Once upon a time I resolved to never smoke tobacco. Despite my predilection for cannabis as an adolescent, I abhorred the presence of second hand smoke or anything related to the ‘cancer sticks’ that were responsible for every imaginable evil in the world as far as I was concerned.
Swayed by the seemingly constant ‘tobacco kills’ messaging of the 90’s and completely unaware of the plant’s history and use as a pan-tribal sacrament in the Americas or its inclusion alongside weed in European and North African smoking rotations, I was naive to the possibility that weed and tobacco can be paired and enjoyed together by the discerning palate.
I smoked blunt after blunt and joint after joint for several years without ever aspirating the faintest hint of tobacco, content with my life choices and feeling as though I was on the right side of history. I even rolled up weed and mugwort together in a shortsighted maneuver to conserve my stash – surely the most Portlandian thing I’ve ever done.
And then came Junior year of college, when I fell in with a group of stoners from Spain. In addition to having a never-ending supply of hash and weed that they seemed to be genetically predisposed to consume every hour on the hour, they rolled ‘spliffs’ – equal parts cannabis and tobacco.
There comes a time in everyone’s life where they must examine their biases and deeply held convictions when opportunity knocks – and in this case, I didn’t have much time or perceived clarity of mind to make the snap judgment. It’s 3 am, we’re at the afterparty, and the Spaniards are getting out the rolling papers and hash – now they’re…holding a flame to the chunk of hash and burying it into a pillow of tobacco? They’re rolling the fragrant mixture into a nice, long cone?
“This is the only way we smoke in Europe” says the ringleader.
Never one to inadvertently offend my host, especially when cannabis is involved, I graciously accept the baton and take a nice, long toke –
And it’s fucking amazing.
Over the next 15 years, I came to appreciate cannabis and tobacco in a spliff, especially while traveling – from Marrakech to Kathmandu, Budapest to Berlin, and many pit stops (or should I say pot stops?) between, spliffs became my de facto method of cannabis consumption when traveling. As cannabis tourism is now a bonafide $17 billion dollar industry and climbing, the collision of different values and practices in the world of cannabis consumption is imminent.
The bifurcation of the cannabis community apparently comes in many forms: The Intoxicating Hemp vs. Marijuana players, medical vs. recreational, corporate vs. legacy, and certainly tobacco containing spliffs vs. weed only joints.
It’s a matter of principle for some purists – the only ‘whacky tobaccy’ is tobaccy itself, and don’t let that shit touch my beautiful green ganja flower.
Others are less concerned about the rules and regulations of the roll up game, with a laissez faire attitude around spliffs. After unshackling the mental constraints keeping me away from anything tobacco, I came to understand it as another powerful substance to be respected and – dare I say – carefully enjoyed.
The prevailing logic of why tobacco gets incorporated into spliffs comes down to cultural familiarity and normalization of tobacco smoking, alongside its perceived ability to burn smoother, induce an extra dimension of buzz that complements a weed high very nicely according to enthusiasts, and its penchant for extending the lifespan of a weed stash.
If you roll half as much weed and replace the other half with a pinch of tobacco, Voila, you now have twice as much weed to smoke. It’s stoner logic and it works, don’t @ me. In Europe, basically everyone who smokes weed does so with tobacco as an admixture according to my very stoned sources. I can confirm after having traveled much of the European and North African continents that cannabis tobacco spliffs are business as usual in the region.
It’s a bit ironic that the modern messaging around tobacco has swung back towards the ‘just say no’ rhetoric for that drug while cannabis has gone the opposite direction. I understand the apprehension behind introducing another potentially addictive and purportedly dangerous substance into a consumption routine, but the stigma around rolling tobacco into a cannabis joint should definitely be evaluated and reconsidered on the basis of it being a separate and distinct practice from cigarette smoking – which as a cognitive libertarian, is also totally fine by me if that’s your jam.
Plus, there’s a massive difference between quality hand rolled tobacco (such as is used by curanderos in their ceremonies across the Amazon basin and elsewhere) and the industrial scale, chemical riddled cigarettes coming from shady behemoth global corporations that most of us associate the notion of tobacco with in the U.S.. I will never judge you for not wanting to smoke tobacco with your weed as a regular event, but when in Rome: roll a spliff and tell me it’s not an amazing combo.
Written by Dennis Walker.
Dennis Walker is a satirist and multimedia producer with a long and robust relationship to psychedelics. He is the host of the Mycopreneur Podcast, a platform that spotlights and supports fungi entrepreneurs from around the world. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Forbes, and High Times among many other platforms.
Check out more of Dennis Walker’s work here at Beard Bros.
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