Picking Cigarettes Up Off the Street

With New York City cigarette tax hikes raising the price of a pack of smokes to $7.25 or more, the pennywise nicotine addict who dislikes bumming cigarettes from friends has but one option: picking up spent butts off the street. While offensive to the conventional mind, it's a surprisingly lucrative endeavor, especially in a city like New York, where there are plenty of half- (and even whole!) cigs to be found on your average street.

Methodology

To get started, develop a technique that will hide what you are actually doing. Remember, you'll probably be doing this in your own neighborhood, and you'd be surprised how such an activity rubs friends and family the wrong way. When I started this hobby, I used a thin newspaper, such as the freebies given out in grocery stores, to hide my retrieval of cigarette butts from the sidewalk. "Accidentally" dropped near the desired cigarette, the folded paper provides an adequate, if clumsy, means for you to bend over and pick the butt up.

Picking up the butt and newspaper with the same hand results, more often than not, in a torn cigarette. Try picking up the newspaper with one hand and the cig with the other, placing one foot right beside the cig to hide it. Pretending to tie your shoe also works well, as does dropping house keys. Another effective tactic: Use a small address or calendar book. Once you've spotted a discarded cig on the sidewalk, take out the little book — it should be pocket-sized but sturdy enough to withstand repeated falls — and drop it with practiced aim over the cig; in general, you should be able to pick it up with the cigarette underneath it, with passersby oblivious to your true endeavor.

Standards

What size butt you're willing to pick up is up to you. I've developed a good eye for the butt that can give me my absolute minimum of at least three puffs. A novice will be easily fooled by the differing filter lengths Note: If you're loyal to one brand, this hobby is not for you, as the street offers multiple brands of varying quality, and you might arrive home with a dozen butts only to find half of them lack sufficient tobacco for more than one puff. Also, I bypass all slim ladies' cigarettes, which have hardly any tobacco and are not worth the effort (although there is a noirish thrill in finding a crumpled cig smeared with lipstick).

Hunting Grounds

One of the best places to find used cigarettes with half or more of the tobacco remaining is in front of hospitals. There are always visitors and employees pacing in front of my neighborhood hospital in Brooklyn. People there are either anxious about sick loved ones or hospital employees stressed out about their job; in either case they all take a quick nicotine break. In fact, visiting loved ones are often so stressed out and self-conscious (call it "cancer guilt"), that they put out the cigarette after one or two puffs.

In front of the hospital, look through your little address book or newspaper and drop it on top of cigs all along the sidewalk. This location is perfect, as the address book could contain the room number of someone you might be visiting. Repeated dropping of the book is understandable in observers' minds: They assume you are upset about someone up in one of the rooms, dropping the book again and again an expression of understandable turmoil.

Bus stops are an excellent source of spent butts, as people light up only to see the bus approach a moment later, and they discard the cig.

With the prohibition of smoking in the office, there are now plenty of those waist-high sand ashtrays which stand outside office buildings and which are usually chock full of butts. While I would never tell anyone wishing to learn the skill of cigarette-butt snatching to avoid a place so obviously replete with butts, I find quickly lifting more than one cig from these bowls of sand to be extremely difficult. First, there are always people right there, so to grab a cig without anyone seeing is virtually impossible. Second, if this large ashtray is outside your own workplace, to snatch up a cig without alerting any of the people who know and recognize you from the office is quite a risky endeavor. If one coworker sees you do this, your whole social standing in the workplace is threatened.

Finally, plucking butts from those ashtrays just lacks the hunter's spirit of searching them out and lifting them through clever camouflage on the sidewalk; I prefer the challenge of the hunt, which is partly why I don't buy cigarettes.

Challenges and Rewards

If you take up this habit, you'll know the joy when you come upon a whole, unsmoked cigarette on the street. They are usually near a curb and have fallen out of someone's pocket when he or she was getting out of a car, or the cig is not untouched at all but its filter end has been singed, a result of the original smoker lighting the wrong end and upon discovering their mistake, drop the cig to the ground. There are more whole cigs out there than you'd imagine, just lying there on the sidewalk waiting to be smoked; your challenge is to get them without anyone perceiving what you are doing.

If you decide to hoard (that is, collect a number of butts and secret them home to smoke at your leisure), you'll find that your pants or jacket pocket will quickly develop a residue of tobacco and ash, not to mention a strong, unpleasant stench, both of which might tip off family members as to your secret hobby. Taking a mini-vac to the pocket works well, snuffling it around in there until the pocket's clean; then spray room freshener into the pocket (your favorite cologne will work just as well).

Consequences

In all my years of picking up cigs off the street I've never caught a disease (in fact, I've caught more colds from my little nephews on holiday visits than I have in this activity). That said, this is a pastime neither for the squeamish nor social snobs. For the imaginative and frugal eccentric, however, picking cigarettes up off the street may prove to be rewarding and fun. Happy hunting!

— Stephen Bracco (sbracco@yahoo.com)