At least my bowl gets roasted every time I exert a minimum of effort to roll the striking wheel on my Bic.

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In response to the Bic essay:

As a frequent marijuana user for the last few years and daily smoker for the last two, I have dealt with my share of lighters. There are many different styles, ranging from the common flint and butane, to the more expensive and more personal Zippo, and finally the expensive torch lighters which can cost up to and well over $100. With such an overwhelming amount of lighters, some people just give up and pick the cheapest and most popular of them, but this may not be the best choice.

If pot smoking is your thing, a Zippo probably isn’t. They are too expensive, and unless you smoke blunts and joints every single time, a Zippo wont be very appropriate most of the time. Sure, it is possible to spark up a bowl with a wick. But why, at 3 am when you’ve been smoking since 7, and those last few shots you took are reacting quite nicely with the vicodin [Editor's note: Try to stay away from drinking while taking drugs containing large amounts of acetaminophen, which is the case with Vicodin. You could die.]. Would you put yourself through that much effort to light your bowl?

No, you need something that is useful in all situations, and this is the torch lighter. These lighters can be very stylish and many are made for exotic car owners to light their cigars with. They can range from the reasonable $40 to the, well, to whatever you can afford. These are enticing they last forever since they’re refillable, they look really cool, nobody else will have one, and you know it’s going to work every single time. Also, you can smoke Salvia with it. [Editor's note: You can also smoke salvia with a regular Bic. I have done it.]

Unfortunately, unless you are the most responsible stoner ever, you will lose it, or someone will steal it. You can have one at the house for personal use, if you never have people over, or if you trust your friends to not drunken or highly put it in their pocket. This is why we can’t have nice things.

So we must settle for the cheap disposable type. To me, if you’re going to cheap out on the lighter, you might as well go as cheap as possible. My lighter of choice? Scripto (the normal sized one, flint strike). I know stoners all over the world are warming up their keyboards to berate me for this, but hear me out.

—I cannot keep a lighter to save my goddamn life. I don’t know if the entire world of pot smokers is out to get me, but I rarely ever come away with extra lighters, and I always lose them. A pack of Bics might last me a week, and I’ll have to go get some more. This doesn’t happen, however, with my Scripto.

—I take one Scripto to a party, I leave with the same Scripto. Nobody wants to steal a Scripto, and at the end of the day when my friends both thought they had red lighters, I know exactly which translucent purple lighter is mine. [Editor's note: before I was enlightened enough to buy bics, I got my Scriptos stolen all the damn time.]

—They are so cheap, how can you afford NOT to try them? Really though, they are cheap. I think an 8 pack costs less than 4 dollars. The last Bic I bought was over 2 dollars. That’s 4 for the price of 1 Bic. If you don’t believe at least 4 out of that package are going to work, anecdotal evidence is against you. In the last few packages at least 5 of the 8 lighters have worked for me. The bad ones weed themselves out early, and the good ones last till the very last drop of delicious butane.

—You can totally make the flame like a foot long.* This sells me on the lighter. If you are a respectable stoner, it would sell you, too.

—Lotus

*I don’t recommend modifying the product to make a larger flame. However, if you do and it doesn’t strike, use a different one to light it with.

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