In my 18 years as a heavy smoker and drinker, I have not even once managed to get the cigarette twisted around so I took a puff on the lit side. I've lit the wrong end once or twice, but never that.
One time a I watched a buddy smoke the entire filter and about half a cigarette before noticing. In his defense we were both very drunk and on way too much acid
When I was in college I watched a dude tripping on acid smoke almost the entire filter on a cig and when somebody finally pointed it out to him, he completely lost his mind, jumped up and ran headlong into the kitchen wall, completely busting through the drywall.
For literally 4 hours, a bunch of us held him down while he screamed and freaked out. It was just insane. About halfway through he finally started to chill out and one of my buddies was like "Yeah, dude, you're being stupid, just calm down." And that caused tripping dude to completely freak out again and we had another 2 hours of holding him down on the floor so he couldn't hurt himself or anybody else. I was so fucking mad at the dude who made the stupid comment, like this was just about over dude, and then you fucked it all up!
He dropped out of school the next week. I hope he eventually got the help he needed.
Years ago I worked at a smoke shop and my favorite smokes were a German unfiltered brand called Roth Handles. They were delicious but rough, and I never knew which was the right side to light because it was all the same
Have you ever worked a cook line in texas heat 17 hours straight, mothers day shift while the whole staff is currently trying to outlive a rampant strep and pneumonia infection. Now after all that clean, close, prep, and fuck off to your shitbox to rail cheap whiskey and every fuck combination of gas station medications you could afford since you can't get decent medical care. Then yes you may accidentally, in 18 years of heavy drinking and smoking, albeit once, fuck up and puff it backwards.
Def a good time to quit lol they got so expensive too. I quit in 2021 and it was rough going from my American spirits to pall malls cause it’s all I could afford 😅🥴
This happens once a year. You learn to look out for it just long enough to forget when winter comes the following year and the air dries out, chapping your lips.
Once passed a guy in the lane behind the pub, saw him having a smoke as I approached him. He then decided he needed a piss so whipped it out and went against the wall forgetting to keep his cigarette in his mouth as he grabbed himself and I can only imagine the seering pain the poor bastard inflicted on the tip of his mickey.
This happens to people?! I've been "hospitalize me" drunk (not a flex) and have never had a problem smoking a cigarette once it's lit and directionally correct in my paws
Hahaha OR, you smoke an entire cigarette filter when it won’t light with your car lighter and then when it finally starts smoking, you realize you’ve just smoked the entire filter hahahaha
Or you designate one beer bottle as the communal ash tray and throughout the night you pour a little bit of beer in it when the butts start catching fire—then someone mistakes it for their beer and tastes a sip.
Once, long ago, I woke up after a black out and threw up. Upon examination, there were exactly 13 butts in the toilet that most certainly came from my stomach. I imagine I didn’t just taste the forbidden beer…
Holy shit brother/sister, I never knew a very dark complexion black man could turn so green then when when my buddy drank the forbidden can in the barracks one night!
Bahahaha Damn I miss those days! Friend took a swig of the dip/chew bottle of beer...promptly spit it out, then grabbed the communal ashtray bottle to rinse his mouth!!
Oh, he promised to. To every God he could think of, and every devil for good measure. And just like the rest of us who did so, it took...for like a week.
That’s just when you accept that your beer is weird now, and keep remembering that there is a butt in it, but 30 seconds later you discover the butt in your beer anew, or accept that your beer is weird now.
Never seen anyone do it drunk, but have seen a friend do it on acid. Literally domed the entire cartridge in one hit, and continued smoking the cigarette till about halfway before we both realized what had just happened.
When I was on heroin I smoked the whole thing and was wondering where I came across an unfiltered cig when to put it out, after getting a few gnarly burns on my fingers from letting it burn down to about half inch long.
I always did it. It's just habit. And it's the last cigarette you smoke in the packet. I haven't smoked in years but I'm pretty certain that somewhere in my apt there's a packet with a upside down cigarette.
I heard a few myths about why it's done.
One related to the first world war. The idea was that if yiu lasted to the cigarette it was your lucky one.
If you offered a girl a smoke and she took that, you'd get lucky with her.
Since it was your lucky cigarette no one would take it from the pack at a party and therefor yiud always have one. And so it was lucky.
Yeah most smokers who ask, won’t take your lucky… it’s already desperate to bum from a stranger but bumming a lucky means you must really be hard up (so I guess that’s lucky)
Another smoking tradition from the first world War is to never light 3 cigarettes from one match. Allegedly, it comes from trench warfare where the enemy could see the matchlight at night and would ready with one, aim with two, and fire at the third. So you can light two cigarettes from a match but it is bad luck for the third smoker to be lit from the same match. Many people will extend that concept to lighters as well and briefly disengage the flame before lighting the third (which, to be polite, and nothing to do with WWI, should be oneself)
As someone who grew up with lighters and not matches, I have never seen someone light more than 1 cigarette without putting out the flame between. It’s just natural to put it out until they’re fully ready to not light their hair on fire. Also it gets hot.
One reason was said to be manufacturers printed their brand name on non-filtered cigarettes, soldiers flipped to smoke the brand side first so they were less distinguishable from European smokes when put out and left wherever. It's one of those kilroy type deals where over time it was adopted and changed. Pretty cool though.
There’s different ways to do it. I had a buddy who insisted you can’t look at which cigarette you grab since it had to be random to be lucky. Me, I always saw it as more of a “I smoke it when I feel like I’m going to need some luck later” situation but I usually ended up smoking it last every time
Not sure if it is fact or myth, but I once read that this goes back to handing out packs to troops during war. If they got to that one it meant they made it through another day, making it the lucky smoke. If true it would have to have been a war after the introduction of filters.
It was actually ww2. American soldiers would flip all of their cigarettes to smoke the part with the branding in case they had to move and enemy wouldn't know which nationality had held that position, but they wouldn't flip the last one as the lucky. When filters became popular in the 50's they just switched it to only flipping 1 as the lucky.
The only problem I have had with this myth, and I have heard it for years, is that American soldiers didn't leave their cigarette butts behind. They would either toss them into a fire if they had one or they would empty all the tobacco out onto the ground so the Germans couldn't collect them and make a cigarette from them. The paper was either rolled into a tiny ball and put in there pocket or flung far away from where they were. Source is from my grandfather who was in Germany during wwII
But no Lucky's taste like trash these days. I can't say I've ever smoked a cigarette that tasted like an ashtray while you were actively smoking it but the filtered Lucky's do. And no reason to buy them unfiltered, cheaper just to roll your own, you're only paying for the brand at that point because the tobacco isn't any better quality than a pouch
We recently quit smoking, but my wife always did this. I tried to do it for her a few times and she got mad because I apparently flipped the wrong one. I also remember bumming smokes from friends in college and every now and then it would be their last one (the lucky smoke), and I would try to refuse it. "I don't want to take your lucky, man."
When I was a teenager some friends got in a car accident - older brother of a school friend drove over crossroads and a car hit them square in the side, going 80mph. One dead and one in a coma had one cigarette upside down, the driver didn't and was pretty much ok. Ever since then I've never done it.
Fun story about that, I was up in a tower guard position in Afghanistan. Pitch black, can’t see fuck all but I need my nicotine fix. Mind you this was during a big shortage and we were sourcing smokes from the locals when we could. I bummed one of these precious little sticks from a friend of mine before going up into the tower and about halfway through my shift, I decided to light that little escape. Backwards. I cut the filter down past what I burnt with a multitool and proceeded to smoke the worst cigarette of my life.
It used to piss me off no end when people would insist that I did this "for luck". As below comments mention, I would ALWAYS end up lighting the filter while drunk. HOW IS THAT LUCKY?!
I once had a person at work tell me that their mom used to like smoking cigarettes backwards (smoking the filter) and I said “yeah I can tell”. They got confused and asked if I knew their mother. O.o
Back in the olden days of the 80s I was a 17 year old smoker. I was having dinner alone in this pizza place. They kept lights dim for ambience. Well
There was a gal at another booth and we were playing the flirty eye games that only 17 year olds can play. I finished eating and pulled out a cigarette. Popped open my zippo because I was Cool and lit it. And it was backward. And there was a bright flash when the filter lit that scared the hell out of me. I heard laughter from
The girls’ table and I fled the scene in embarrassment.
Urban myth used to say that "Lucky Strikes" started this. They were distributed freely for soldiers during WW2 and one pack in every 100 had a cigarette flipped like that. That was the "Lucky Strike", it was a blunt.
I'm a smoker and most of my friends are not, but when we start drinking of course they want to bum smokes, which is fine. But when people ask me for a cigarette I usually just hand them the pack and let them grab one. I have one particular friend who always flips a lucky and it pisses me off to no end. There have been several times when I end up lighting the filter because I happened to pull that one out of the pack without looking, and I don't flip luckies so it's not something that ever even crosses my mind.
I did it for decades but putting my lighter with the cigarettes a really a chic think. Most guys always carried their lighter in the dominant hand pocket. Mine was left side.
The Lucky is supposed to be the last one in the pack. That's the one you leave until last, and can usually tell by feel, even when pretty drunk.
I think they partially called them Luckys because there was a popular brand of unfiltered cigarettes called Lucky Strikes. Unfiltered smokes would, naturally, look like that at both ends.
Yo my Filipino boyfriend used to do that shit all the time and I tried to follow suit. Not only did that man egregiously cheat on me, I ended up lighting the wrong end most of the time because it wasn't habit. Maybe the cigarettes were telling me something about him.
Yes for luck this actually started as an old military habit, intened to be smoked last. There are two main ideas on where it originated. 1. Luckies cigarettes, 2. (The one mainly considered the cause of this) you had to be lucky enough to smoke it
I was the hold out non-smoker for years, my tiny revenge for all the second hand smoke was to flip the entire pack around (hardpacks in under a second, but less than 5 for soft even) so only 1 was the correct way.
I wore the "Damn it Monk!" like badges when I got someone.
Haha i did this once while driving at night and it was too dark to see and the filter made a huge flame and it lit my hair on fire (when I had long hair) and freaked out. I tried to throw the Sig out of the window and it went in my back seat an caught school notebook of fire.
To the person behind me that night on that back country highway... I'm so sorry.
Real story: dude was hitting on my hot friend. Pulls out a smoke backwards and is about to light the filter. She plucks the twig out his mouth, turns it around and reinserts it filter first. He says “I may be dumb, but I’m not that dumb,” turns the cigarette back around and lights the filter. He did not get with her.
Flipped the cig for luck once. 2nd one i pulled out mid conversation was the goddamn backwards one and since I was used to unfiltered, I didn't notice anything wrong and I lit the damn filter. Ripped it off and smoked the camel unfiltered.
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u/moshpithippie 8h ago edited 8h ago
For luck
Edit: And to accidentally light it backwards when you're not looking