Pat Uri

www.freshgat.com?

Team - you've made my day! - I praise you all! Usual stimulant driven conversation isn't it! So http://www.daff.gov.au/aqis/mail/cant-mail/khat ain't worth the paper its written on! Figures! Don't worry PD - I'm sick of cutting it back for compost! -you can pick up big bag of Arabian Tea Tree off me any time!

Hang in there Tough Fella! (Actually the Mapuche Indians of the Andes are so familiar with tobacco use - those incredibly rare times when they don't have any and go into withdrawals they put the symptoms down to sorcery! Only Mapacho - their Guardian Angel - can drive off the evil! You must know how they feel about now!) I can really recommend snus - Swedish oral moist snuff - and rather than getting involved in the cigarette companies new games of protecting their online interests go to:- http://www.northerner.com/ not exactly ma-and-pa sized industry but outsiders anyway about 3 ounces of tobacco you can buy with delivery in 9 days (not 3 fucking weeks - because BALC trust Sweden origin stuff as clean) for $20. Because in this form twice the nicotine is available, no tax or duty applies to tobacco that isn't smoked i.e. snus, that $20 will supply a-packet-a-day ex-smoker for a month. The brand General is very popular and has instantly converted many a smoker. And when you've seen a cancer victim in palliative care dying with emphysema still trying to smoke a cigarette through their tracheotomy until you give them snus to try and with tears in their eyes they ask "where were you thirty years ago when I first started smoking?" I know you will hate the cigarette industry as much as I do. Amazing fact about tobacco:- Snus is nearly completely free of carcinogens to Swedish standards - other tobacco products are not. For pointing this out EU cuntries have banned snus - presently - because it contains 50% water! Which contravenes the Pure Tobacco Act that states it must have 10%water! - carcinogens optional. (Nothing to do with better product for consumer and all to do with getting the right excise and tariff) And your lung will feel so good, no creosote taste in your mouth, sleep properly without constant phlegm in the throat, and all the mountains you'll climb when you get there! Hurrah for you, Psylo D!

And the balls been passed on splendidly by Tipz to Pat Uri:- Yep! - dump a bit of ciggy stuffing onto wet filter paper and watch those industrial chemicals chromatograph off in ever expanding rings. Your smokin"tobacco" may now betray its origin - if you hadn't guessed already - 'proper just swells, its molasses case might stain the paper abit; then depending on how much they can screw out of impoverished addicts, goes down (in pectin) to some blue pouch stuff I cannot name that will become whiter than the filter paper! It's not fit to be put in the same class as the Great Noble Plant authored by the Divine, Innocent, Incapable of Sin (That's a human invention!) (I'm serious - everyone should be allowed to grow at least one! To think the law would have you smoke your whole life, die of the habit, but never let you see, smell or mediate in the gold and blue aura of its mana - like all the Great Soul Ethnobot Plants it gives off more and purer energies than any average human) let alone be called a pesticide! let alone be smoked by the most vulnerable sections of society! GGGGGRRRRRR! Soz - Tipz are you Persian? (I like Persians - Hiya Ilya!) whereas you don't have to worry about lowies rippin' off plants from the front yard! Don't worry about giving away your position - just tell me if you can see the Southern Cross and about how high it is above the horizon. I've gazed long enough skyward to figure the rest out. Amazing Fact About Tobacco - All the naughty insects that feast on accumulator tobacco (and who can blame them? - I do too!) crops are killed by being sprayed with tobacco! (Insect control on tobacco is critical. The most valuable leaf product from tobacco that there is - constant humidity shade grown cigar wrapper leaf - becomes scrap if a stray hopper bites a pinprick in it! Each hand reared plant might only produce 2 or 3 such leaves!) Just like in humans, its all a case of pH, drug target delivery systems and lipid solubility!

Peace! Mud - and Respect! Worded up that's some pretty heavy bile coughed up into the face of society! I could feel the heat of your heart from here, comrade! I've only reread it fifty times so far - still newbie to your style! All I was gonna say was Nothing Makes the Lawmakers Look More Stupid Than Creating Unenforceable Laws That Can Not Be Policed! But I think you said that in a Slipknot sort of way. Cigar coming your way you crazy diamond! I'll read it some more.

That is mighty nice of you Tipzy and I wished you lived next door too! - I think it might be one of PsyloDread's "brothers" presently! But we have an expression up here - "You only eat your own beast, when you go to your neighbour's place for tea." - and it applies to their veggies too!...know what I mean, like? If you lived next door you would feast (not just with eyes) on what grows in neighbour's neglected lots from decades of Clan Pat Uri dropping seeds with their superphosphate deposits along the creek. But without the distinctive flower some simple leaved plants are impossible to spot from the road. Maybe that's why they call it 'virginia tobacco' - smart arses keep knocking off the flowers, keeping them virgin markedly increasing leaf quality, preventing pollination (and detection) - the scallywags! (I made the virginia part up - the rest is true.) PS - I'm quite the newbie and, as confidence gains, hope to send you some cigars, photos or move you in next door - (I'll get "Greasy" Pete moved on - HIS shishas made from the wet dumpers and "tutti-frutti" toilet blocks he finds cruising public toilets after dark! Don't ya! - Go change your hookah water! ya grub! Sorry - when can you move in, Tipzy?) And by the way many thanks for kicking off this topic! Its been a fine game! Have you been following gallery?

Yeah - to grow european type crops on ancient, australian soils which are notably phosphorus/phosphate deficient - and kick off the White Death saltation of Murray Darling - used vast amounts of phosphate. Initially stripped off pristine coral cay islands where fish-eating-birds poo out vast quantities of guano that, neutralised by the pure calcium carbonate of reef coral sands, turns into the best fertilizer once known to man! Yes - our local islands have only just started to recover from the guano industry! The phosphorus/phosphate in the sea over eons came into equilibrium with the reef and its islands. Plankton took up the phosphates. The seafishies took up the plankton, accumulating the phosphates, taken up by the seabirds who shit it on John Howard and other places. Traditionally bird manure and calcium phosphate, from animal bone, surficed - but with intensity guano exploited, now mineral, epecially as phosphoric acid (yes and the other ones! sorry motorheads - no free homebake tips given out here!) very soon phosphorus is tipped to be a commanding commodity in human population growths! Most heavy metal radioactive nucleatidy minerals are gonna stay in the ash - what little radioactive elements stay in your body from smoke, even over a lifetime, are a peck on the cheek from Liz Cunningham compared the nitrosamines, polyphenolics, formaldehyde, etc created in the pyrolysis of a cigarette! Don't want your cigarette to give you lung cancer? Then do not let it get above 150oC and then find yourself another drug-delivery-system that isn't the lungs for the nickies to get in. Best phosphate cycle is to have a composting dunny to put your phosphate into earthworms, to chickens amongst vegetables, and back on your dinner table! Because of the amount of fucking Coca Cola drunken affluent westerner's poo is one of the richest sources of phosphorus/phosphate since they banned them in washing powders in the 80's -

Talking about Hitler and some very strange propositions by your humble servant to titilate you - dear reader - for between truth and beliefs, what is not knowledge, can be strange indeed! - As "Happy" Ally Crowley predicted someday all the evil religions and black magics would unite internationally over the internet (WWW = 666!) combining Prehistoric Demon worship, Muti, Voodoo, Palos, Narcoreligions, from all over the world - practices that make what goes on at a Satanic Black Mass look like a Church picnic! Alien-demon-spirity blokes are coaxed out of hell to "ride" their followers with spiritual possessions and deliver their wicked instructions for 2012! - and teach really cool guitar licks to musicians and write Beatles songs backwards. Oooohhh! It sends a shiver down me tattoos! These cheeky devils - hellbent on human souls (with all the other crap available in an infinite universe on an infinite timescale at their disposal -why pick on us?) are strangely very partial to, guess what? tobacco smoke! Loads of cigar smoke is needed to invoke Baron Saturday, demons and the Petro evils. It has to be tobacco! (tafia, chickens, goats, etc. optional) How did I source this obscure treat of occult? - I try to support little ma-and-pa sized industries throughout the world with my tobacco imports. This leads to some strange contacts:- I feel an "S.American ip. no.skype.link" to a man wearing bits of other men and professing 200 generations of Devil Worship - trying to buy dirt to feed his cauldron, over the internet - deluded or not - would, prima faci know more about that subject than my advertisement which was for "high quality, local snuff, best prices paid!" (Yes - I had to ask - you will not be admitted to even the most open of these rituals if you are drunk, or stoned, or drug affected in any way. You are searched and your breath checked! The diabolical influences can't get inside you if you're addled in any way besides smoking! What you know! There will be Australian Safety Standard AS4308 in Hell!)

Amazing Fact about Tobacco - Hitler didn't smoke.

Yep - you got to watch these governments - I mean everything Hitler did to the Jews was perfectly legal at that time in Germany!

Yep! It's pretty much the consensus of this scruffy lot around me "virginian" is a name bandied about really. Originally expensive aromatic tobaccos were used to make cigarettes - but only those mild and aged enough for this new sort of consumption. Flue-curing discovery provided mild, bright leaf eminently suitable for smoking in a paper tube - very cheap, very profitable! Especially as other forms of producing was so expensive now you had to pay the niggers a wage! Flue cured White Burley and Maryland, with a touch of Oriental sauce was used in early American cigarettes - and thus was born the American blended cigarette - the blend that really still dominates the world market to today. Now, at about the same time, the English drug lords business people were industrialising and invented an automated cigarette making machine that could produce billions of tasty ciggies for the world to happily puff on devouring acres and acres of el cheapo yellow, American flue-cured from Virginia. Hence what Poms call 'virginian' the "Merkins call "flue-cured" and both think they are perfectly correct. Poms have the strange habit of naming things by their origin - "Hoover" for vacuum cleaner, "Spanish" for S.P. snuff. Amazing Fact about Tobacco - 'tobacco' could actually be the name given by Cubans to the tube they snort 'cohoba' with - odd because 'cohiba' is what they call their tobacco! No wonder possession of Cuban cigars is still illegal in the USA! And there isn't a plutocrat amongst them that haven't broken that law! (Mind you the Cubans got them back with the rumour that Tampas, Florida cigars are radioactive.) I told you there is a very twisted tale behind tobacco, how she causes the damage yet manages to get her sister persecuted for it:- folks you ain't heard nothing yet

Hello there SallyD! Now that's a name I can do business with! Old mate Percy's pretty much talking about the US Florida situation with the mineral phosphate apatite they get from Mexico. Yes - it is loaded with uranium, mercury, clandestine meth-lab residues, headless bodies, chillies, etc. If you think that's bad I've a sample of Ukrainian Schamalzer snuff grown 19km from Chernobyl! (Apologies to any Customs officers who let it in.) Good old Aussie phosphate, exported to the world, comes from that fine community of miners at Phosphate Hill slaving away in the Queensland desert to produce state-of-the-art fertilizers! No radioactive dregs in our 1st world product! You are right - a tremendous amount of nonrenewable phosphate is diverted from food crops to prime tobacco crops. It's only during seedling and vegetative stages of virginian crop that a relatively high N%:K:P fertilizer regime is observed Only in crops destined to develop their own flavours and alkaloid profiles is fertilizing continued, but toward harvest the crop is nitrogen starved to avoid rankness that may take weeks (for months) in a humidor to cure out - Yum! Yum! But this proper baccy is never smoked in the same year it was grown... Cigarettes require material that can be processed as quickly as possible, as bland and as uniform as possible, so it will soak up lots of brand-specific tobacco sauce, free from minerals that affect the ash, free from any natural flavour and aromas that could influence the sauce, nicotine citrated, sugar/glycol balance adjusted for burning, tissue structures "popped" for porosity and filling power, etc. (No cigarette company makes the claim they don't use GE material - it's not a foodstuff folks!) To prime it for harvest, to lower the chloride content (the bane of the Australian industry) and nitrates a calcium top dressing is applied along with the <N:>K:>P fertilizer encouraging root alkaloid synthesis and translocation. Cigarette consumption was a godsend to their industry! Now they could make use of the poorest, most infertile soils to grow a blanched, diluted scraggly crop, insect bitten, chloro tic runt called virginia to turn into a product to people who think they are "buying beef - but they're eating sausages!" Actually SallyD pleased to meet you! Very soon I wanna start a topic on "Non-tobacco Shisha" i.e. using the hookah technique of vaporising/steam distillation on good friends of ours like wormwood, calea, frankincense, lagochillus....and others as I grow more confident on good healthy formulations...you might suggest some other suitable s. (It is totally immoral to give others what you haven't thoroughly tested on yourself!) On the radiation subject - it is potassium that's the main source of our irradiation. Check out the "banana unit" of radiation exposure: - its funny! Regards - and I hope you find lots of easter eggs tomorrow - you've got enough bloody rabbits your way.

RESPECT to you Mr TW! May the Most High bless you in your work -and make you invisible to your enemies! (- I thought things like that only happen to me!) Long have us up here considered you HERO - and now you are LEGEND to!

I copy you, fella! The only way to truly tell the origin of your tobacco is to wet mount a sample and examine microscopically for the intact cell walls that prove it was once living plant tissue! If all you see is fibres then your commerical tobacco is reconstituted "tobacco" sheet paper made of pulp (there is no law that says any Nicotiana has to be used in commercially available smoking products) impregnated by artificially brand-specific chemicals to give them that brand-specific smell and controlled levels of nicotine, tobacco-specific-carcinogens, and what makes one brand of cigarettes commercial smoking product distinguishable from one another. You notice it when you open the packet and then it fades back to the flavourless "virginia" shredded paper it really is. ( I mean I could import washed shisha as confectionery under the Pure Tobacco Act 1932 - does ATO know that one? it took BALC long enough! - because it is ~50% sugar, >10% water and with nicotine content no greater than an eggplant!) Remember - very few cigarette companies actually make the claim they use free trade 100% pure, organic N.tabacum..if any at all....they just let you assume that. And guess what? It isn't really Ronald McDonald cooking those yummy burgers back there either! Amazing Fact About Tobacco - The fine chemical industry that blend together the brand-specific-aroma concentrates for perfumers, liquor and food flavours etc. create synthetic "French Carrotte" - the posh name for the top note perfumes of really good tobacco. The ciggy companies not only spray it (with nicotine, acrolein, sorbitol, etc.) on their product have influenced perfume companies to use it in deodorants and colognes that target the teenage market. With limitations on other forms of advertising their pioneering work in subliminal suggestion is very effective on smokers trying to quit! In some countries this tobacco sauce - as we call it - can be soaked into rhubarb, oak, chicory, apple cores, etc. and then sold as a commercial smoking product

Ho! Ho! Many thanks for the picture above! Acabar con la esclavitud los negros! Empresas internacionales de cigarrillos esclavizar al tercer mundo! Not real PC is it! I can think of about 5 reasons why I haven't seen the image up here - and that's before I talk about plain labelling, tax duty stamps, or indeed if its tobacco given Spanish economy! It looks like it could be coffee - eh? Those smashing big booty babes on the label would certainly sell more units than the pictures of diseased organs they put on ours! I've printed it out A4 to inspire Mi Blakgins to work harder - to the tune of the Rolling Stones "Brown Sugar"! They should see it on the 8th - Domingo Nergo - "Black Sunday"! tee! hee! Amazing Facts about Tobacco:- To this day International cigarette companies exploit black, often underaged, slaves to grow crops, not for food, but to process in sweatshop conditions to profit bloated tobacco-related-products ie cigarettes to import for rich addicts in the first world. (Don't worry we've tried the idea of fair trade tobacco - not a chance! That "tobacco" is the code word in Australian logistics for any precious cargo that should not be named for security reasons. As the chain-of-custardy and transport of "tobacco" requires ATO, BALC,Fed and local police notifications, inspection certificates, license checks and rechecks, armed security guards, road permissions, distance checks, recerts, etc. the "tobacco protocol" is understood...by no-one really - for security reasons That when local growers pay for a police escort the agency usually sends them an Asian Chick in a fancy dress costume.

Yo Respect to you Psylo Dread for all your legal research! So from the ancient piturri trails, to contact when 2oz of 'baccy was part of a man's wage (pushing the addiction with British Imperialism), WW2 when my 13yr old Al Fakher was fed Yankie cigarettes like lollies, selling out the Australian Industry to the Internationals, (you have your Myrtlewood, we had our Mareeba) - to today where the moderators of this addictive, health-destroying DRUG are the revenue collecting mechanism of the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT namely the AUSTRALIAN TAXATION OFFICE! You see the incredible irony of this? It is like DRACULA running the BLOOD BANK. You are right though - I haven't paid a cent in tobacco duty for years...And with the ATO making up the rules as they go along, the law and myself don't expect to for years. I'll send ATO a box of cigars and a bottle of brandy . Why the ATO? I don't know about illegal chop chop, but around Childers here the farmers realising about $8 per bale (Au tobacco bale is 100kg- all hand packed city folk) on their crop, with some specialty buyers said to turn the ticket at $80, surely CENTRELINK would be a more appropriate! Politians always think they can control society with taxes and create black markets as a result.

This trial idea of mine (spot-the 'sly-baccy' competition) has had positive results locally: Yep - the average CQ's knowledge of tobacco is nonexistent: - beyond the color of their "packet of PJs -thanks mate" - positively! Convincing them that just because any idiot can plant Cannabis and dry to something smokeable - DOES NOT mean they can grow material-suitable-to-be-the-plant-that-might-be-used-in-the-production-of-tobacco, let alone turn it into such good tobacco I'd swap it for its weight in gold. It is incredibly difficult to turn the shit into something really, really worth crapping up your lungs with i.e. commercial tobacco. Look at some of this gammon the hillbillies have given me:- The "senescent" Olde Perique going to seed in former Prime Minister Johnny Howard's front yard, was in fact the former Prime Minister John Howard. (He is also the dope "photosynthesising" at the back - originally planted by Kerr whacked up on Nikov and K! in the 70's1 rumour) Exy-sexy-Premier Anna Bligh's pet Al Fakher Up was always her nickname - ya idiots! As seen from Google.earth.maps Bob Katter's crop has always been there and so doesn't qualify! He doesn't smoke - he just sucks. Also, talking gmap, the Long Shag seen growing out of esteemed elder Germaine Greer's undies ain't tobacco...it's also where she keeps her smoking pipe between sessions which could explain the misperceptive smells... What smells like N.rustica outside Rockhampton Lord Mayor'sCouncil Chambers, and smoked for its "glue sniffer" like high, blatantly seen in a local city I'd be slanderous to name! is actually E.pilulifera mutated from TSC laden mulch of a hundred years of Council City Worker's cigarette butts. Okay - that is Squaw Tobacco growing in Bob Carr's EarthStar Phytotron - Peter Garrat sold him the seeds years back and told him it were Jack Herer. He actually got them to grow and when he smoked the "sheep dip" he got all cred and cool - then cried a bit, etc. We know he couldn't hurt himself so long as he thinks that way - so best left alone. Here's one just off the bar - Mature Tasmania Virginia doesn't exist - regardless of what she says. It gets worse:- What looks like brown stalks of tasty South African Kutsaga field cure leaves billowing like smoked antelope hides in the wind on Ant Murdock's luxury penthouse heliopad is actually his hot wife Jodie practising handstands. God bless ya - ya lovely fit thing! Definately NO! Julia Gilliard Prime Ministeress, pretty prime indeed! Woof! Woof! Does not grow the best in Oz! She is so good and pure when she brews beer she brews it to 02.9% alc.v/v content because she know it is illegal to brew alcohol in Australia beyond 3% without a brewer's license. (The ONLY country in the world with this archaic law. that they can't even be bothered policing) What looks like Maryland Mammoth on her land are, closely related, mandrakes, fertilized with Ruddy's blood and bone (and balls). She uses the mandrakes, of course, for black magic offering her immortal soul to the Devil in exchange for a filthy damned demon to possess her and give her the supernatural strength to defeat her enemies. (On the ends of the mandrakes are the faceless men of Labor) Tony Abbott is only picking homegrown rhubarb for his family's consumption - you slanderers! (It just looks and reeks like White Burley because Bronwyn Bishopp's dog keeps pissing on it.) (Oh and Tony hasn't watered them since Cyclone Olga) It goes on and on! They wouldn't have a clue! Immature savages - Better end off with another:- Amazing Fact About Tobacco - Experienced shaman vegetalista can actually use Tobacco related Mapucho as an antidote to Brugmansia poisoning and visa versa! (Don't try that at home!) Pharmaceutically their profiles happen toward antagonism. They believe Nature puts no poison on the earth without an attendant antidote close by. We discovered they were correct as rutin found in tobacco, still refined from this source, is used to lower LDL and protect the damage caused by smoking tobacco.

Interesting comments! How many of you are non-smokers, former smokers etc. I'm curious if the term "Domingo" is correct and you don't mean "Dominica" - which, as the name implies, is an origin, not a variety? Yeah - Macedonian oriental latakia is the best in the world! Tiny little leaves with free petioles, low in nicky, rich,rich in flavour! Hand reared! They hang it up like christmas decorations in the street to cure! Then anoint it with the smoke of oak, sumac and cypress for ages.Did you say they sauce it? Double delightful! Latakia sauce "in sous" is used to give the Oriential note to the flavorless virginia of expensive cigarettes like Camel and Marlborough. A little macedonian goes a long way! Amazing fact about tobacco:- In the 18thC American colonial men could buy an English white woman for her weight in tobacco! This was to offset the her weight from the tobacco cargo it would normally carry. It was standardized to 170lb with a surcharge for a "heavier" bride - that apparently they were happy to pay for their darling.

Hey thanks folks - usually my mixed metaphors have a toxic effect on forums! (I'm just annoyed Google suspended all my accounts because they've discovered I'm not real) Getting back to the virginia question:- Virginia is more of a curing process than a variety - nearly any tobacco can be virginianed - but Maryland and burley cultivars do best. The 3 day flash cure of the flue (oest in Australia) makes it yellow (if not, the maleic hydrazide and ethylene they use will), enzyme denatured (no chance of natural aging or fermenting) and still full of starch and high levels of reducing sugars (so it must go to the processor, and not diverted) so it molds easily. Starch is nearly unique to virginia, all other cure techniques keep the tissue alive long enough to break down starch, proteins, develop carotenes, flavanoids aroma percursors and start breaking up the perfume from its pectin bonds - proper baccy! Now remember back at school where you tested for starch in your potato by putting iodine solution on it, and it went blue? Same deal, bloke! The high level of reducing sugars is the real diagnostic test - as some dark fire cures have a little starch, but are very different in color, smell, price and availability! Have you heard of Benedict's solution, or other redox reagents? I'm still curious if the average person could honestly recognize the-plant-used-in-the-manufacture-of-tobacco if it was growing right in front of them - without its flowers. Many tobacco experts have been confused by some of the natives I've shown them. Prehaps I could send a bouquet of purple flowers, lovely flowers!, to the customs, BALC, quarrantine officials I've sent out of their minds by ordering foreign tobacco products item by item. (Sniffer dogs don't like Irish High Toast Snuff, but they do like F&T's Prince Snuff - I think its the pheromone affect of the civet, tonquin, ambergris and musk that does that.) Would it be illegal to make a competition out of who can grow a plant in the most obvious spot as photographically evidenced?...N.amplexia on Moura football field doesn't count. (God bless the rains.) I'd offer a box of Romeo y Julieta Petit Coronas hecho a mano Cuban cigars as prize - or White Ox depending which side of the law the winner lands on. Amazing facts about tobacco:- Tobacco smoke contains the illegal Schedule 9 drug Harmine at about 10% - produced in the same pyrolytic reactions that destroy half the nicotine and produce the nitroamine, TPC, poison. The harmine's indole stains smokers fingers the same nice orange that B.caapi dyes make. The harmine is actually part of the smoker's high and is of course not found in chewed tobacco, a totally different experience. Hence why the two races of man that have used nicotine for millenia, Americans and Australian aboriginals, chew or sniff it for stimulation, and smoke it - with its attendant harmine - occasionally for a more mystical experience.

Yes - illegal and monitored...get the hint. Oh - the day I gave up cigarettes, was the day I discovered tobacco. Snuff, snus, shisha, mapucho, nambuha, plug, perique, cigars of all nations, etc. etc. and the International Cigarette Industry own it all by the balls! "Chop Chop" is their patent F1 hybrid bright leaf for flue cure diverted from their control - it actually breaks many laws - then Gangs started bringing it in by the container load - then the Cigarette companies discovered (by DNA analysis) that some chopchop was actually some of their best shit ($80 a bale!) diverted by their own execs off the trading floor. That's when they hit the roof! - illicit tobacco growing was gonna spread bluemold - chopchop would run the industry - blah! blah! - prohibition! I was chatting happily with some native american growers who were absolutely amazed we are not allowed to grow or possess seeds or raw tobacco in more than 250g personal in Australia. In their words "but how does that work? Your government says that you may only have this poison if you buy it off them at high profit? - yet when it gives you disease, it is your fault, they told you better and leave you to fate while they keep the profit." I explained in Australia we are very much told what to do. We are not the product of forefathers who fought with their lives so their children could walk on the land of their birth free, to live where they like, take whatever company they choose, own possessions and land and grow whatever they choose to grow on their land, rights to privacy, fair arrests, not having to prove who you are or participate in search or analysis etc. We don't even have a bill of rights - we are still rebellious convicts guarded by a corrupt Rum corps anxious to get out. In Australia only now (that the Government has figured out how to profit) have we been considered mature enough as a society to handle legalised prostitution, pornography, underage drinking, gambling, homosexuality, etc. but not drugs! We are way too irresponsible and immature to handle any sort of drugs and so we have the strictest prohibition...And some of the most bizarre laws. Here we are not given a choice and I'm sure there's a lot of smokers who would give up now - if the govt informed them there was a choice Now - to give up cigarettes I looked for alternatives. There's hundreds - all commercially banned in Aus. You must buy cigarettes and I estimate the gov. make $17 per pack - I import 250g of tobacco products annually and spend $200 a year on tobacco now, instead of $3000 on cigarettes! I use snuff, snus, chew, pituri, that is oral and nasal daily, shisha hookah weekly and take a few excellent cigars to share at annual corroboree. That's a lot of money in my pocket; my lungs feel fantastic, now I love tobacco! I study all forms of it - except cigarettes. "Much is written about growing tobacco little about producing it" Sir B.C. Akehurst Tobacco Directing Officer of Rhodesia, Tanzania, etc. until he was kicked out of Africa by civil war a bitter, cynical and displaced man - incredibly knowing - and willing to spill the beans on the international tobacco industry. It is the most amazing, incredible, global conspiracy you have ever heard! The politics is incredible! (I mean if the Chinese didn't discover America first, how did they have tobacco so early?) It will amaze you how cannabis and tobacco use have grown up side by side like sisters - one condemned and exploited, because she's fair, honest and innocent; - the other celebrated, glorified, lusted over, because she is filthy, addictive, libertine and dangerous! (see de Sade's "Justine" and "Juliet" series) So well on my way to being a tobacconista I recommend you do at little research about tobacco with your taste buds and you'll see chopchop for what it is:- unaged, unfermented brightleaf of no character and if grown locally was done so to collect subsidies and to offer back to customs to offset duty on what cigarette companies import from the 3rd world (my worthless opinion). In this way you will learn what tobacco really tastes and feels like, what you'll never learn from cigarettes. The glories of its varieties, preparations, curing techniques etc. why it is called "nature's own perfume chemist". In doing so, you will learn that pH changes in fermentation release the aroma and how that aroma relates to strength and quality in alkaloid profile - not that nicotine is everything! But it helps identification. You see nicotine accumulation in plants is actually a recessive gene. Most populations inbreeding with themselves become "converters" the dominant characteristic. "Converters" don't allow nicotine to accumulate, but convert it to nornicotine. Such plants look the same, smell the same, but no nicotine. It is what we call "sheep dip". Back Tom Petrie days everyone grew a patch of burley as back up if you ran out of the shop stuff. Hung for years, then "cavandish" cured to plug and still second best. These patches have bred to today, lovely flowers!, but mostly all gone converter hence no nicotine, hence not commercial tobacco which are registered F1 hybrids, the supply, transport,growth of which is highly regulated. You can imagine even the prestigious and diligent Queensland Police Force Drug Squad would have trouble collecting up all the wild "sheep dip" tobacco of rural Queensland as they have collecting those Schedule 9 possessing cane toads. "Accumulators" besides being a rare mutation are usually more prone to insect attacks (and human too) and don't do well in competition. Notice I say "plants that accumulate nicotine" and not, say,"N.tabacum var.havanensis White Burley var.OneSucker Kentucky III". Aussies aren't allowed grow N.tabacum, and we can't pick the other 27 native species. Amongst the natives, it is only those few freaks that are "accumulators" that are useful and these individuals had to be discovered and remembered and their knowledge was a great secret. Hence why researchers get inconsistent nicotine results in their study. They need to research with their tastebuds (oh - and a little lime - but with practice you can smell the difference). All said and done - I have 15 gorgeous plants in my front yard of "Flowering Nicotina" beautiful flowers! - although mine didn't flower, oh dear! perhaps that happens when I keep cutting the buds off. Try again this year with the few million seeds left. So the poor things are just all a few yellow, velvety leaves, sticky, resinous and stinking of vanilla. Now - it can not possibly be tobacco - probably N.sylvestris or something - because some months back some constables came to visit to ask about some break ins along the street. The plants were right in front of them and they seemed to have no problem with them at face value. Now Queensland Police are highly trained in crime detection and could not see a problem - and they must report a crime if they see it, don't they? Nicotinia is highly polymorphic - it changes considerably under growing conditions. So much so that often 5 polymorphs of the exact same strain go into a decent cigar - one type for its flavour, one type for its burning qualities, another type for its ash, another for construction and other for appearance. Tobacco processing is an art, a science and a highly guarded secret - with a lot of disinformation to confuse you. Sorry to write a book here - but it's a favorite topic of mine. Hope you can read between the lines here, because living in Australia I've probably said too much about an ancient, powerful and amoral international "Drug Cartel" quite capable to monitoring me now. Oh - there's a knock on the door. I wonder who it could be?