click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

I don’t mind sharing a joint, but I do mind being sick. Sometimes you just have to be careful.

When you smoke marijuana in the winter, you sometimes get people with colds and other respiratory illnesses sharing. That's your business if you want to do that, but most folks don't want to share germs when passing around a joint. That's especially true in this time of coronavirus.

For starters, sick people shouldn't be passing things around. Of course, sometimes people carry a virus for days or weeks before they realize they have it. So what do you do when in a group of people passing around something to smoke? You could just let it pass by. That's a pretty good way to avoid problems.

On the other hand, if you want to indulge, you can use your hands to create a chamber to draw smoke through without putting any foreign materials in your mouth.

1. Begin by putting the non-burning end of a joint that you would put in your mouth between your baby and ring fingers.

click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

2. Still holding the joint between your fingers, roll your hand into a circle so that your thumb touches the fingernail of your index finger.

click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

3. Your other hand should be bent at the knuckles into a cuplike shape.

click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

4. Then bring the two hands together with the cupped hand covering the open area of the circle hand. The fingers of the cupped hand should be touching the baby finger of the circled hand.

click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

5. This should create a chamber with a circular opening facing you.

click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

6. Put your mouth over this hole and suck. If your fingers are airtight, smoke should come through the hand chamber and into your mouth. It may take a little adjusting, but this is a pretty easy method.

click to enlarge Larry Gabriel

This avoids putting anything into your mouth that has been in someone else's mouth, if that's what you want to avoid. All that stuff about washing your hands often comes into play here. Sucking off your dirty hand doesn't help much either. I don't mind sharing a joint, but I do mind being sick. Sometimes you just have to be careful.

There's a third way of avoiding sharing germs, but it only works for folks who have a lot of weed. This is something I learned in Jamaica years ago when I asked a guy for a hit of his spliff. He told me to roll my own. It makes sense if you have a lot of weed; everybody gets their own joint to smoke. When I was a teenager, we passed a bottle of wine around. Now that we're grown up, everybody has their own glass. That makes sense for weed, too.

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