Roll Your Own Cigarettes: Smokers Savings and Hidden Benefits

If you're a regular smoker and you're getting sick and tired of paying the ever-growing price for a pack or carton of cigarettes, this article will answer a lot of question about the benefits of rolling your own cigarettes.

Looking For Savings

Smokers that are looking for an immediate saving will find that they can reduce the price of a pack of cigarettes from around $4.50 (in the Dallas Texas area) down to around $1.25, or maybe even a little less. In my case I buy loose tobacco (1 pound) and filtered tubes (3 cartons) from a local smoke shop for a total price around $31. If you break that down it works out to $1.02 a pack.

Be aware though, there is an initial outlay for some sort of tobacco inserting machine. These machines range from a simple plastic hand held device at around $6 on up to electric machines costing as much as $450. I tried the hand held model first, and while it works just fine, I wanted something that allowed me to roll more cigarettes in a shorter amount of time. I settle on the Supermatic which allows me to roll a cigarette in about 17 seconds. The Supermatic cost me around $45, and I've never regretted it.

Groovy Side Benefits

As for the groovy side benefits, well, you can custom design your smoke. You get to pick the tobacco brand, cut, and flavor. You also get to choose what kind of tubes (100s, King or regular, and full flavored or light) in which to insert the tobacco.

It's been my personal experience that loose tobacco is of a better quality compared with packaged cigarettes, and tends to burn a little slower, thus more bang for your burn if you will.

Since you are rolling your own cigarettes, you can pack them as tight or loose as you like. This allows you to tailor your smoking experience to your personal liking. A tighter pack requires a harder draw (or pull) while you smoke, but yields a longer lasting smoke, while a lighter, less tight pack, yields an easier draw and quicker burning cigarette.

Loose tobacco also appears to be more fresh. Even if the batch you gets seems to be a little dry or crumbly you can simply apply a few drops of water to the batch and let it soak in to rejuvenate and freshen it up a little.

You have total control over your cigarette supply. In other words you can sit and roll as many cigarettes as you like in one sitting. Just enough for the day, or in my case, I'll sit and roll for about an hour or so and roll enough cigarettes for both me and my wife that will last us about 5 days.

For me also, I like the entire process of sitting and rolling cigarettes. It's almost like taking a little meditative break, just going through the mechanical process of loading the tobacco, running the insert, tapping the tobacco down in the tube and repeat.