When the price of a single pack of Marlboro in my local stores became too expensive and too outrageous in my opinion some years ago, I started looking into alternatives and I came up with plan B. After doing some internet research, I began ordering cartons of European Marlboros from a few places in Europe, I believe the place I ordered most from was a site located in Switzerland. If I recall correctly, I was getting a carton for around $20, so I'd order from there every once in a while, and that worked out real well.
I did that for more than a years time until I got a letter from customs one day letting me know that my most recent cartons that I'd ordered had been confiscated at JFK airport.
After that I had to come up with a plan C, and then I started looking into RYO. After reading a bunch on the internet, I was ready to go and I bought a nice machine that rolled the cigs for me and I would order 1 pound bags of tobacco and cartons of tubes. A 1 lb bag of tobacco was around $12-$15, depending on the type and brand I wanted. I think the tubes were around $3-4 for a carton of 200. I'd be able to make about 2 to 2.5 cartons of cigs from one of those bags, if I recall correctly.
I did that for a number of years and then one day, there was going to be all of these new taxes introduced on cigs, including RYO, very high taxes, I forget the exact percentage, but I was looking for ways around paying that of course, because I refuse to partake in idiocy and finance what I view to be a scam.
I got around that by buying 1 lb bags of tobacco which were labelled as Pipe Tobacco, because that was technically not classified as cigarettes and they were exempt from the scam tax. They were basically identical to the previous bags that I had been buying, only the name was different.
And that's what I used for a long time, up until I decided to try vaping one day.
I never started vaping because cigs were too expensive, because when I stopped smoking, it was costing me almost nothing. I was simply smoking too much, because it was dirt cheap and I could smoke as much and as many as I wanted to, and I did.
Until I got my first vape delivered to me that is. And I'm still proud to say that I have not had one single cig since the day when that first vape package arrived in my mailbox. That's almost four years ago.
