NakedCity Wichita

rollin’ your own

Posted on 23. Feb, 2010 by NakedCity in entertainment

words > RED

Now that the holidays are well over, it’s time to stop overeating and enjoy our year-long habits. Certainly there’s no stronger commitment than between a person and their addiction. Have you noticed them? Keep your eye out. That little metal contraption on a coffee table. The oblong, plastic box in her purse. There’s been a huge rise in people rolling their own cigarettes. Now, rolling (or stuffing) your own cigarettes is certainly nothing new, but it’s making a comeback. I talked to resident expert at Pete’s Smoke Shop, and he told me just how popular it’s become:

“We sell a lot [of tobacco and papers]. It’s increasing almost 200 percent. Two-hundred percent more than we used to sell.  It’s decreasing a little bit because they put the tax on that, too,” he says. “But it’s still saving so they still sell.”

He says that price is the main cause of the trend. “Some people say, ‘strictly Marlboro’ which means they just smoke Marlboro; they don’t like other things at all. But some people don’t care. Some have a budget, they smoke anything they want—they have to there’s a budget.”

Self-assembling your smokes has a few pluses, especially since Fire-Safe Cigarettes were put into place. Fire-Safe Cigarettes are supposed to extinguish themselves after 30 seconds of not being used. Though cigarette companies refuse to officially release the ingredients of their cigarettes, people fear the flame-retardant chemical(s) that have been added.

People who make the switch boast that it half as much as your pack of Camels, and that, since they’ve started rolling, they smoke half as many a day. Other pluses include a better taste and of course fewer chemicals.

I asked Wichita Fire Captain Stuart Bevis whether he thought FSCs where necessary.

“I can sort of equate it to seat belts,” he says. “With a cigarette, I looked at these numbers, and I wondered, ‘Huh, how big of a difference can this make?’ But when you look at the percentages, how many cigarettes are out there? And when you take that many chances for something bad to go wrong…”

He says that even the fire-safe cigarettes are only a step forward.

“Because they’re supposed to burn out after X amount of time. And in the experiments I’ve done, I’ve seen sometimes they’ll burn out after a minute or two minutes, but other times, if they’re in the right situation, they can continue to burn just like a normal cigarette, because even in testing only 25 percent of them have to pass the test.”

Capt. Bevis couldn’t help but laugh when asked if it’s harmful to inhale fire retardant chemicals. “What I deal with is the fire safety issue of it. To me, the health safety is, if you’re really health-conscious you wouldn’t have a cigarette in your mouth.”

So, either accept FSC, quit smoking (Perish the thought that we quit smoking, right?), or start rolling your own smokes. Jump on the band wagon! We all know that smoking is sexy, but isn’t smoking cigarettes you’ve rolled yourself just a little bit sexier?

Tags: do-it-yourself, smoking