While you are preparing for the future you must try and remember some of the pleasures in life. Life without a bit of joy is hardly life at all. It will be bad enough when we have to live on rice and beans for a while without us having some vice to look forward too. Even if there is no collapse the way our politicians are going they will remove all the fun out of life in their attempt to make us all drones.
One vice which you can get ready to cover is tobacco. Already heavily taxed and now made out as a sin worse than murder. You would be forgiven for thinking that all smokers are the devil from what happens to them. Just the other day I watched an old lady sitting in the freezing rain outside a hospital having a smoke in her dressing gown. If you tried that with a dog you would be prosecuted but smokers have no rights. The new puritans are out to make your life hell and it won’t stop with smokers, booze and food are already being worked on with more to come.
So if your vice is tobacco, you can make sure you get some pleasure out of life.
Plantation House and The Tobacco Seed Company are two places that are popular with UK growers. The best bit, at the moment anyway, is this is perfectly legal. Get some now before they decide that someone somewhere is having fun and not paying tax and stop it. There are several different types depending on the use, cigarette, cigar, pipe or snuff. Obviously get what you prefer.
You grow tobacco is a similar way to tomatoes. Start in a propagator until they start to sprout, move to pots but keep them indoors until after the cold spells are over then grow them outside. Instructions come with the seeds and are available on the web sites.
Curing them is a bit more of an issue. You can simply roll and just smoke the leaves without curing but it is recommended for flavour that you cure them. Curing them requires you dry out the leaves. Either the old fashioned way by leaving them to dry, which takes a while, or in a curing chamber. Which you can make yourself. Again, instructions are given on how to do this.
Now, I don’t smoke so I cannot comment on quality or anything but I intend to get some seeds and try them out. At the very least it will be an item in demand and can be used for barter. I wonder if pipes will make a come back when cigarette paper runs out or people will just smoke it with any old paper when they get desperate. Either way, save money now and be able to grow a commodity item in a disaster scenario. What can you lose?
Go on. Have a go. Even if it is just to deprive HMG of revenue.
I started my tobacco seeds today, I roll my own and smoke a pipe. One thing about tax is that you do have to pay it on the finished ready to smoke product. I doubt they would hunt you down, or would they??
Half,
Of course I expect most people will follow the law on something that can be easily grown in a garden, does not look in the slightest suspicious and requires the grower to voluntarily pay the tax.
I mean, all those paying cash to man in a van for tobacco bought from the EU must be keeping the rest of the cash to give to the tax man at the end of the year.
Oh, and they don’t hunt you down yet but it won’t be long before they seriously look at it. After all who will pay for the NHS. Smokers can pay taxes to the NHS but can’t use the services. They will be sorely missed.
What type of seeds are you using? What do you think of the process?
Skean,
Smoking harms your health and the health of those around you. It’s long overdue to ban it in all indoor public places. Personally I’d like to see it banned with 50 meters of doorways and pavements too.
Your comments seem to suggest that the NHS needs funding from tobacco. In reality the tax on tobacco doesn’t come close to covering the NHS costs of illness due to tobacco.
If you want to pick a vice there are a whole lot you could choose from that are less damaging to you and those around you.
Skvez,
I’m a libertarian at heart. I don’t smoke myself but understand that many do and enjoy it. Our nanny state is trying to take the joy out of life on many fronts with smoking first, booze next and fatty foods to follow. Soon it will be sky diving, skiing, and cutting trees down with chainsaws as they are all activities that take resources out of our sacred cow the NHS.
The tax take on sins, booze and alcohol, go a long way to funding the NHS and you can be sure that with the NHS withholding treatments for those that fail to follow its guidelines that is money taken at the point of a gun with no return benefit. Like many things it would be illegal if the government was not doing it. Tax not being paid to HMG means a reduction in income and even our useless government can’t just spend without some money coming in. The wheels are coming off and I for one would like that to happen sooner rather than later so we have less debt to recover from.
Personally, I think the illegal drugs are less damaging than the legal ones with alcohol being a long way out in front of anything else. Corporate tobacco with all the additives is much worse for you than a little home grown tobacco. It is funny how tobacco is the one area where actual oversight and regulation actually make things worse for the consumer.
In the event of a survival scenario I suspect many people will be without their vices. Smoking will once again be a privilege to the rich and those that have resources to burn.
I’m growing golden virgina,this is my first time growing tobacco but am geting lots of advice from someone who grows it in the States. I got my seeds from someone who grows it in the UK very well.
Skvez, what about the health benefits from smoking tobacco?? Smoking helps control tb and certain types of flu. First they came for the smokers and I did nothing as I wasn’t a smoker, then they came for the drinkers, fatty food, fast food and on down the line until were back to ration books. There was a vote recently somewhere in Manchester on a fast food tax. Places like New York control the amount of salt you can use or what cooking oil you can use. Its a slippery slope.
Half,
People always quote the obscure 0.01% of the time cases when something ‘bad’ can prove to be useful. Certainly if there are medical conditions where smoking can help (while still doing harm) then it should be permitted *in those cases* but the vast majority of cases it does harm, period.
I wasn’t proposing an outright ban but I think we should discourage people from hurting themselves (and taxation is an effective way to do that) my point was we should do even more to stop smokers hurting others. Do you have a problem with a legal alcohol limit on drivers? I expect not, passive smoking kills too. If I have to walk past a smoker they are harming me and possibly leading to my early death.
I would prefer if they want to kill themselves that they do it in the privacy of their own home where I don’t have to suffer too.
Skean,
Small amounts of alcohol have little or no negative effect on health, each and every puff of smoke does you (and those around you) damage.
For some prohibited substances the full negative effects are in doubt but in many cases that’s due to lack of information. The medicals community collected vast amounts of information on smoking (doctors monitoring themselves in the 50s) to show how damaging it is, we simply don’t have comparably good information on some ‘lesser’ soft drugs.
“I wasn’t proposing an outright ban but I think we should discourage people from hurting themselves (and taxation is an effective way to do that)… ”
Thats a worrying statement, how far do you go to “discourage people from hurting themselves”?? Taxation doesn’t work, creates a nice black market which is unregulated so people can end up smoking anything, look into the russian vodka taxes and all those folks turning yellow and dying. What about fat tax, salt tax, where does it end?
Guys,
I don’t want to turn into an issue site. I think we can see we have different political views and stop this one here.
We have one thing in common and that is we are looking to prepare for whatever the future throws at us. Let us concentrate on that here.
The more I think about this subject the more I like it. I’ve spent many years building up supplies for my kids & me but have never come up with a suitable barter item for post-SHTF. The American sites talk about gold, silver, nickels etc but they won’t be much use over here (or over there probably). I’ve always felt kind of smug knowing that when the sheeple are fighting over the last loaf of bread in the supermarket (when they eventually realise a major event is unfolding) I’ll be sat at home with my provisions ready to use. Now, however, I think I’ll be at the shops as well but buying as much whisky & tobacco as I can. Even now they can be used to “pay” a friend who won’t take money for doing a job: after the SHTF I really think they’d be the new “currency” for a while and could buy a lot of things that would be of more use to me to keep my family alive. Don’t forget, we are talking about just that, survival, not the niceties of why you should or shouldn’t smoke in our very comfortable society as it is now. When the SHTF there won’t be time for those niceties, it will most likely be a very ugly world out there and I will be fighting tooth & nail to protect my family in whatever way is necessary.
Moosedog,
Just be careful with your stores. Depending on where you live and how well you can hide your stores you may find that you get a visit from a hungry mob.
I see tobacco, booze and other drugs being bartered around more that gold, silver or any metal. That is why I’m going to be doing articles on making your own booze and growing your own drugs, for those locales it is legal for of course. 😉
Thankyou Skean Dhude, yes we’re very aware of keeping “under the radar” with all our supplies and preparations. Added to which Moose is a very noisy Jack Russell, giving advance warning of anybody nearby. Our security is as good as it can be in our present circumstances and even if we have to bug out on foot our backpacks have been carefully chosen to look as if there wouldn’t be anything worth stealing in them. All very low key, old looking and unmilitary in appearance. If we stay put in an emergency all food preparation and cooking will be done upstairs well away from prying eyes and with very little smell, so unless we’re “raided” by a very determined group we should be fine. I am investigating the possibility of a small hidden room in the house: I have an idea of where it could be done but am not too sure if it can be fully disguised. A work in progress at the moment.