Those of us who are addicted to nicotine are increasingly impoverished by huge taxes levied on our relatively harmless addiction. The first step in setting our own such addiction free of the tax-addicts’ even more powerful addiction to more levies is to buy a cigarette-making machine, an easy-to-use crank-operated gizmo costing about $35.00. It allows one make cigarettes by stuffing bulk tobacco into filtered paper tubes. That worked well, saving me about three dollars a day in after-tax money for the past two years, resulting in keeping an extra twelve hundred dollars a year, $2,400.00 in total, in my own pocket.
The tax-addicts knew that millions of us were avoiding their taxes by making their own cigarettes. They fought us do-it-yourself cigarette makers last March by imposing a twenty dollar tax on each pound of bulk cigarette tobacco, reducing our savings to only a couple of dollars a day.
So, I began the lengthy process of purchasing and planting tobacco seeds. Each is about the size of a grain of sand. They are not planted, but merely dropped on soil, often inside, weeks before the first frost.
The plants grow, slowly at first, and can then be thinned and the plants moved outside, planted in a sunny area. If one is fortunate, a few plants will survive, and grow to be nearly four feet tall, each large leaf, about the size of a shoe-box top, all fairly brimming with the nicotine to which we are so unfortunately addicted.
A few days ago, I pulled a dead leaf off the bottom of a tobacco plant, and let it dry. A few minutes ago, I crumbled that leaf over the opening in my cigarette-making machine. I put a filtered paper tube (cost, 1.2 cents) onto the end of the cigarette machine, and turned the crank, making my very first home-grown and home-made cigarette.
It wasn’t bad! But, it doesn’t burn as evenly as I’d like. I need to crumble the leaves a little more to produce a more uniform size of particle, which I’m about to go and do right now.
Update: It worked, but still burned erratically. So, I put the remaining part of the leaf in the microwave for a minute, and made another, with drier, more crumbled tobacco. Worked even better. Next, I’ll put pieces of dried leaf in the food-processor to get a more even size of leaf-particles.
This process has reduced my cost-per-pack to thirty cents a pack, the cost of twenty already-filtered paper tubes. The last package of cigarettes I bought from a local store was six dollars and twenty cents. Now, I’m saving almost six dollars a day, or $2,190.00 per year! If more of us do this, the two million smokers in Pennsylvania, alone, would save four and a half billion dollars, most of which would otherwise feed the gaping maw.
Growing and rolling also avoids any number of the 600 different chemicals that commercial cigarette manufacturers put into cigarettes. When they burn, no one knows what these chemicals turn into, or what negative effects they have on our bodies. And, gowing and rolling lets us evenly and slowly dry the tobacco, instead of being forced to buy tobacco that is “quick-dried” in huge, gas-powered driers.
If we’re going to smoke, this is the right way to do it!
P.S. As word of this gets out (I’m certainly not the only person doing this!), we will see laws passed that increase the cost of the filtered paper tubes that our little crank-machines stuff with tobacco. As I get more leaves dried, I’ll try to use the leaves as cigarette paper, making little “cigars” that will avoid the coming tax on paper tubes.
Soon, we can expect nanny’s usual “experts” to propose legislation making it illegal for unlicensed individuals to grow their own tobacco, citing the usual imaginary “health hazards”.
