Originally Posted by audiocide
If you're looking as to why you get high, let's look at some of the qualities of the perfect hit:
- It will, for one, be of good grass. It will burn evenly on all sides of the bowl (or cherry) and pass through the stem (or joint) to your mouth fairly quickly.
- The bud will be dense and cut/torn well. This makes for a harder-to-hit but much more surprising smoke.
- The air/smoke ratio will be perfect. That is to say, somewhere in the nature of 70 smoke/30 air. I don't know the numbers, but it seems to be about there.
- The air and smoke will be cooled well, even chilled. Or it could be extremely hot, which dances every bit of the smoke past your lung sac thingers very quickly. This allows for quicker absorption of the THC.
- The hit will have lots of pressure on it in your lungs.
- The smoke will be fairly cleaned of useless chlorophyll, tars, and other such things like the burning paper (or not).
So let's analyze a good, strong bong hit.
- The bowl is fired. It burns evenly and the smoke shoots straight down the narrow but not skinny stem. This provides for a thrust into the chamber through the water.
- The smoke passes through the water. Depending on how small the bubbles are broken up (ice water is wonderful), it will be filtered well to a certain degree.
- The instant bubbles surface, the smoker closes the carb completely. This provides for a negative pressure in the chamber now, so inhale just a bit more and let pressure turn the chamber milky white.
- By now the back pressure has settled, so inhale only a tiny bit and exhale through your nose. Chamber completely full and most likely overpressurized and compressed. There is more in there than you think.
- Let go of the carb and quickly draw in the full chamber. This shoots all the smoke into your lungs before any large amount of oxygen.
- The smoke is cold, so it doesn't move much even after the oxygen stirs it around in your lungs. It settles on the lung surface area. You may notice your lungs feel under a bit much pressure; this is because you were inhaling denser smoke (oil-heavy by now, and cold) and then rapidly changed to lighter air (most likely warmish). This forced your lungs to pull extra hard on that air before you could realize it, and you pressurized your hit.
This extra pressure needs a way of getting out, and if you hold the hit it rapidly enters your blood vessels. You can also compress your chest slightly as you hold it to speed this up. This usually leaves the user with much less visible exhaled smoke.
So, chances are that you weren't getting enough air in your joint hits (held it less), it was too hot to hold long, or you were getting too much air (even a small hit with shitloads lots of air still tastes very big... anyone here knows this). Any number of things. With the little pipe, you were getting a much faster hit, which was much more compressed.
Hope that helps.
--mic