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Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they controlled for Tobacco intake. In my experience most stoners mix their cannabis.

What country are you referring to? I know that in the UK it's often mixed, but in (Midwestern) America almost no one I've known has mixed tobacco with their cannabis.

Sometimes if they are both smokers and cannabis users you'll see spliffs (blunts of half tobacco half weed) generally to get a head change, a buzz, a high, and to save on costs.

But spliff smokers are in the minority in the US. Was more prevalent in the past when more people smoked tobacco.

Nowadays most people use carts / pens for cannabis use anyway.

Anecdotally I've never encountered someone mixing in the US.

Mixing is very common in nyc. See grabba/fronto

Yeah I assume it's very regional and even group specific. I don't think I was ever around a group that was at the level of smoke enough and constantly enough to need to cut to afford it.

> Nowadays most people use carts / pens for cannabis use anyway.

I wonder if that's true or selection bias. Certainly we see more people with carts / pens, but I wonder if that's actually true of overall usage. Pens allow it to be less conspicuous and smelly which leads to more conspicuous usage, but flower smokers are still toking in basements and garages.

See spliff (mixed with tobacco) or blunt (wrapped in tobacco leaf). Though the US is one of the smallest countries for the practice. I didn't realize how severe the differences were until I looked it up based on your comment. In Italy, 94% of marijuana smokers mix with tobacco!

https://www.inverse.com/article/32064-america-europe-tobacco...

In Europe the terms are reversed a joint is mixed with tobacco and a spliff is pure. Threw me off when I visited the US for the first time.

We call it "full flavour" in Canada when there's no tobacco (or just "full"). Joint/spliff/doobie/etc are all synonyms of the final product, regardless of ingredients. There's a certain stigma associated with mixing tobacco in nowadays; unless you're a smoker, nobody wants that shit.

isn't "spliff" from "split"?

It seems. But it refers to the paper or wrap, not splitting between tobacco and weed, apparently.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spliff

Ah yes, that's true - many people here in the states do smoke from blunts. I've never been a fan so I didn't even make the connection that it's like a joint wrapped in tobacco. Personally I'm a fan of slow, controlled burns and as little smell (excess smoke) as possible.

Plenty of my friends will roll a blunt in a swisher sweets paper leaving some tobacco behind. It's very common in some communities in the US. We're a big culture :)

Even if you don't leave some tobacco behind, the wrap is usually made from tobacco pulp or leaves. So everyone smoking blunts is smoking tobacco.

UK, Europe, South America and Australia. I haven't had the chance to smoke with any Midwesterners, maybe one day.

German here. WTF, you smoke your high potency pot pure?!

> In my experience most stoners mix their cannabis.

This is such an interesting observation. It may be true that worldwide it is MORE common to mix cannabis with tobacco than to not. But we wouldn't think that in the United States, because it is much more rare here.

Older cannabis users are more familiar with spliffs, and there are some sub-cultures where it is common, but it is not the norm here.

Hah, yeah, in the US I feel like a marijuana smoker is likely to find a tobacco habit disgusting and unhealthy.

I tried doing high grade pipe tobacco twice. I did not like the "brain pops" that occurred. They felt very jarring and really uncomfortable.

Brain pops? Never heard of that term.

Do you mean head change? Basically a dizzy/foggy/rolling feeling mainly in the head.

It gets less extreme with tolerance, similar to cannabis highs.

> Do you mean head change? Basically a dizzy/foggy/rolling feeling mainly in the head.

Yah I never got a gentle dizzy rolling feeling.

Instead it felt like my brain was guitar strings and they were being plucked and vibrating. Then another. And another. They were very sudden, pluck/vibrate, and sped up the longer I smoked tobacco.

I did that pipe for about 20m. They sped up to about 3/second around the 10m mark. They finally quit at the 30m mark (10m after stopping).

I'm sure they slow down with tolerance. I just know I didn't like the feeling even starting.

You are supposed to puff a tobacco pipe, as in you don't inhale just hold it in your mouth. Same with cigars. Treating either like cigarettes or marijuana is a sickening experience even for many nicotine addicts.

Ah, yeah I know that cigs you inhale, and pipes you let be in just the mouth.

Either way, there were brain pops that were happening around inside my head that I did absolutely not like. Not sure how others describe the nicotine phenomenon. I just know I didn't like that one bit.

Stoners, in the US at least, view tobacco as disgusting and look down on other stoners who use it, which is really ironic given the stigma that surrounded (surrounds?) smoking weed.

Though people still roll “spliffs” which is a mix of tobacco and weed, but the people that do that are few and far in between. Though people do roll “blunts” and “Woods”, which is basically a gas station cigarillo (swisher, Blackwood, etc) that’s opened up to let out the tobacco and weed is put in there instead, but the wrapper itself is either tobacco leaf or very close it—and this is a much more popular option, but the quantity of the tobacco smoked is as thin as the wrapper itself and it’s also more extravagant than a joint or using a bong.

This is a stretch. People that smoke weed are much more open to other substances, including tobacco, than the general population. Your social circle might be that way, but it doesnt represent weed smokers as a whole

This is current, but it wasn't always like this. And I suspect that this varies by location.

In the 80's and 90's where I lived (rural NE US), pot smokers who didn't smoke tobacco were rare and looked down on.

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