His reviews of those old MRE cigarettes are amazing. He makes it seem like he's smoking pure ecstasy (figuratively, actually, w'ever). I've never smoked but watching those segments I'm jonesing hard to smoke one of those.
I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.
I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.
We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.
The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.
Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.
The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.
Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.
If you decided to get addicted to vintage MRE tobacco you'd probably have a pretty tough time sourcing enough of it to give yourself cancer.
This means that there are parts of the paper wrapper that have vinyl compounds that are intended to allow them to self-extinguish.
Compared to the cigarettes of yore, these taste like fried dick cancer.
But old tobacco doesn't always age well. It can survive for centuries if stored at the appropriate temperature and humidity and away from things that would impact the taste, or it can turn stale and fairly blah in weeks or months when stored poorly.
(One can make them themselves, just as one can make anything else by oneself, but then one would not be purchasing them as completed items.)
The cigarette reviews tend to be a bonus segment - most MREs don't include them today (for good reason) and it's not the intended purpose of the channel anyways. That being said, I have never craved a cigarette more than the moment I laid eyes on a box of 1944 Chesterfields.
Honestly I'd just recommend all the episodes, MRESteve defines "peak YouTube" for me. It's a really relaxed and fun exploration of the different survival meals and basic kits distributed to soldiers around the world.