I saw something rather strange in a car park a few days ago. I had parked, and had just returned with my shopping, which I was placing inside my car. There was a car parked next to me, with the driver behind the wheel. I was keeping an eye on him because I was wondering if he was about to drive away. As I was watching, he suddenly blew out a truly vast cloud of smoke from his mouth. I’d never seen such an exhalation on such a scale before: with one breath he filled the entire car. I realised that he had to be vaping. And then he did it again. I started my car, and drove quickly away, slightly scared by what I’d seen.
I remembered it again this morning. And I had the thought – the inkling – that the War On Smoking had created a monster, much in the way that the War On Drugs only ever seems to produce new and ever more terrifying drugs. If pubs had once been a bit smoky from the smoke of a few dozen cigarettes, in the future they were going to be filled with a smog so dense that people would get lost on the journey from their table to the bar, or vice versa. In the attempt to get rid of one innocuous degree of smokiness, Tobacco Control has conjured up a new, almost inconceivable degree of smokiness. And the vapour would be laced with all sorts of different scents and flavours, and all sorts of different psychotropic drugs. The future wasn’t just going to be a bit smoky in the way that some pubs occasionally used to be: it was going to be super-densely smoggy. Firefighters would arrive wearing breathing equipment and carrying powerful torches to find their way to people who had got lost in the middle of a dance floor. I had seen the future in the car park.
…
A similar inkling this morning came from reading somewhere that outraged smokers in Malta or Cyprus or somewhere were demanding that tobacconists re-package tobacco to conceal the disgusting pictures that they were now being covered with. I’m not sure of the details, but the tobacconists were now providing their own packaging. And why not? Is Tobacco Control going to demand laws against re-packaging tobacco?
The inkling grew from realising that the disgust of smokers at the obscene images on the packages was undoubtedly going to be shared by any non-smoker who saw them. Tobacco Control was going to make not just smokers feel disgust, but everybody else as well. And at whom would that disgust be directed? Not the smokers on whom these images were being inflicted, nor the tobacco companies that printed them, but on the Tobacco Control zealots who had forced these pictures upon them. For with these obscene images, Tobacco Control is advertising its own sickness.
TC is like some artist who fills a gallery with images of his own vomit so disgusting that anyone who goes into it leaves shortly afterwards, retching. Such images reflect far more upon the artist who creates them than any gallery visitor who views them. But TC’s art gallery is not just one room in a building: TC’s art gallery is the whole world. They are painting their filthy pictures over the whole world. And everyone will see those pictures, and everyone is going to be revolted, and they are going to be revolted by the nightmare stream of ugliness pissed out by Tobacco Control:
It will all come back on them, in a wave of revulsion at what they are doing. They will be hoist by their own petard.
Frank Davis 
It became a major problem as we were trying to get folks to stop smoking the hobbyists got a hold of vaping. The vapers wanted more vaper. They fiddled around with them for a couple years and then the reviewers, vendors and every vaper supposedly wanted to blow clouds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpSfbeFJmc8
Yup, that’s what I saw.
I often see these sorts when I’m out and about. Blowing huge dense clouds of sickly smelling vapour.
‘Hey, look at me, how cool is this!’. It’s not, they’re tossers.
Yes, I’ve seen a few videos of vapers doing this. It seemed, and still seems, an incredibly juvenile pursuit. And not only that, they are shooting themselves in the foot big time if they want people to think vaping is so much better than smoking. Not a good advertisement for their delivery device at all. It’s just more grist to the mill of those who want to ban vaping everywhere.
Very few vapors around here but of the few I have seen they have a lot cigarette going at the same time they’re vaping!
Resembles a steam locomotive hitting a hard grade up hill.
But ehh whatever trips their fancy, means nothing to me.
I think you made that up harley. Video or it never happened. :)
I can get you one next time I see it at bingo it happens just not
That often do we see people vaping here. The 2 vape shops here shut down and most are gone up in bowling green too.
Poor suckers probably got caught up in the Bowling Green massacre :) Vaping works great if you want to quit or at least give it a chance. https://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/threads/dhhs-funded-moffitt-cancer-center-survey-found-79-of-vapers-quit-smoking-but.725563/
Ya right that was the California xmas health dept massacre she meant to say! You know the health gestapo Nazis who push the bans and ecig bans
Now imagine there had been a child sitting in the back seat of that car and someone more easily OFFENDED had walked past. I tried vaping back when it was all cig-a-likes but these ‘modern’ sub-ohm(?) devices are vapers’ own worst enemies. Remember vapers, the SelfRigtheous don’t pick and choose, to them smoke is smoke…you can’t expect them to get their little minds around the concept that when water heats it turns to steam not smoke.
How long before the Verbot about smoking in cars with children present is extended to cover vaping and those new fangled heated tobacco thingys? Vapers will only have themselves to blame.
They did that last year in Vancouver. We’re the anti-smoking mecca. Not something I feel especially good about!
I may be wrong, but I thought that the new law already covered e-cigarettes, too? Well, it looks a little bit like smoking, doesn’t it? And we can’t have that, can we?
No i don’t think it does, but i could be wrong (a pretty normal state of affairs for me). On the subject of the car ban for cigarettes though I don’t smoke in the car if i’m driving Granddaughter2 (18 months) anywhere. Not only because her non-smoking Mummy wouldn’t like it nor because of some inherent respect for law *snork* but because it could be used against her parents, ie ‘they knowingly let their child, their poor innocent babe, ride in a SMOKER’s car!!’. Parents these days have to be so careful, even good parents and my son and his wife are frankly far far better at parenting than i ever was.
I repackage my cigarettes into my lovely cigarette case and my tubing tobacco into my tin. TC CAN F…K off !
I also use a cigarette case, and so the grisly images don’t show. However, here’s a little tip for all you would be “civil disobeyers.” Just out of principle, I’ve kept quite a lot of my old “branded” cigarette boxes, and I’ve discovered that with the new “resealable” inner packs (were they deliberate, do you think?), if you remove them carefully (they’re stuck with a not-very strong glue to the inside front and back of the box, you can take the whole inner pack out and slot it easily into a previously-saved branded box. Then it gives me great pleasure to feed the new “plain” boxes into my turbo-charged paper-shredder to be later added to the compost bin in my garden, so that not even the bin-men will see them! There are still quite a lot of branded packs about, so buy ’em while you can, save them and use them to frustrate the intentions of the puritans!
Some impressionable people may see vapers like the one you described and assume they are smoking tobacco. It would give them an excuse for prejudice. Not that there’s any harm in a car full of vapour or smoke and I’d have no problem with either appart from the sickly smell of the e-juice. I seem to recall that tobacco smoke is around 96% water vapour anyway.
And atmospheric air it’s 2-3% water vapor. Just remember the dryer the product the less smoke there is.
But for good tobacco it’s gotta have about a 20% moisture content or so to make the right smoke!
If your rolling your own and the baccy gets rather dry a small wet sponge overnitevin the sealed bag can usually get the moisture level back to where it should be.
Or a piece of raw potato.
Ya that’d work too
I use apple peel. It imparts a faintly sweet flavour, and enhances the smoke.
I use thin slices of apple should I need to rehydrate.
I don’t use lettuce/apple/potato because of the danger of mold and i don’t like the idea of putting anything with vitamins in it anywhere near my lovely healthy tobacco. Also a lot of the tobacco i smoke is ‘pure’ ie has no preservatives/anti fungal chemicals added.
I use a small plastic micro-mister /atomiser filled with filtered water. Really fine misting/couple of shots into the bag/jar etc. Or just hold the open baccy pouch at an angle over the kettle, which has the advantage not only of scalded fingers but it’s pretty much instant rehydration. Other people use their wife’s steam iron on ‘steam shot’ which works well too.
Oddly enough, BD, I prefer dry tobacco and put small amounts in a glass bowl, I can’t bear that sticky moistened rolling tobacco and it drove me nuts having to open the pouch, pull all the bits apart to avoid getting solid lumps and dry it all out on a work top.
I had to swap brands because my favourite tobacco was out stock during the packaging change over. It was a great relief when it came back.
And I’m sorry to inform you but there are vitamins in your tobacco, it is a plant after all.
Rose, everytime I have to open a pouch of commercial tobacco I get annoyed that it is so moist as to be almost unsmokeable, so i hear what you say. Last time i opened a pouch of GV it was almost bloody fluid. Which annoys me on several levels, mainly though because , as we buy tobacco by weight, i feel i have just paid out for water.
I recently left a pouch of DRUM open and even after 2 days in a warm room it was still just the wrong side of ‘too wet to smoke’. That isn’t right. Anyone who has handled raw untreated tobacco knows that unchemicalized tobacco dries out in a heartbeat. And the more humidificatory chemicals added, the more anti-fungals there has to be too becaue wet tobacco molds up in a heartbeat too.
Try American Spirit Blue, if you haven’t already, BD.
I have tried American Spirit and thought it over-hyped silage (I’m not a fan of Virginias), more unpleasant even than Cutters Crap. Thin, hot and biting. My tranny friend with a brain the size of a small planet recommended it to me some years back as it was the only tobacco without strontium 123whatever or was it polonium-something or the other? I would like to try their ‘black’ with Perique because Perique makes Virginia ‘work’ IMNSHO, the same way vodka makes orange juice work but i don’t think it is commonly sold here.
Perhaps I just like thin hot and biting. I tried the yellow and that wasn’t bad until that went out of stock too, but at least you don’t have to dry out either of them.
I found the American Spirit Perique tobacco a little harsh. The one I’ve been smoking for a while now, and which I like very much, is Pueblo Burley / Java blend, which is another ‘additive free’ tobacco. Unfortunately, thanks to the arseholes in Brussels (part of the TPD bullshit, I guess), my supplier in Germany is no longer allowed to sell tobacco to me here in Greece, and since that brand is unavailable here, I’m now back to Golden Virginia.
I get so angry with these interfering twats telling me what I can and can’t do. I wish they’d just fuck off back under the stone from whence they crawled.
These are generally known as “cloud chasers” who deliberately vape an almost 100% VG concentration to get to that effect. They are actually a small niche, most vapers (myself included) use a pretty standard device producing no more shall we say “smoke type effect on the exhale” than an actual cigarette would.
But then again according to prog I’m a tosser so what would I know?.
Smoke, vape whatever, I’m all for free choice, but as I vape I’m definitely a tosser. ;-)
Number 3 Son is a vape fetishist. The steam-engine effect is clearly a big part of the fun.
It’s amusing, and completely harmless. It only annoys those people who enjoy being annoyed, so everybody’s happy! No problem.
Harmless and only annoys those who want to be annoyed with it … exactly why vaping was quickly classified a ‘Tobacco Product’ and lumped in as an accessory to Public Enemy #1.
My son likes vaping too and we all have fun with the steam engine effect out in the garden, I particularly enjoy it when he blows vapour through bubble mixture, a beautiful effect and fun for all the family. After all there are small amounts of nicotine in the vegetables everyone eats so no problems there and as for the Propylene Glycol it seems a positive benefit.
Propylene glycol in e cigarettes might keep us healthy, says researchers
2009
“Dr. Robertson placed groups of mice in a chamber and sprayed its air first with propylene glycol, then with influenza virus. All the mice lived. Then he sprayed the chamber with virus alone. All the mice died.”
“The researchers also found that “the propylene glycol itself was a potent germicide. One part of glycol in 2,000,000 parts of air would–within a few seconds–kill concentrations of air-suspended pneumococci, streptococci and other bacteria numbering millions to the cubic foot.”
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091104/Propylene-glycol-in-e-cigarettes-might-keep-us-healthy-says-researchers.aspx
Antibacterial and antifungal properties of propylene glycol, hexylene glycol, and 1,3-butylene glycol in vitro.
1991
“The antimicrobial properties of three glycols, – propylene glycol, hexylene glycol, and 1,3-butylene glycol – against Candida albicans, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Streptococcus pyogenes A, Streptococcus mitis, and E. coli were studied in vitro. Within 20 h, 10% and 30% hexylene glycol in fresh tryptic soy broth were able to kill all the micro-organisms listed above. Five percent hexylene glycol showed some antimicrobial properties but the 1% agent had no effect. Thirty percent 1,3-butylene glycol and 30% propylene glycol were approximately as effective as 10% HG.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1675525
As it seems to do much of the job that tobacco smoke used to do killing germs in enclosed public spaces , if vaping becomes widespread it might even be safe to go back to the pub. Assuming they aren’t banned of course, we currently seem to live in a world of righteous ignorance.
Public heath hate ecigs because they have come from absolutely nowhere and have blown the crappy patches and gums out of the water. If ecigs had been a public health invention then they would love them.
As Dick Puddlescote often says it has never been about health, and he’s absolutely right.