Like many a smoker, I've resigned myself to living my life as a pariah: even joke about it when I enter the designated smoking area at a social function. "Ahh... HERE'S the rest of the social lepers!". And I was ready for this state of affairs to continue, with our legiscritters and goobernor deciding that Wisconsin should be "smoke free". Then I made a discovery...
What I found was the "electric cigarette". Sounds silly, doesn't it? Ran into someone with one at Faire, and thought "this might have it's uses". So I did me some research, and found one that didn't break the bank (I chose the Blu Cig). Good timing on my part.
Last night, while buying chocolate for Spoon, I noticed that the tax hike on cigarettes has gotten out of hand. The pouches of loose tobacco I use to roll my smokes has doubled in price (I'll have a rant about the sin tax and associated stupidity later this weekend). Thankfully, my "e-cig" starter kit was already on it's way.
Point of fact, it arrived today.
So I'm giving this thing a test-drive. So far, my impressions are good.
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First off: when I placed my order, I was warned that it might be 4-6 weeks due to backorder. Now, I don't know if this is the "Scotty Ploy", or I just got lucky. But the package showed up in roughly a week.
Here it is, just opened up:
I was actually impressed with the packaging: I had ordered one of the less expensive "starter kits", but this thing was nice.
The starter kit comes with 2 batteries, the "pack" (which is a combination carry case and mobile charger), USB and wall charger units, and a "carton" of cartridges. That's 5 packs of 5 each. Looks like this:
And yes, that's a quarter for size comparison.
Got the batteries all charged up, and started using the silly thing. And again: I'm impressed.
It's not like smoking a normal cigarette... not quite. There's no ash, no real odor. And no sense of smoke invading your lungs. Just a nice clean delivery of nicotine to my system.
Managed to go through one cartridge (actually trying to finish off the second while I type this). Since I usually average between 10 & 20 cigarettes a day, that isn't all that bad. And my usual "smoker's hack" just hasn't really been there...
So tentatively, we're going to give a Privateer Seal of Approval to Blu Cigs as an alternative to actual burning tobacco...
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Gonna add in here: smoking IS stupid. It amounts to willingly putting poison into your body. But that's one of the great things about freedom: we CAN choose to do these things.
The day our society actually works like the one in Demolition Man, I'll become a hermit...
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