Nicotine, Me, and Pipes

[olkofri]

something that tastes like Lakatia and is not tobacco

That'd be poison.

You could try smoking leather, but again, that'd be poisonous.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

If anyone knows of something to smoke something that tastes like Lakatia and is not tobacco, let me know.

A blend of mesquite, hickory, wet oak, pine straw, a touch of rubber, a slight pinch of dried sage, shake it all up, let the flavors marry for a few weeks...

 

[danimalia]

I don’t notice oxygen. I’m not even sure it exists. I think that what people call the lack of oxygen is just really the inability to exercise their lung powered cooling systems.

This is the problem with self-diagnosis. I can’t really tell much between low nicotine and medium nicotine blends, but I rarely smoke low nic blends. Unless I get that overdose feeling in the gut and my hands, nicotine just doesn’t exist. But, lack of nicotine, I can feel. Not like when I smoked cigarettes, but it’s there like a “state.”

I remember when I first smoked a cigarette at age 14. I felt sickish, but I couldn’t figure out what the attraction was to the drug. A few packs latter, I better understood the lack of nocotine better than its actual effects.

I understand you guys who say that you don’t smoke for the drug. I get it. But, I always ask myself, why not just smoke something without nicotine? Why not just choose to pack your pipes with incense or lobelia? Lobelia has a history of being smoked for health and healing.
...for historical reasons, tradition? Why did the tradition of smoking pipes evolve around tobacco in the first place? Do we just blindly do what we’ve seen done? No questions?

So many reports by Cokumbus and early European explorers wrote about the altered consciousness of tobacco. What was that about? Is it just to taste what used to be a powerful drug, before europeans cultivated it into the weak limp-wristed thing in tins now? The evolved flavor of its forefather rusticas that was ingested to make people altered?

Self diagnosis of the nicotine is all we have in pipes. They don’t test blends for a milligram dosage like cigarettes. And the same damn blend and brand can differ pending where and what is sourced to go into it. One week a tin of a flake or blend can bee a knee buckler, the next time we buy it, it might just be an all day smoker.


What draws us to tobacco?
Why tobacco? Why not smoke hickory or rosemarry or sage or any of the aromatics that smell great when incinerated?
Is there something deceptive about this drug that makes it easy to lie or deceive ourselves about its effects?

Stuff I think about.
And, how other people conceive their smoking nicotine baffles me more and further confuses the issue for me, because it doesn’t make any rational sense to me.

It is really interesting.. The first few times I tried a drag on a cigarette, I coughed. A lot. The first few times I managed to smoke a whole cigarette, I got dizzy and nauseous. There is absolutely no rational reason that I would continue to plug away, except... Every time I was exposing myself to nicotine, the pernicious little shit was all up in my 13 year old brain, doing chemistry experiments and re-wiring the joint, smashing on my pleasure sensors... even as I was trying not to puke.

I KNOW I smoke for the nicotine. I mean, I enjoy the flavors and everything, too, but I doubt I'd smoke a pipe or cigars if they were nicotine-free.