We spent half of last month here at Seeing Through the Smoke looking through not smoke, but the cleanest method of drawing THC and its entourage companions into our lungs, vapor. Today we are going to rip a skidding, screeching U-turn and, with the assistance of a couple casual Facebook polls from the past week, head directly to the dirtiest of the dirty topics on the matter – the inhalation of cannabis in combination with a tobacco mixture: spliffs.
(Side note: I find it a topic of consistent interest as we begin dropping some calendar pages in 2018 how a friend will occasionally sidle up sheepishly to me and say something along the lines of, “I really like your articles but I don’t feel comfortable liking or commenting on them because of work/family/other social pressures.” I understand; I also hear the ghost of Aslinger cackle every time.)
The spliff: it’s basically a joint that includes tobacco. This can be a 50/50 blend of weed and tobacco, a version (for reasons of taste or availability of filler materials) that leans more heavily toward one or the other, or a version that includes tobacco with hash or hash oil. I remember smoking them here and there in my younger days, and though I have never been any kind of real smoker (aside from a pack-a-month habit I carried for about a quarter of 2009), I was never bothered by the nicotine river running through them. It was explained to me during a trip to Jamaica a couple decades ago that the combination of the cannabis and the tobacco was a metaphoric representation of the union between “the mon and the woman, mon.” I said, “Alright, mon. Alright.” Makes sense.
I have a couple friends who seem to subsist on them and little else. My main man C. Slimes is rarely to be seen without one, perfectly spun, crutch and all nearby, and it would be hard to gauge the yardage totals of the wraps slathered in oil and filled with loose American Spirit or Bugler fodder that I have smoked outside shows in the past decade. It is a different high. That nicotine takes something in me (my soul, maybe) and rockets it straight up through the stratosphere. The cannabuzz settles in a few minutes later and carries me along nicely.
I like it, but apparently my pleasure is not universally shared. The FB post was one of my favorite types – the comments outnumbered the reactions by a ratio of four to one. Had a couple <3 reactions, which I took to mean I had a couple full-bore spliff lovers in my audience. A few said they were fans, provided both the cannabis and the tobacco were grown and prepped in a positive fashion; one friend commented that he likes them but only seems to smoke them while in Central America; there were also several spliff haters who lamented the waste of good weed, or did not want to be lumped in with “Euros,” and my cousin, who posted a picture of one of the kids from “Malcolm in the Middle” likening smoking one to “sucking satans [sic] dick.” One friend riffed on the lyrics to Bob Marley’s which I greatly appreciated.
So, DGO, it looks like we have two distinct camps when it comes to the topic of spliffs. Where do you fall on the issue?
Christopher Gallagher lives with his wife and their four dogs and two horses. Life is pretty darn good. Contact him at [email protected].
