Germaphobes...how do you handle toking with others..

[FRIENDinDEED]

I've always been somewhat of a germaphobe....one thing I never really let it affect was partying with others and sharing pipes, joints, bongs, etc...

However, after being sick for almost 4 weeks straight (first with the flu and than pneumonia) I am really not all that down with toking with others and taking the risk of contracting some other bug that someone might be carrying around..


If someone comes over I have my own pipe, and I'll let them toke from another pipe and smoke my stash.....Get alot of odd looks and comments, but fuck it, my health is more important to me than any bullshit smoking etiquette.

I have to admit that I am somewhat or have become a germaphobe as of recent. I only have a select few that I smoke with but I mainly smoke with my brother when I get a chance to get out of the house and over to his or he to mine.

my brother and I are the only ones that are into pipes pout of the friends we have/know, him an actual pipe and me a bong/bubbler/DIY hookah/anything water, and we already know about being clean. im working in the medical field, moms a retired nursing prof. so we both have a good idea of how to prevent germs from spreading and getting sick ourselves (germ prevention was drilled into us from young, hell, to this very day!).

since my pipes are precious and I don't want/like excuses I don't take them out or offer them at all. I know my "crowd" and they are rollers for the most part so no worries there.

but when there is the occasional situation where I blaze with friends, I just do the "thumb and pointer" hold and that normally helps me avert any germy danger.

everyone does the hold differently, or I do a chillum hold if im n the mood. ppl hate it because they think it wastes smoke do to the residual that's in the hands themselves BUT if you drop your pinky on your bottom cupping hand it acts as a carb to some degree and viola! nothing wasted, everything gained.

 

[FRIENDinDEED]

interesting topic. i have never been worried about sharing, but then again i don't think a friend has gotten me sick that way.

i remember chillin at a mutual friends house and watching one sick guy share a pipe with another dude, the healthy guy just took a lighter and ran the flame across the mouth piece. he said it "sterilized it"
yeah, ok.

he was right to do that, if you don't think about it then you don't really know, heat is one of the fastest ways to kill germs. you gotta kill or keep away from those lil nasty germ motherfuckers how ever you can.

 

[mean mr.mustard]

It's never easy.

 

[Wise]

I smoke a lone usually

 

[usda101]

I kindly hand them some herb so they can roll there own . I smoke to the head .

 

[mack 10]

lmao.....so funny lost at sea.

 

[Tela]

Roll and spark joint. Hit it 4 or 5 times. Pass it and don't hit it again.

I do this with most groups or at parties/concerts.

 

[MIway]

There are trillions of bacteria and viral RNA, both attacking and defending me. When you die, very quickly do they spread and you become the fruiting body.

Its dangerous to bubble your immune system. Therefore when an actual threat occurs, your immunesystem will not have a remembered histological response.

We breathe in fecal matter. Our mouth is a biome. The bacteria species in our intestines isn't us.

While many fears are real, this disgust should arise when someone is sick or when the skin is pierced.

Keyboards, remotes and phones are grosser than toilet seats both by number and danger of strains

Me to a t... Aware of and constantly on the mind. Same thing with fungus, just as with the bacteria... They are around us, on us and in us... Being alive is just staving off the inevitable rot & decay they will bring about, samr for all lving creatures. Micro world is constantly trying to eat us alive...and will eventually win.


On a side note, used to be tight with some folks that worked in a testing lab...when they would do mold and bacterial cultures from weed samples...they all germinated and grew, all of em do. The degree to which was surprising, and they would always be able to discern when people trimmed bare handed...cultures were more robust and had more variety. They would grow e coli at times...from the nugs. Gloves apparently help a lot.

 

[Fly by Night]

Germies skip first base altogether

Germies skip first base altogether

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

I am the weirdest hypocrite germa phobe. I wont drink or eat after clean people, or eat things left out more than 4 hours at room temp, but I'll smoke a joint with a homeless guy. I wont share ice cream with a girl but I'll stick my tongue in her holiest of holes if she wants. lol

Our bodies are host to entire civilizations of germs, parasites, and mites that are completely separate from out DNA but have evolved over billions of years to be symbiotic with us. If we didnt have microscopic mites cleaing out our eye balls we couldn't have the eyes we have. If we didnt have bacteria and parasites in our gut we couldn't brake down food. Each body really is a temple.

 

[HOPS5K]

After a good smokeout with friends or even family, I always wash my mouth out with listerine and brush my teeth. I make sure the listerine gets on my lips too to kill all the nasty germs off. Haven't been sick in a long while from just smoking out with someone and I'd like to keep it that way.

 

[BudToaster]

it's such a crap shoot -- what you touch or don't breath. Aerobic exercise that raises the core body temperature is what kills the bad germs and viruses from the inside out. also sweats out the toxins that get ingested. or so i think. it's all placebo anyway.

 

[devilgoob]

I used the word bubble as slang, as in this day and age nobody is a bubble boy because we can use donor antibodies. Also the bubble is quarantine and quarantine is isolation, so "bubbling" is my slang for casually quarantining oneself by either distance or an enclosed space.

Why, did ya think I thought people were in bubbles clam-baking while on this forum?

 

[skullznroses]

yup,

sex is the counter answer

 

[mean mr.mustard]

I always wear my lucky hands when I smoke with people.

They never get me sick.

Maybe it's my tendency to inhale every hit too...

Now that I think about it it's probably my shoes.

If I ever get sick I won't know what to blame.

 

[BudToaster]

If I ever get sick I won't know what to blame.

doesn't matter, just pick one ... believe it or not i find attributing a cause to a symptom makes it go away. it unhooks the symptom in my mind and it dissipates.

 

[lost in a sea]

if people are taking precautions because they understand the likelyhood of certain disease vectors and the danger of the pathogens associated then fine.. but worrying unduly about the kind of organisms that are in everyday life is really stupid, potentially self harming, because we have been living with those since the dawn of time and if you remove those simple parasites and and hash zeppelin rightly says symbiots from the equation you create a new world of trouble..

in an ideal world people would be in good health before they get infected which would reduce the pathogens chances greatly.. when i say good health i mean classically good health of which we dont have a comparison for in our age because of poor soil, environmental pollutants, lack of herbal remedy usage and the death of most hierloom vegitable varieties that there were around just a few hundred years ago all of which is basically diet related, and modern western science killing peoples livers through the most simple yet fundamental flaw..

of course almost every drug you can think of was first isolated from nature or found shortly after formulation in a lab in nature.. but plants arent just the one drug, they are a cocktail and if you refine out the one chemical and administer that you ruin the bifunctionality of that cocktail of chemicals selected in the plant, by our ancestors, making the body dependant on that drug till its demise and very rarely able to balance the processes that need correcting to cure the condition, which is what plants actually do.. sadly people think instant results of one form or the other beats being cured after a few months of herbal remedies.. instant gratification society again, they wont wait for nature so they go with the man in white and get a decade plus cut off their lifespan and an endless depressing dependancy..

when people take pills most of that cack (usually all of it) has to be cleaned out of your blood by your liver, a few weeks is literally measurably damaging but you take them for more than a few years and depending on your genetics your body will be on the edge,, all the organs suffer from an overworked liver..

so imo if people generally were in full health in the classical sense it wouldnt matter if you were a little bit obsessive about germs, but in a world of basically corpses staggering around just waiting for the next black death to clear the earth its actually dangerous to go the other way and remove all of its competition..

 

[SeaMaiden]

yup,

sex is the counter answer

I was thinkin' more along the lines of Cup o' Cheeze.

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

most people get sick because of a shitty immune systems. If they just ate enough vitamins and zinc they would be fine. I have cured every head cold and flu with home made chicken soup in the pressure cooker. gotta use bone in chicken thighs and melt out all the marrow into the broth.

 

[Stoner4Life]

even more so than germs is (was) the fact that I got tired of waiting for friends to finish their bong hits from my bong. I have good weed & so I fill it 'lightly', if you're a non-tobacco smoker it's one big hit, tobacco smokers usually light it 2-3 times to finish the bowl.

most of the fuckin' time I was rewarded by friends interested in boring me between hits w/long winded bullshit stories and the rest of the time I'd have to insist on getting my bong back after they've lit/re-lit & RE-LIT that already cashed in bowl. A few folks had me raise my voice (surprise huh?) when instead of handing back my bong they'd wave off my 2nd request & dive in for yet another toke of ashes.

so, I supply the weed, the bong and just as often the fire and when I ask for my glass back I never expect to hear the word "no" or to be ignored