His reviews of those old MRE cigarettes are amazing. He makes it seem like he's smoking pure ecstasy (figuratively, actually, w'ever). I've never smoked but watching those segments I'm jonesing hard to smoke one of those.
As someone who smokes a small single digit number of cigars per year, I can attest that the nicotine buzz is incredible on the rare occasions that I do.
I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.
I tried smoking multiple times and never had any good reaction. It's weird to me why people smoke. Is my chemistry differs from others? I even used to smoke for two years once, just for "community" because people I hanged out at time were smokers. For me cigarettes are just weird thing producing smoke. I learned to swallow it and not blew out my lungs, but I never found any amusement with this thing and dropped it eventually.
Per their use in MREs, yeah, nicotine is a really good drug to have when you're likely to be in combat in the next four or so hours. It drives blood to the core and away from the periphery, it heightens alertness, it increases testosterone, and there are a lot of other effects.
Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.
it may depend on the cigarette brand. they treat the tobacco differently. some will put it under ammonia fumes heh and that modifies the nicotine, cracks it of sorts, which increases the potency by two or three orders of magnitude, like cracking coke just with nicotine.
Same here. I'm a light-weight, so smoking a cigarette just makes me jittery and uneasy. Not a pleasant high. A feeling that says: "WTF did you smoke that?"
When you have a hard addiction to cigarettes, just being asleep for 8 hours is enough time to give you a wonderful warm body flush of joy when you have that first cigarette in the morning.
I had a friend who loved smoking hookahs years ago. 16 or so years ago now, wow.
We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.
The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.
I had an old coworker that said the same thing, calling it nearly like getting a sort of high. He had been gifted some tobacco plants by a local tribal community he had a good relationship with. So basically the only thing he’d smoke was his homemade cigars that was its own involved process. Seems like a great way to limit intake and actually enjoy things. That said, I hate smoking, and find even campfires noxious most of the time so it’s not for me.
Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.
Talking about nicotine inducing a religious experience. In my 20s I smoked organic pipe tobacco from a bong and holy shit the experience was out of this world, I literally felt like I was flying and had the most insane headrush.
I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.
Many drugs have great effects, nicotine from cigarettes on me ain't one of them. 5 minutes of dizzy, uncomfortable, mentally still in the same place.
The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.
Same. Part of the reason the addiction never quite took hold of me is that I could tell that despite the addictive rush they just made me kinda jittery and nauseous. Obviously this varies an incredible amount person-to-person.
I'd appreciate the perspective of an actual smoker on this, but I suspect those long-preserved cigarettes aren't that special in and of themselves. For Steve, it's a hit of both nostalgia and a chemical he's long been deprived of. It's probably amazing for him, and that shows in the videos, but telling himself that those preserved cigs are special might be a way for him to avoid relapsing. He craves more, but he can tell himself that the modern junk just wouldn't be the same.
If you decided to get addicted to vintage MRE tobacco you'd probably have a pretty tough time sourcing enough of it to give yourself cancer.
Cigarettes haven't been the same (in the US) for well over a decade now, since all 50 States and DC require them to be "fire safe" cigarettes (FSC).
This means that there are parts of the paper wrapper that have vinyl compounds that are intended to allow them to self-extinguish.
Compared to the cigarettes of yore, these taste like fried dick cancer.
But old tobacco doesn't always age well. It can survive for centuries if stored at the appropriate temperature and humidity and away from things that would impact the taste, or it can turn stale and fairly blah in weeks or months when stored poorly.
Interesting. I rarely smoke, but did do a lot of smoking in the mid 00s. I recently indulged and damn, it was nowhere near as tasty as I remember. That probably explains it!
Any tobacco shop. You can buy empty cigarette tubes, which are basically just the paper tube with a cotton filter attached. They don't contain any extra additive. You can then load any tobacco you like with a cigarette loading machine (also known as an "injector"). You can also buy pure, high quality Dutch tobacco that's far higher quality than anything that would have been loaded into a cigarette in the 1970s.
For pipe smokers, there’s a formula called “Doc Watson” which includes cigarette tobacco. It’s excellent. You will get a nicotine biz from it unless you sip it.
The cigarette reviews tend to be a bonus segment - most MREs don't include them today (for good reason) and it's not the intended purpose of the channel anyways. That being said, I have never craved a cigarette more than the moment I laid eyes on a box of 1944 Chesterfields.
Honestly I'd just recommend all the episodes, MRESteve defines "peak YouTube" for me. It's a really relaxed and fun exploration of the different survival meals and basic kits distributed to soldiers around the world.
I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.