This invention relates to tobacco smoking and more particularly to an improved apparatus and method serving to achieve the effect of smoking without releasing second hand smoke into the surrounding area.
Tobacco was in use in the New World well before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It is normally smoked in cigarettes or in a pipe or chewed or used in powder form as snuff. All of these modes of using tobacco are distasteful in some way or other, especially to non-smokers, due to second hand smoke, spitting of tobacco and its juices, etc. An important constituent of tobacco, nicotine, is also available as a drug and may be delivered in a chewable gum or as an arm patch, both by a physician's prescription. These systems for delivering the nicotine are not distasteful and they assist smokers to quit using tobacco but they are not satisfying as there is no associated pleasure as when the concentration of nicotine rises sharply in the bloodstream. The rapid transfer of any substance into the bloodstream is most quickly effected by a directed injection and inhalation is a close second, with eating and transdermal absorption tied for third place for speed of transfer. Often the rate at which the bloodstream concentration rises is critical to the perceived effect. This is why it is often difficult for cigarette smokers to switch to any other form of nicotine delivery. Cigarette smoke, unlike pipe or cigar smoke, is fully inhaled into the lungs so the effect is felt almost immediately. An unfortunate side effect of smoking cigarettes is that the smoker inhales into the lungs tars and other products of combustion which are subsequently exhaled as "second hand smoke". There is ample documentation that the smoking of cigarettes as well as prolonged exposure to second hand smoke makes the human body vulnerable to emphysema, heart disease and cancer.
Electric heating of tobacco for smoking is well known. U.S. Pat. No. 5,269,327 issued Dec. 14, 1993 to Mary E. Counts, et al. discloses a cigarette shaped article containing a plurality of charges of tobacco flavored medium equal to an average number of puffs per cigarette. The charges are individually heated electrically as the smoker puffs on the unit. The complexity of this device as well as the need for specialized tobacco charges are serious practical drawbacks.
It would be preferable if a compact and easy to use smoking article could employ tobacco in commonly available forms such as that provided for cigarettes, pipe tobacco, etc.