I try not to get too political when I write my occasional column here at The Owl. I do enough yelling at nazis and pea-brained right wing clowns on Youtube, but I have been forced to talk about a subject that has over the years become very political – tobacco.
I can remember sneaking my first cigarette. I grabbed one of my parents’ Merit Ultra Lights, went up to my bedroom and lit it up. I coughed my lungs out,
got dizzy and slightly nauseous, and I seriously cannot tell you the point where I went from that to “I need a cigarette”, but nonetheless – it happened, and now I have joined the ranks of so many other smokers in this country, including our current president.
I started smoking when I was thirteen, and I can clearly remember walking through the grocery store with a Marlboro hanging out of my mouth and buying whatever and not having anyone look twice at me. Somehow we have come to a point where you can climb a clock tower and let loose shooting a dozen or so people, but that would be not near the sin of smoking a cigarette.
I noticed the price getting jacked up unfairly on cigarettes fifteen years ago, so I began rolling my own, and since then I have not contracted bronchitis once! I could almost count on getting it twice a year when I smoked pre-rolled cigarettes. I have a theory about the filtered cigarette: the filter is not placed on the cigarette to cut down on the amount of tar or nicotine you are putting into your body, but rather to prevent the dried-up, sub-standard tobacco “dust”, as I call it, from getting into your mouth every time you inhale.
When I made the decision that I would save some money by rolling my own cigarettes I spent a lot of time trying different tobacco products. I finally settled on a few of the shag cut varieties. These were of a high quality of the moist, aromatic tobacco that sticks together in clumps. One must take care when rolling this food of the Gods so that you do not roll it too tightly and get no draw from it. The thing I noticed right away was the taste. It was sweet, fresh, and did not have any harshness to it at all. Just a warm, pleasant smoke that rendered a sweet flavour. The only drawback was the brown stain that would appear on my index and middle fingers from the smoke flowing out of the drawing end. This was a small price to pay for saving hundreds – thousands of dollars over the years.
Well, last month the government finally caught on to the fact that people like me were skirting the exorbitant price of cigarettes due to the sin tax placed on pre-rolled cigarettes, and decided it was time to up the tax on loose tobacco… By 300 percent!
I was shocked to see the price of a $13.00 can of my favorite tobacco (enjoyed by Johnny Depp) rise to a ridiculous and unforgivable $37.00. I paid it anyway, as smoking is one of the few pleasures I have left as I age, and I’ll be damned if I will be forced to quit on anyones’ terms but my own.
Now, this has led to a new chapter in my affection for the tobacco plant – You’ve got it, I am now growing my own tobacco! It is perfectly legal to produce your own tobacco for personal use and there is absolutely NO tax on that. The plant does very well in most areas of the United States, and I was delighted to learn that states such as Wisconsin and Ohio have been producing tobacco for cigars for decades.
The major advantage to growing your own tobacco is that now I am in complete control of the freshness of the product. No more will I have to wonder when I peel the foil top off of the sealed can whether or not the tobacco I purchased has been sitting on some semi or in a back room for two years. Occasionally I would encounter this problem, and as long as nobody bought the can of tobacco, the merchants would leave it on the shelf until some sap would wander in and finally buy it, not noticing the layers of dust on the lid.
When I first bought my house six years ago, a friend of mine gave me a tobacco plant because the flowers it produced were very fragrant and the blooms were rather pretty, and I was all excited to have my own back yard that I could grow flowers or whatever in. Now all I have to do is pop those pretty buds off before they can produce flowers or the wonderful smell of jasmine in order to force the leaves to grow to enormous proportions. Curing and preparing the stuff to smoke is just another skill I will have aquired on my life’s journy that will prove to be educational and personally rewarding, and best of all – The tax money is going to have to come from somewhere else.