i'm used to smoking a pack or two over the weekend, but i've been smoking pot - with tobacco - almost daily for two months. it really snuck up on me.
so, i opted to try a non-tobacco rolling option for the last nice weekend, hoping to strangely smoke myself through the detox. i've done this several times, now; the first thing is to break the physical addiction, and that actually only takes a few days. while it's uncomfortable, i actually don't find that part difficult. rather, it's the habitual part of the whole thing - having a smoke after every meal, for example - that i found so hard to smash up. and, i still crave cigarettes with alcohol, particularly.
so, this is going to be a rough weekend, regardless, and it's better to get ahead of it than let it linger further. so, i may have smoked my last ever cigarette last night on the way home from the store.
after some cursory research, i decided that what i was looking for was red raspberry leaves and the best way to find it was to looking for loose leaf raspberry tea. raspberry tea is both ancient and popular, it is no doubt a tradition passed on via family going back decades, so i did not think this would be hard; this struck me as an easy to find commodity. the bulk barn did not have raspberry tea, surprisingly. i tried some tea stores, and they had raspberry mixes...
i decided to just take a walk out to the store and stop at a few places, and i ended up spending $4.50 on 60 g of tea, in two box - a pure peppermint tea (30 g for $0.99) and a mix that includes raspberries and blueberries (30 g for the remaining price). i did not know if it was safe to smoke these teas or not, but i figured i'd have some tea, worst case...
it turns out the peppermint is safe, and i'll have to look into the other mix when it comes up.
when i was at the store, i asked the clerk if she had any filler to sell; if not raspberry leaves, then maybe even ground up hemp. she pulled out a concoction by a company called enlite that includes the following: Mullein, Red Raspberry Leaf, Yerba Mate, Gotu Kola, Marshmallow Leaf, Spearmint, Thyme. well, there's my raspberry leaf, for the night.
i've smoked a few joints using this mix now, and it smells and tastes like tea; it's mostly the raspberry that dominates, but you can get strong hints of spearmint as well, giving it a kind of menthol feel to it. this mixture also contains caffeine, so it's got a lift to the buzz that i like.
unfortunately, this mix is quite expensive; i paid $20 for 16 g, and i only did it because i didn't know the safety of the tea i'd just bought. this stuff is at least marketed to smoke, tea certainly isn't. the price of peppermint tea looks a lot more appealing, and i may be able to order raspberry leaves in bulk online. however, depending on how this goes, i suspect that i may see some attraction to green tea for the caffeine content. this is cheap and widely available.
for now, that's what i'm smoking for the weekend, and let's hope the physical pull on the nicotine is gone in a few days.
while i know that smoking herbs is not less unhealthy than smoking tobacco, i do hope it is less addictive.
potential side effects of smoking herbs like this are going to be allergies, headaches, dryness and rashes. the truth is that tobacco also has those same side effects. it's still early, but right now it seems like any such side effects would be lessened, given that the buzz is a little softer. but, we'll see what happens.
i want to move to edibles for normal (sporadic) use. but, if this works, i could maybe retain a place for the odd spliff, too.