How To Smoke Weed From A Pipe

First, exhale before putting your mouth on the pipe. This makes room in your lungs, and insures you won’t blow out through the pipe by accident, which has been a source of embarrassment for new smokers for many decades. Put the flame over the weed in the bowl, and inhale. This sucks the flame down towards the weed, lighting it. Keep inhaling until you feel like your lungs are starting to fill up (not until they’re totally full) If you’re using a bong, keep inhaling while you lift the bowl out of the downstem. This lets air in and smoke out, and is called clearing the bong. If you’re smoking a different kind of pipe that’s made for weed, there’s probably a hole or “carb” on the side that you’ve been covering up all this time; just lifting your finger off will clear this kind of pipe. Now here’s a real Old Hippie trick: take the pipe out of your mouth, and make a sudden “gasp” intake of fresh air, deliberately expanding your chest (preferably while sitting or standing up straight). This forces the smoke deep into your lungs, and insures that you won’t swallow the smoke by mistake. This trick will get you much higher (and works with any style of smoking or vaping). Hold your smoke in for five…full…seconds. Count them. (Vapor can be held for 10 seconds). Now exhale. And probably cough.



Now you can smoke with me, using the bong we just made together:



I hope you enjoyed that video, because there’s quite a story behind it. My son helped me shoot it, and he can verify that, after maybe 45 minutes of futzing around by the sink taking the other video (the one you saw in Part 3), setting up the tripod for this one, running through to make sure he could see all the action, and so on, I finally went to my desk to pick up the bowl for the live smoking shot, and that’s when the “420 Notifier” app on my Android phone went off.

That’s right…it was exactly 4:20!

But wait, there’s more.

After we finished with the video, I put all the stuff away as fast as I could, because I knew I took a big hit. It’s a good thing I did, because about 10 minutes later, I was on a rocket to the moon, Alice!

Not only, in 45 years, have I never before been that high from smoking, but this was from just one hit! (Though I was actually around a [3] when I started, from one of my Canna Caps). Anyway, at the peak I was experiencing time dilation of well over 10:1 and hit [13] briefly (I only spent about 5 minutes over [11], but it felt like an hour).

After I was able to stand up again, I spent about half an hour (which felt like well over 3 hours) trudging slowly in a path around the house listening to 60s music on my earphones until I felt better. I spent at least 2 or 3 actual hours over [8], and I was very high until I finally went to sleep almost 10 hours from when I started.

…and half the bowl was still untouched!

Please be careful with bongs, folks…the water cools the smoke so well, you can take in way more smoke than you normally do. They’re like superchargers in a car engine, at least in that way.

Not recommended for saplings!

How To Clean A Bong

I forgot all about this, with all my edibles and vaping and whatnot. But smoking is dirty.

I mean that literally. Until I made these bongs, I had totally forgotten how smoking leaves resin residue on everything, especially your equipment, so that you have to clean it every time you use it, or it will start developing smells of its own. You know, like ashtrays? Yuk!

If passing bongs around when you’re high causes a certain amount of breakage, I suspect that cleaning them causes even more, because you’re bringing your glass bong close to a very hard sink. I’ve developed the habit of cleaning it right after I use it, which means I have about 10 minutes before I’m too high to clean it safely 🙂

Clean it when you’re not high, because otherwise you’re likely to have an expensive accident. Anyway, here’s how I do it:

Take the bowl and downstem out, and immediately put the downstem between the faucet body and the back of the sink, where it can’t roll away and break. Wash everything off with hot water. Pour some isopropyl alcohol into the bong and swish it around, then recycle by pouring it from there into the bowl and downstem, and shake those up with your fingers over the ends (don’t let go!). (Optional) Blast all the pieces with compressed air (if your sink happens to be near your garage like mine is). You can dry everything off if you’re that kind of person, but it’s not really necessary. But don’t reassemble the bowl and downstem unless they are dry, because the ground glass-on-glass joints can stick if they get wet. If you’ve gone awhile without cleaning and your glass is dirty, you can add some coarse/kosher salt to the ISO in step 3 and let it soak for awhile, then do some extra shaking. The salt helps cut through the resin.

Isn’t Smoking Marijuana Bad For You?

As I’ve mentioned many times (including in Part One of this construction series), smoking is generally worse for your health than vaporizing, tinctures, or edibles. And you can imagine how much crap it leaves on your lungs. So why should a medical cannabis patient even bother with a bong?

Smoking cannabis gives you instant access to all the cannabinoids in the plant. It actually feels different. I’m not going to judge if it’s better for everyone, but it might be better for your particular condition…maybe not all the time, but perhaps sometimes.

If you’ve got to smoke, a bong is probably the least harmful way. It will at least take some of the nasty stuff out of the smoke and help your throat and lungs by cooling it. If you don’t believe me, sniff some used bong water!

Sometimes it’s just fun to take one hit and go straight up to [8]!

With the right silicone hose and adapter, you can hook your bong up to your vaporizer, and get water-cooled vapor hits. That’s the most gentle way to inhale that I can think of.

I just wouldn’t make a habit of smoking regularly.

For Those Who Read To The End

Bonus: here are some recent homemade liquor bottle bongs from the subreddit /r/StonerEngineering:

Part 1: Make Your Own Glass Bong

Part 2: How To Choose Your Bottle

Part 3: The Magic. And how to make it happen.

Part 4: How to smoke from your bong! (this article)