Party Vibe

looks like they do selll them over there; although not sure how widely available – my sister may not have the spare time to search for these Hippy-Zigaretten though. OK they don’t have as many additives but IMO they will all kill you in the end..

At least they also selll Rothmans (even cheaper and you get an extra cig in the pack; (19 rather than 18 in the UK even though vending machines are banned here since 2011 (not in DE but you must also scan your age ID into the Automat) and Luckies. But what is the difference between Lucky Strike Red (which I always used to buy in London) and Blue?

Zigarettenpreise Deutschland | Zigarettenpreise Deutschland 2015

@smokemary 977013 wrote:

Quick question to the English ones on here, I learnt back in the day that NI and Italy are the only countries to sell ten packs of cigarettes, they where great to hid in your school blazer :p, have you lot ever came across ten decks?

did you work for Gallaghers (might be JTI? now)

10 packs still sold widely in England to this day; although when I was in high school blazers were not part of the uniform, we wore more modern sports jackets which had plenty of spare pocket room.

Many EU nations now forbid the sale of cigarette packs with a unit size of less than 19. My sister bought me a carton of Luckies (from Germany) for my birthday and is bringing me another load when she next visists. These, to be fair are almost as good as back in the day (1990-1992) when I regularly smoked them as I lived in London and they were readily available; although like all of todays cigs not as strong [and only 190 in the cartons rather than 200]

She even refuses my offer to pay her the €55 (she works for a very high flying job for a major company) although if she has run out when staying with me in England I will always buy some for her. This does mean she cannot get any trouble for tax/duty as its not illegal to bring them in as gifts and its not even a way to finish me off quicker so I would leave her my house; as neither her nor my brother in law would particularly want to move 200km East when they live, work and socialise in SE England and London .

Currently you can get cigarette packs in unit sizes of 10, 14, 17 and 18 – these oddities happen so overall unit price (and possibly the EAN barcode) can remain the same following tax increases (although you get one less cig in the packet each time). Basic arithmetic will stlll unearth how much you are paying per cigarette; and with the amount of maths tests teenagers get as well as uni/work pressures I certainly won’t judge todays teens even if they do still decide to smoke.

It might well be a filthy habit that knackers your insides, but there is still satisfaction from having a smoke after a 2 hour maths lesson or solving a complex IT or technical issue.

Currently I find Rothmans King Size [now sold in a slightly rebranded packet] to be cheapest decent cigarettes legally available here [a Romanian dude at work tipped me off to this] though I always feel like I’m turning into my Dad buying them – for some reason they have always been popular with Malaysian Chinese…

@tryptameanie 982798 wrote:

We’ve had packs of 10 since as far back as I can remember.

Also benson and hedges were whaT i used to smoke.

in my teens”mild/light” brands (such as Silk Cut rather than B&H) or those wtih other similar pack colours brands were viewed as “girls cigarettes” and few lads smoked them, although this changed around the late 90s/2000s as more people started to smoke pot – stronger tobacco was less popular for making spliffs with and also harsher on the throat on a Sunday comedown when you had run out of everything else.

I have always preferred more exotic “American/Oriental” flavour cigarettes such as Camel and Lucky Strike which were once hard to get outside London or “Uncle Ahmed’s” type of shop – but by the late 90s hippy types who were widely encountered on the party scene would often have a lot of angst about tobacco and claimed they only bought it for makng joints with; around that time more young men started smoking milder brands.

I ended up switching to Embassy or Regal as a compromise as these hippies wouldn’t use stronger US brands for spliffs..

However most of the nuns who visited a shop I worked at from 1987/1988 always bought much stronger cigs particularly Black Cat and Craven A (also distributed by Rothmans who had taken over Carreras; they had to be ordered specially – I had to make sure the supply never ran too low and serving them discreetly as the head sister who bought all the other groceries and the booze disapproved of smoking so they (and the Father) all had to buy their own cigs.

The cat (based on one who used to visit the London tobacconist where the brand originated) always looked quite stern and feminine (eine Kätzin); this brand was what proto-feminist ladies smoked in the 20th century so I could see why the sisters often chose it.

There was one sister who bought Silk Cut (an obscure variant only sold in 1980s) which I thought unusual until I eventually realised that a convent has sisters of any age from 18 to 80+ – she probably wasn’t a great deal older than myself and had joined up to become a teacher in the nearby junior school. To avoid any awkward situations if the head sister (also head of the school) walked in and saw her buying cigs (and setting a bad example to teenagers) she started chatting to me about what I did with the money I earned from this weekend job.

I explained (quite truthfully) I was buying US import records of Frankie Knuckles and Detroit Techno from Kevin Saunderson etc which I had to get specially from shops in town and cost more; and that we couldn’t hear this on our legal radio stations easily as it was viewed as “specialist black music” – she seemed to genuinely know who these folk were and smiled in approval (Frankie Knuckles was a strong Christian and Detroit has a lot of Catholics; and if she had got the top room in the convent she might well also have been able to listen to London pirate radio stations on a transistor radio :laugh_at:

@tryptameanie 982813 wrote:

Silk cut had a ring of tiny holes punched through the paper covering the filter, i imahine to allow air in and allowing you to get less actual smoke in your lungs so if for any reason I had to smoke one, if there was sellotape available, a strip of that went round the filter.

All “mild/light” cigarettes still have this addition to the filter; which works as you described (similar also occurs with 100mm cigarettes which contain the same amount of tobacco but seem “milder”) when smoking tobacco although tar is much worse for you than nicotine it masks the harsh taste and makes the cigarette seem “stronger”.

Today you have the “Euro-Zigaretten” that must all have 10mg tar / 1mg nicotine max (usually 0,8-0,9 mg) which is almost as weak as the mild brands from 1980s and to an older chap like me is like “only 75% of a cigarette”. If Dad were around today and had to smoke these he’d be cursing at ” EU / bloody foreigners” and checking if it was possible to get away with importing them from Malaysia (where the EU rules don’t yet apply)

I wonder if the “new Rothmans” are actually targeted at my age group when every Saturday you’d sit with Dad (and/or any other older males in the household) and watch World of Sport in a cloud of smoke – even if you didn’t even like sport that much and were too young to want to smoke you’d still hang around with them for a bit as it “made you feel like a Real Man”.