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How To Smoke Weed Without A Pipe?

Sophia Delphi July 01, 2022 - 7 min read
Fact Checked
Illustration for Smoking Weed When You Don't Have a Pipe or Paper

It would be easy to say to a panicked friend: “You don’t have a piece? Dude, you’re not a dedicated smoker.”

It would be wrong, though. At some point or another, it can happen to anyone. You may not be able to find your favorite pipe or bowl, or that one-hitter you threw in a drawer a few months ago. Or you may be on the road, and realize too late you didn’t bring anything with you except your wallet and a baggie. Or maybe you just dropped your pipe on the floor and it broke.

Relax. It’s not the end of the world. There are lots of ways to smoke weed without a piece – and to be honest, you probably used at least one or two of them when you were younger and broke.

No, we’re not going to jump right into the world of apple pipes, although we can’t promise that they won’t show up by the time we get to the end of this article.

But let’s start with some of the more socially-acceptable alternatives to a normal weed pipe.

1. Bum A Cigarette

The simplest approach is to take or “borrow” a cigarette (sure, no one smokes cigarettes anymore – but trust us, lots of people really do), empty the tobacco out, and replace it with weed. Just remove the tobacco gently so you don’t damage the shell, and remove the filter carefully. Of course, you can also use a cigar and make a blunt, but you knew that.

Problem solved.

2. Rolling Paper Substitutes

You can always stop at a convenience store and pick up some rolling papers, but that’s not the underlying vibe of this article. We’re really talking about improvisation, and you don’t need a pack of Zig-Zags or Juicy Jay’s to get the job done.

Don’t make the newbie mistake of trying to use a piece of printer or notebook paper to roll a joint. Don’t believe in common wisdom, either. Toilet paper won’t work; pages from a Bible are thinner, but the ink can be hazardous to smoke. Besides, God won’t look favorably on the Bible option.

Regular paper is too thick, it burns much faster than rolling papers, it can put hazardous chemicals into your body, and it can be difficult to manipulate properly. If you actually end up with something that looks like a joint, it will burn up in a flash, and the smoke will be really harsh and taste like crap. Essentially, you’ll be wasting your weed.

Instead, take a gum wrapper and carefully separate the foil from the paper that’s attached. That paper is the right thickness and consistency to be used as a replacement rolling paper.

One other approach that some people use is to roll their flower in a few rose petals, or in a dried corn husk. Each method requires some dexterity, and the rose petals have to be rinsed, briefly heated, and then attached to each other after they’ve cooled. Both work pretty well, though.

3. Use A Bottle

Image of Roll Up Weeds and Containers

Bottles can be used in several ways to smoke weed.

First, the easy one. Take a water or soda bottle and cut a small hole on the side. Fashion a bowl out of tin foil, poke a few tiny holes in the middle of your bowl and then fill it with your pot. (Don’t grind it too fine, or it will fall through the foil.) Place the bowl over the hole you’ve cut, take off the bottle cap, light up and smoke up through the bottle’s mouthpiece. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works just fine.

To take things to the next level, use your bottle to make a gravity bong.

Cut off the bottom third of the bottle and cover the top of the bottle with tin foil. Fashion a bowl in the foil, poke a few tiny holes in it and then fill it with your bud. Now put the bottle into a bucket of water, with the top of the bottle still exposed.

Spark up the weed while slowly lifting the bottle most of the way out of the water, and it will fill with smoke. Remove the foil and cover the bottle’s mouth with yours, push the bottle back down so gravity will force the smoke into your lungs, and enjoy. (Smoking with friends or want to get totally baked fast? Use a two-liter bottle. There will be a lot more smoke.)

4. An Apple A Day

Hopefully, this won’t be your daily method of smoking, but it certainly works in a pinch – or if you’re nostalgic for the days when you were just a kid searching for some way to get high.

Take the apple, remove the stem, and use a pen (or something similar) to make a small tunnel that starts at the top of the apple and runs halfway down. Now do the same thing starting from the side of the apple, so the two tunnels connect. Take tin foil and fashion a bowl that fits into the top hole, poke a few tiny holes in the foil, and put your flower into the bowl.

When you light up, just inhale the smoke from the side hole. The apple flavor that’s added to your smoke is an extra added bonus, at no charge. And if you’re feeling ambitious, you can make a third tunnel to the opposite side of the apple to use as a carb.

No apples in the house? The technique works just as well with similarly shaped fruits or vegetables like melons, pears, or squash.

5. Get Fancy

It may seem unnecessary to say that you can buy other smoking devices than pipes. You undoubtedly already know that – and if you were going to head out to buy something different, you could simply just buy a new pipe (or some rolling papers).

But we believe in completeness. We also believe that you can enjoy yourself even more by widening your horizons. So we’ll just mention some of the other ways to smoke weed without a piece.

  • Vaporizer: Healthier, smoother smoke, ability to vape concentrates and distillates as well as flower.
  • Bong: More powerful hits, cooler smoke, a must-have for parties. (Try a smaller bubbler, too.)
  • Dab Rig: More complicated but the ideal way to get blasted.

If you’re someone who always just uses their piece, you owe it to yourself to give something else a try. You may actually discover that you enjoy smoking even more.

How To Smoke Weed Without A Piece? FAQ

Q: You left out using hot knives.
A: Yes we did because half the people we know who’ve used this method have ended up burning themselves. It’s doable, though. Just heat two knives on the stove, sandwich your weed between the blades, and inhale the smoke. But be careful!

Q: What about using kitchen parchment paper to roll bud?
A: Bad idea. Parchment paper is bleached with potentially hazardous chemicals that you definitely don’t want to put into your system.

Q: Are you sure I can’t use toilet paper? My friends say it works pretty well.
A: Honestly, it’ll probably be a disaster. If the roll is almost empty, though, you can take the empty cardboard roller and use it in the same way you’d use a bottle.