I’m not a smoker. I am a tea drinker, however.

And I admit that there’s a certain mystique to smoking that I miss in American culture. I’ll trade it any day for the health benefits and the lack of disgusting cigarette smoke, of course. But a piece of culture has been lost nonetheless.

But that shift aside, as I took a whiff of a beautifully steeped cup of loose-leaf tea this week, carefully emptied the infuser onto a napkin I had in front of me, and started to roll it up to throw in the trash, I was struck…

Can you smoke tea leaves? Can you roll them up like a cigar and smoke them? Do you get the fine flavor of the tea in the smoke? Do they even burn well? Obviously you wouldn’t inhale, I’m not sure there would be a point. But like a fine cigar, the flavor might be lovely.

I’m not alone in a fascination with cigars and teas, and apparently every teenager on the internet has asked an Answers site whether it’s save to smoke tea leaves (“and will it get me high?”). But I don’t see that rolling tea cigars is terribly common.

Maybe there’s a nice legal business niche there.