A History of Roll Your Own Cigarettes

The history of roll your own cigarettes shows it to be, from the very start, the poor relation to pipe, cigar and in modern times, mass produced cigarettes.

Though it is uncertain when tobacco was first smoked recreationally, ancient Mayan drawings show the smoking of rolled tobacco. This was a practice that developed into cigar smoking.

Pipe smoking was also popular in Mayan civilisation and since has mainly been the preserve of the wealthier, ruling classes of later societies. However, pipe smoking did become more popular with the lower, poorer sections of society with the increase availability of cheap clay pipes.

It was, however, the very cheapness of these clay pipes, and the high cost of cigars that brought about the need for an alternative.

Following the introduction of tobacco to Europe after Columbus’s expedition to the Americas, the Spanish town of Seville became a centre of cigar production in Europe. 

The locals however were unable to afford the cigars, and with the cigar manufacturers monopolising all available tobacco, the locals used to scrounge around for discarded cigar stubs, shred the tobacco which was then rolled within a small sheet of paper. This produced the popular 'papalette'.

In 1736 the Lacroix cigarette rolling paper company had become established and by 1796 had received its first major order, from Napoleon, whose soldiers had previously used paper taken from any available source in which to roll their tobacco.

Aware of the growing popularity of hand rolled cigarettes, Philip Morris, in 1847, opened a shop in London to sell rolled cigarettes.

By 1865 Lacroix had perfected the use of rice in the production of cigarette paper. This prompted a change in the company’s name to Rizla. 

In 1879 Zig Zag was founded and by 1882 a factory had been built in France for the production of cigarette papers. In 1894 they invented interleaving papers.

In 1881 a James Bonsack invented the first practical cigarette rolling machine, for the mass production of cigarettes. Though the mass production resulted in cheaper cigarettes and so fuelled their popularity,  governments saw this as a means of extracting huge revenues by the introduction of tobacco taxes.

This inevitably increased still further the need for roll your own products.

In 1906 Rizla produced the first flavoured paper with the introduction of strawberry and menthol papers. This was followed in 1910 by fine weight papers and in 1942 by gum edged cigarette rolling papers

1948 saw Rizla introduce its Green medium weight cut-corner paper, followed in 1977 by its King Size range.

Since then there has been an almost continuous introduction of new products to enhance the self rolled smoking experience.

Consumption

In USA roll-your-own (RYO) is tobacco industry's fastest growing segment. It estimates that 2-4% of US cigarette smokers, or approximately 2.6 million people, make their own cigarettes. Many of these smokers have switched in response to increasingly high taxes on manufactured cigarettes.

In 2000, a Canadian government survey estimated that 9% of  Canada’s 6 million cigarette smokers smoked hand-rolled cigarettes "sometimes or most of the time" - 7% smoked roll-your-owns "exclusively".

In Thailand roll-your-own smokers have long exceeded those for manufactured brands.