Smoke

By Roger Colins

______________________________________________________________ We make it, we breathe it, see it and smell it but there's more to smoke than meets the eye. One constituent of smoke is what set off some of our greatest thinkers in history. The coolest thing I ever knew about smoke was something called Brownian motion named after, Robert Brown. Principal discoverer of how a fluid particle flies about with completely random velocity and vector. Einstein backed this up in a paper on a different subject and Jean Perrin followed up on that with one of his own. Both won Nobel prizes for these works. Any one particle displays this random behaviour, simply due to bumping into other surrounding particles when liquid or gas. The different directions and forces of all the crazy snicker snickering results in any one particle showing of, near as dammit, proper randomness. Smoke is a great example. 5 particles (in yellow) display Brownian motion Anything that isn't solid will do the trick but we can probably see it more clearly in a cloud of smoke. You will of course need an electron microscope to actually, kind of see it but for just being able to recognise what's going on, smoke definitely works well. Smoke is made up of all the constituent elements that took part in the original combustion. Combustion usually needs oxygen to bond with so you'll get a lot of oxides. The ash you see are mostly metal oxides but of course it depends what you're burning and how hot you're burning it. One tree might leave quite a bit of calcium carbonate in it's ash while another may be nearly all calcium oxide and if you want just carbon, you heat your wood without oxygen. Smoke or Shoot For all the smokers out there, you'll know that the lit cigarette gives off plumes of blue smoke and after respiring, it turns white. Anything small enough to be soaked up by the blood cells get into the body along with everything small enough to get out, carbon dioxide for example. Depending on your tipple, there's probably only one active element that we're looking for in a puff. Smoking must have been one of our all time favourite pastimes since we discovered fire and we must have tried everything before we found the really good stuff. Nowadays all the fun has been sucked out of it thanks to needles. Suffice to say one gets exactly the same effect whether smoking it, shooting up or chowing down. They're just all different ways to get the thing in the blood. Injection only works with powder. So why smoke over shoot? We're all well aware tobacco being the most commonly smoked product in history. The second is probably opium. Only quite recently was it decided opiates should be banned and though common in Victorian London, the product was not as readily available nor entirely socially accepted. It has of course thrived for centuries in the Far East and spread worldwide in the form of pipes, drips, pills, powders of morphine, herion, codine, oxycodone all with their own alkaloid, strength and delivery method from the poppy. After that, things get fuzzy. You can of course smoke anything that burns, and everything burns, if you add enough heat but here is another chemical we have enjoyed from the benefit of chemists and dealers alike. Methamphetamine is highly popular today, more so than any other active property in recent memory. It is also most commonly smoked to achieve the most satisfactory results however, here we come upon an anomaly. Heroin is traditionally injected whereas it's opium counterpart, usually smoked. Looking at it one way, Heroin or diamorphine is a purer concoction from opium and morphine a purer concoction from heroin so why is one smoked while the others injected? Opium is not refined enough to inject but the others are. So what about methamphetamine? It's the hit. As previously mentioned, the effects of any drug are the same but the net strength depends on purity, delivery and resistance. Addicts are well known to overdose on herion more than any other drug, simply thanks to a lack of resistance over time and the choice method of delivery being one big shot. While less common, it is just as easy to inject methamphetamine as it is heroin. Choosing to shoot up over smoking seems a balance of probability because one chemical is that much more immediate where the other is the same. Given the choice, you'd probably prefer to smoke something instead of dig around for a vein. The King of Smoke Marijuana can be argued as more popular than the rest of our smoking products as well as the most medicinally beneficial. Tobacco just happens to be legal but the active tetra hydro cannabinol in marijuana would probably outsell nicotine ten to one should laws switch tomorrow. Colorado has legalised bits of it, Holland has been smoking it, and everything else for a while now and of course the Caribbean wouldn't be the same without the stuff. Coming in all different shapes and sizes from the home grown plant to new hybrids, we can safely say that out of all the outlawed chemicals we chose to smoke, weed wins. The most popular smoke of all Somewhere, someone published a paper on the psychedelic effects of marajuana but I'm having trouble finding their work. Never the less, I can briefly recite that a study of Scandinavian origin claimed that prolonged abuse resulted in mental illnesses including but not exclusive to, schizophrenia. I can agree that if you feed the wrong person enough of any chemical he will surly lose his mind but can base no experience of my own or those I have known that could tally with such a finding except, that all the schizophrenics I have met, all smoked weed. Benefits? I also lost an alternative article on the rates of lung cancer in non smokers from about six years ago. The article claiming, that roughly half of all those undergoing lung cancer treatment in the UK were non smokers. Not to say there are no cancer causing properties in cigarettes, I just wouldn't mind a second look at the article. Bearing in mind the different potencies of different tobaccos, there are on average 69 severely toxic chemicals known to cause cancer. These are of course, trace elements out of a list of over four thousand, none of which are particularly friendly but that does not necessarily mean they can't be useful. When we're in the hospital dying of cancer and addicted to morphine, all is well so long as we remember it's addictive. Tobacco is an anti inflammatory and good for irritable bowel syndrome, lowers the chances of getting Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and all kinds of allergies. Medicinal benefits exist in nearly everything, just as the risk of death does also. Smoke currently has a nasty stigma around it. In the UK we've just passed law banning new electronic cigarettes to under 18's and decided not to ban the adverts, in the hope to convert more adults to non smokers than teenagers to smokers, so far as I understand the theory. Either way, it's polluting the environment, annoying people with touchy noses and so on. It was not that long ago when smoking was taboo if one chose not to light up, that we had dedicated rooms to do it in and if I am right, smokers have always been very considerate. There will be the occasional fat cat that likes to annoy an entire restaurant with his Cohiba but on the whole, there wasn't much of a fuss when asked to smoke outside, even though it seemed quite a cruel thing to do. Perhaps there isn't much space left and the olden days are far behind us. Our future is very much ahead of us however and smoking will be with us for many years to come so maybe, one day, we can have our smoking rooms back.

smoke smoking chemistry