day, with none of the heady/trippy affects to distract you. In other words you can feel great and get plenty of shit done too.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED!

Also, why haven't you ordered your Solo yet...

[Fraginstein]

I'd really like to try some of the new product coming out of Colorado, like some of the stuff from Dixie Elixirs  >  http://dixieelixirs.com/products/prime/prime-vape-pen/  &  http://dixieelixirs.com/products/family/dew-drops/?age-verified=6ca9e3b48f 
they need to fix their website, every page you touch, makes you re-enter your age, gets irritating.

[M1SERY]

 Nice write up Bluemeanies. I can relate to everything you said, and the fact about not getting the self examination/anxiety hi is really important to lots of people. Its the really only down side of smoking at times. Nobody does that when they drink a beer, but for some reason smoking a joint becomes just that , at times.

[|iR|Focalor]

From what I've always been told, the nicotine particles in the blood stream damage and scratch up the artery walls, allowing fatty substances to deposit and become lodged upon them easier. And once the fatty substances take hold there, MORE fatty substances stick to the fatty deposits like a magnet. Not really pleasant to imagine. I've had recurring nightmares before about intentionally slicing my forearm open and then watching millions of centipedes crawling out of the wound. Thinking about gunky shit collecting in my arteries is kinda equally horrifying.

All the horrible shit the tar and carbon monoxide does to your lungs was my major concern in quitting smoking in the first place. That was kinda my warped and extremely misguided justification for dipping snuff. I said, "My teeth and gums may be turning to shit, but at least I can breathe." And it was pretty cool for a while when I quit smoking and only dipped. I was able to walk up steep hills without getting out of breath as easily. But since I've started smoking again, and smoking NON-FILTER roll-your-owns (where your lungs become the nice dark brown color you always see on the filter)... I'm starting to feel it, hehe. I fucking hate murdering myself, but at the same time, it's such a pleasurable way to murder yourself that it's really hard to stop.

[fdrjk]

pretty much everyone in my family except my brother and i smoke, and they all started when they were 15. theyre probably going to have to deal with that shit down the road, so its their goddamn loss. i grew up with my parents smoking in the house, which i could never fucking stand. it made EVERYTHING of their smells like shit; their room, their clothes, their fucking breath. you can tell when someone tries to hide smokers breath with a few fucking tic-tacs because it still smells like shit. i cant stand the smell of it, and i cant stand why people justify that they do it 'to relax'. seriously, go take a motherfucking nap for once. id rather have people like foc say they do it just because they like it. :<

i already have a really shitty diet that i plan on changing a few months down the road, and smoking would probably complicate my health even more.

[|iR|Focalor]

Ain't no bones about it, I do it because I'm addicted, first and foremost. But the relaxing thing, yeah, there's that. I mean it's pretty relaxing to get some nicotine pumping through you when you've been without it for a while. I can get a pretty bad temper sometimes, but plop me in a situation where someone or something grates on my patience and nerves when I've been cut off cold turkey from any nicotine for upwards of 24 hours straight, and I'll go absolutely apeshit batshit fucking homicidal psycho on someone. I vividly remember trying to quit smoking the first time a couple years ago, and it wasn't pretty. I wasn't gonna make a big thing of it. I was just gonna do it and not tell anyone and hopefully they wouldn't talk about it too much to where I'd start wanting another cigarette. It was about 30-40hrs after my last smoke. Some little something around the house didn't work like I wanted it to, and I went fucking ballistic. I was throwing shit, breaking shit in the kitchen, scared the living shit outta my old lady when I was cussing her out and calling her things she's never heard me say to her before. And she had no idea what had set me off or why. I stormed outta the house and rode up to the gas station up the road to buy a pack of Camels. Ripped it open before I even walked out, and lit one up the second I got outside. Stood there smoking it down to nothing still fuming mad. By the time I got done and put it out, the nicotine got back into me and I came back down to earth and then I realized what a total fucking dick I had just been. I felt soooo horrible for what I had just done. Came home and profusely apologized for my psychotic schizophrenic behavior.

[bluemeanies]

Quitting tobacco's gotta be almost as hard to quit as a full on opiate addiction. Even though a few times in my life I've smoked quite a bit, especially rooming with smokers, that one never took hold. I had no problem putting it down. Most likely because Mary Jane is a jealous woman who doesn't like me cheating on her like that...

I realize the whole e-cig thing might seem femmy...but that just might save some of yall from a horrible cancer death...hell...Stephen Dorff smokes em...hahah

My brother-in-law is a full on smoker for almost 20 years...only time he really tried to quit was so that he could pass a life insurance tobacco screening...it was like 3-6 months...soon as he passed motherfucker was right back on the Marlboro mediums...

[Whirlingdervish]

I quit smoking cigs about 2-3 years ago, after doing so daily since I was in my early teens. I'm finally at the point where it doesn't even smell good to me anymore.

I slowly weaned myself during work days so that at first I'd wait till lunch to smoke, and eventually after work in the car on the drive home. Once I was able to voluntarily keep it to under 5 smokes a day regardless of weekday or weekend, and go all day at work without, it was a much easier step to stop entirely without any sort of cessation aid like an e-cig or gum/patches.

I would still get the urge to do it during specific circumstances where I'd always smoked before (after meals, after smoking herb, as soon as I got in the car, etc) but eventually those habits went away and now I don't even have the little habits like holding stuff in my hand like it was a cig and such.

The very toughest times for me were when I got drunk and I had done that on a daily basis for a while too so I cut it back a bit when I quit smoking and spent time working out a bit extra to keep the aggression/anxiety at manageable levels. I'd highly recommend it based on the dollars I've saved since and I luckily haven't had any health issues as a result that needed paying for.

[|iR|Focalor]

From what the scientists and doctors say, nicotine actually ranks ABOVE heroin and cocaine for addictive potential. What that means precisely, I dunno. I guess the legal status of it and it's wide availability might contribute to that. But I'll say this... I've tried all 3 in my life, and there's only one of them that I do on a daily basis.

I'm not sold on the "safeness" of e-cigs. Claiming that it's "safe" or "risk-free" is a total lie. Maybe it doesn't have the carbon monoxide, ammonia, tar, arsenic, and other compounds either IN the product or produced by the process of USING the product and/or metabolizing it, but it still definitely has nicotine in it, and nicotine all by itself is the #1 main contributor to heart and circulatory problems in tobacco smokers and smokeless tobacco users. Aside from that, it's anyone's guess as to what else might be in e-cigs. Just because they're on store shelves doesn't mean it's been thoroughly examined by the FDA. They sold Yellow Jackets energy pills and Phen-Fen diet pills all over the place for years before they finally pulled them for being dangerous products.

Another smoking fact many people may not know about... Not long after cigarette prices jumped from about $2.50-$3 per pack to $5+ per pack, they passed federal laws prohibiting tobacco companies from using words like "light", "mild", "medium", "ultra light", etc etc, on their packaging. Due to tobacco marketing campaigns in the 80's and 90's when they attempted to list the tar and nicotine quantities in print ads, terms like "light" and "medium" became ways of conveying the "strength" of cigarettes, although tobacco companies insisted that such terms were only used to describe "flavor". So that's why Camel Lights are now called Camel Blue's, Marlboro Lights are now called Marlboro Gold, Marlboro Ultra Lights are now called Marlboro Silver, etc etc.

Although I still have no fucking idea why Camel decided to quit calling the long filter cigarettes 100's and start calling them 99's.

[Fraginstein]

@ Blue Meanies > if your bro-n-law gets a tobacco related illness & shows positive for tobacco use (after testing negative to get said plan) Insurance could view his app/results as fraudulent & deny the claim & make your sister fight to get anything.   

@ Focalor > yes, my doctor said the e-cigs are bullsh!t... I'd asked about using an e-cig & he actually seemed to get upset, not at me, but at the MFGrs for miss-leading everyone... e-gigs may not be quite as bad as direct tobacco use, but they are no where near as harmless as they are portraying them to be.  The nicotine is bad, especially for someone that has a heart &/or other serious issues... I was even told "no" for using the gum, had to walk away from all of it!   Doc also said even the flavored water e-cigs w/ no nicotine will eventually be found bad in some way, just like the "red candy dye #" they've been using for decades, they found it was causing ADHD in kids along with other issues, not to mention the fluoride their still putting in our water, even tho 90% of the rest of the world has banned fluoride use !

As far as full flavor vs lights go, the Doc had told me years ago that if I wasn't going to listen & quit smoking, that I might as well smoke full flavors... there's not a big difference w/ nicotine levels between the two, but with all the chemicals & additives they put in the lights to replace what they took out makes them worse for you than the full flavors.   & that smokers that smoke lights tend to take deeper inhales & smoke more of the less satisfying lights.

[adz1La]

dat blue dream crumble

[fdrjk]

just like the "red candy dye #" they've been using for decades, they found it was causing ADHD in kids

speaking of utter bullshit 

[Fraginstein]

   let me re-phrase that, red &/or food dye's aggravate/amplify ADHD,  but haven't actually been proven to cause it; nor has the FDA even attempted to explain the 68% increase of Adolescent ADHD cases in the last 30 years, but you go ahead & wait for Obama & his buddies to level with ya'    > http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/food-dyes-are-they-safe

[|iR|Focalor]

Personally, I think this "ADHD" thing is not rooted as much in anything medical or nutritional going into the body as it is in the psychological input. Basically, I think the ADHD phenomenon is a conditioned response caused by television, internet, video games, and this advanced society at large. In the case of television, just look at the commercials they have now. The camerawork in commercials switches scenes or angles on average every 1 or 2 seconds. It's just BAM BAM BAM BAM. They flash shit up, flash something else, shit goes by so fast, it's just go go go go all the time. You subject a human brain to that kind of stimulus long enough in it's formative years, and it's gonna have lasting psychological effects that convinces it that rapidly moving from thing to thing is the proper way to function. It's brainwashing at work. Plopping your kid in front of a TV for too long is basically hardwiring their brain to fire at a rhythm that may not be optimum for it to function on. Brains are different, like fingerprints. Some kids, TV and shit effects them more than others.

As far as full flavor vs lights go, the Doc had told me years ago that if I wasn't going to listen & quit smoking, that I might as well smoke full flavors... there's not a big difference w/ nicotine levels between the two, but with all the chemicals & additives they put in the lights to replace what they took out makes them worse for you than the full flavors.   & that smokers that smoke lights tend to take deeper inhales & smoke more of the less satisfying lights.

I've talked about it before, but I'll reiterate it. Major tobacco companies flue cure all their leaves. They hang it in a large heated room, and they burn a selection of hardwoods that smoke up the room and deposit the smokey flavors on all the leaves to make them taste more uniform, because not all leaves of the same type of plant will taste precisely the same. Size, literal age, and maturity of the leaf will often determine it's strength and taste. But more importantly than flavoring all the leaves uniformly, the hardwood smoke masks the residual signature left by pumping ammonia fumes into the curing space. They do this to dry out the leaves more rapidly without allowing as much of the nicotine to evaporate from the leaves. The ONE AND ONLY REASON they use ammonia is because it leaves more nicotine in the tobacco leaves during the curing process. As an added benefit, the ammonia residues also vaporize when the leaf is burned as the smoker puffs it. That vaporized ammonia allows for quicker uptake of nicotine from the lungs and into the bloodstream. It's essentially a method of "freebasing" nicotine.

So yeah, like you said, smoking lights or ultra lights doesn't matter that much. If you analyze the nicotine content in the tobacco contained in a Marlboro Ultra Light and a Marlboro Red, they're gonna be virtually identical. The major differences in the cigarettes are what they do with the paper covering the filter portion. A long time ago, they actually used real corkwood for the filters on cigarettes. Before that, they didn't use filters at all, it was just paper and tobacco, period. That's why a lot of the filters today are covered in paper with a brown color with lighter brown spots, to resemble corkwood. But when you get a full flavored cigarette, you get just straight paper on the filter. With lights, they perforate one line of tiny holes around the middle of the filter to allow a small amount of unsmoked air to be pulled through the end of the filter. With ultra lights, theres 2 lines of perforated holes. So the reason lights and ultra lights might taste or feel different entering the lungs is because of the smoke to air ratio at play with the carb holes in the filter paper. You eventually draw in about the same amount of pure smoke, you just do it at lower volumes per puff. And like you said, they also have "additives" the lights and ultra lights to make the smoke less harsh feeling. So you might be able to drag the hugest lung full in the history of mankind off a Marlboro Ultra Light without hacking at all, while you'd be doubled over puking do the same thing with a Marlboro Red... but that doesn't mean one has any less nicotine when measuring the chemical content of the pure smoke itself by volume.