# Something you do is made illegal--so do you stop?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-you-do-is-made-illegal-so-do-you-stop/364041>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [July 11, 2006, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-you-do-is-made-illegal-so-do-you-stop/364041 "2006-07-11T16:01:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Hostile\_Dialect](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e495f1/32.png) [@Hostile\_Dialect](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hostile_Dialect)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2006, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-you-do-is-made-illegal-so-do-you-stop/364041/21 "2006-07-14T02:01:55Z")

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I’m not a smoker or an ice-cream-eater (I’ve immensely enjoyed both in the past; they just don’t appeal to me anymore considering the consequences…OK, I eat ice cream every once in a while), but no, I wouldn’t change my life because some part of it were made illegal. In my mind, that’s the first step to a process that could very easily end in slavery or worse.

> [@Ellis Dee](#):
>
> Cigarettes, OTOH, even with exhorbitant taxes are still under $10 an ounce. A single cigarette has about a gram of tobacco, 20 (grams) per pack. An ounce is only 28 grams, so a carton of cigarettes is something like 7 ounces. That would be the equivalent of $2800 for a carton of illegal tobacco!

I, for one, thought cigarettes had about 1-1.5 oz per stick. Have you ever weighed one? (I haven’t, but the way the stuff is shredded up, I’ve noticed you can pack in _a lot_ more tobacco in one ciggy than you can weed.

> [@Otto](#):
>
> Wow, do they uninstall your hyperbole detector when you give up smoking pot?

Wow, did you actually read his post, or did you see the word “pot” and assume he was talking about marijuana addiction (he wasn’t) and that he was some crackpot (heh) whose ideas were automatically wrong?

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**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2006, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-you-do-is-made-illegal-so-do-you-stop/364041/22 "2006-07-14T02:48:38Z")

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[QUOTE=fetus]  
I, for one, thought cigarettes had about 1-1.5 oz per stick. Have you ever weighed one? (I haven’t, but the way the stuff is shredded up, I’ve noticed you can pack in _a lot_ more tobacco in one ciggy than you can weed.  
[/QUOTE]  
No, it’s roughly a gram per stick. To put it in context, there’s 16 ounces in a pound. If they weighed an ounce per stick, a single carton of 200 smokes (10 packs of 20 cigarettes each) would weigh 12½ pounds. At a gram per, a carton’s worth of tobacco would weigh about 7 ounces, which seems about right to me.

Long ago I actually stripped out the tobacco from a smoke and weigh it on a triple-beam balance out of curiosity. (What? Didn’t everyone have a triple-beam? I actually had 3 of em at one point, plus a hanging quadruple-beam. I misspent my youth with a vengeance.) If memory serves, it wasn’t exact but close enough to a gram for argument’s sake.

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**Author:** ![ParentalAdvisory](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/53a042/32.png) [@ParentalAdvisory](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ParentalAdvisory)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2006, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/something-you-do-is-made-illegal-so-do-you-stop/364041/23 "2006-07-14T20:38:08Z")

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[QUOTE=Ellis Dee]

Marijuana is as valuable as gold, by weight. (Roughly $400 an ounce.)  
[/QUOTE]

:eek: $400? That’s way to much.

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