For the sake of harm reduction, here is how to make a tooter. Tooting is less risky all round than injecting:
- It doesn't involve needles.
- You ingest the drug gradually, and the dosage level that would render you incapable of smoking any more is well below potentially lethal.
Inhaling vapours can be safer than inhaling powders, and more of the drug enters the bloodstream from smoking than from snorting.
It is, of course, by no means perfectly safe. It involves dangerous drugs and naked flames. Also, note that inevitable improvements over time in smoking technique can go some way towards disguising a developing tolerance -- the need to consume more of the drug each time to get to the same level of high is offset by the fact that you are taking in a larger proportion of the same-sized sample each time, at least until you reach maximum ingestion efficiency.
This is one way to make a tooter. It is not the only way, but it is the best one I know:
- Take a strip of aluminium cooking foil 6 cm. by 16 cm, a 6-sided pencil or ballpoint pen, and a cigarette paper.
- Cut off just the gummed strip from the cigarette paper and discard the remainder.
- Place the strip of foil lengthwise on a flat surface, shiny side down.
- Fold a 1 cm. width of foil at the right-hand edge back on itself (so there is now 1 cm. of shiny side on the top).
- Fold up the lower left-hand corner so it meets the top edge, and forms a 45 degree angle at the upper left-hand corner.
- Fold the upper left-hand corner down to the newly-formed 135-degree corner, so there is now a 90-degree angle in the middle of the left hand end.
- Turn over the foil so the shiny side is now on top; with the point at the left-hand end, the fold nearest to you and the corner touching a corner away from you.
- Starting at the top edge, wrap the foil around the 6-sided pencil or pen. The two separate-but-touching double layers will be innermost, so the next layer that gets wrapped around will hold them in contact.
- Lick the gummed paper strip and use it like adhesive tape to bind the whole assembly together.
You now have a hexagonal tube, 12 cm. long by about 8 mm. across, with a chisel point at one end (the inlet) and the other end (the mouthpiece) flat. There are 2 ways to use it.
- Hold the tooter at an angle of 45 degrees with the aperture facing down, so the chiselled end is parallel to the foil if the latter is held horizontally. This presents maximum catchment area to the smoke, for inhaling as much of it as possible even if you are not following the beetle exactly.
- Hold the tooter at about 30 degrees to the horizontal, with the aperture facing up, so the smoke must travel up and around the end before being caught in the draught of your breath, This method requires more precise positioning and is sensitive to strength of toke.
Method (1) is easiest for a beginner. Method (2) is better for building up a "bonus beetle" of condensed vapours around the aperture (the tube can be unwrapped when one's stash is exhausted, and this smoked through a fresh tube). As a crude form of chromatography (the constituents with the lowest boiling points will tend to travel the furthest before recondensing), it can provide useful clues as to the purity of the original specimen. And any adulterants which did not evaporate in the heat of the lighter flame will not be present in the bonus beetle.
To toot heroin, place a small quantity on a sheet of foil (about 15 cm, by 15 cm. is a reasonable size; larger pieces of foil tend to be unwieldy), heat it from below with a cigarette lighter until it melts, and inhale the vapours through your tooter. To prevent the blob of liquid heroin, or "beetle" from catching fire, you need to tilt the foil gently, so the beetle runs away from the flame. To prevent it from running out of control, you can form a groove by folding and unfolding the foil. Just before your lungs are full and you cannot breathe in anymore, release the trigger on the lighter; then depress it again without sparking the flint, so as to release a blast of unburned gas. This will be at the boiling point of the fuel (about 0°C for butane gas) and so will help to remove residual heat from the beetle, solidifying it quickly and preventing flare-ups.
The most common beginner's error is simply letting too much of the precious smoke escape. Get a friend to help you by letting you know if you are missing (or try video-recording yourself).