I’m not a smoker, but I do know a few and they all spend close to $150+ a month on cigarettes.
I notice that a pound of loose tobacco is under $20 where I live. Isn’t that close to 500 cigarettes worth of tobacco since a cigarette is only about 1g of tobacco?
So aside from a rolling machine, how could a smoker use loose tobacco? I assume you can put it in a pipe.
Hookah? Bong? Can a person chew loose tobacco?
Can you just put loose tobacco in certain vape pens?
All the smokers I know simply roll the tobacco into cigarettes using rolling papers. No machines, pipes, glassware, or anything else required, besides a lighter.
ETA I assume pipe or hookah tobacco would be a different blend and/or cut.
Blends and cuts are important. Most cigarette tobacco tends to be primarily Virginia tobacco, perhaps blended with other tobaccos, though straight Virginias are available in some brands. Cigarette tobacco is also “navy cut,” which means that it is cut very fine, creating thin tobacco strands. They are easy to roll by hand, or using a machine.
Pipe tobacco is always blended. Virginia, Burley, Latakia, Cavendish, Perique–all of these, and others, are tobaccos that can be cured in certain ways, and blended different ways and in different proportions, to produce different flavours. Even a “Virginia Flake” tends to be blended with a little bit of Latakia, in order to take the Virginia’s sweet edge off. But pipe tobacco is not cut quite as finely as cigarette tobacco. I’m a pipe smoker who knows how to roll my own cigarettes (thank you, misspent youth) but I’ve never tried rolling my pipe tobacco into a cigarette paper. Given the wider cut of the pipe tobacco, as opposed to navy-cut cigarette tobacco, it would be a very clumsy roll, and likely, a lousy smoke.
That bulk tobacco that you’re seeing that costs $20 for a pound is shit. It’s probably Bugler or Gambler, packed in a large ziploc bag…not good quality at all.
I’m an on-again off-again cigarette smoker and when I do get in the habit of smoking, it’s usually not more than one cigarette a day with my coffee - sometimes more if I’m at band practice or at a show. This is my go-to rolling tobacco, Norwegian Shag, made by the Peter Stokkebye company. (They also make pipe tobacco.) It’s a blend of Turkish and Virginia tobacco. They make a handful of other rolling tobacco blends which I’ve also sampled. This is the highest-quality cigarette tobacco that you can get. It’s better in every way than the cheap bulk tobacco the OP mentioned, and certainly better than any commercial cigarette from a pack that I’ve smoked. The quality of the taste is better, the aroma for the bystanders is less objectionable, and the nicotine buzz is stronger. And it also doesn’t have all the additives in commercial cigarettes nor, if you roll it in ultra-thin plant-based paper as I do, the needlessly thick paper wrapper. If you’re going to smoke, smoke this…IMO.
Back when I was a smoker, and a young, uncultured one, not knowing any better I bought a sack of pipe tobacco from a drug store and rolled cigarettes with it. It definitely tasted a hell of a lot better than the pre-rolled commercial cigs, but they burned really unevenly, frequently went out between drags, and smoked a lot like, well, pipe tobacco.
I have no idea about tobacco quality honestly. I assumed a big part of the price difference between it and packaged cigarettes was that the packaged ones were taxed differently and because of the convenience of not rollings your own. I believe mainstream cigarettes are only about $20 a carton when you remove all the taxes, which would make it closer to $50 a pound for tobacco and obviously the rolling would also be a part of that $50/pound price.
So is the $20 bag a much lower quality than say marlboro, pall mall, camel, winston, etc? Is there a medium ground on price vs quality, the one you link is about $100 a pound.