Butane torch
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A butane torch is a tool which creates an intensely hot flame using butane, a flammable gas.
Consumer air butane torches are often claimed to develop flame temperatures up to approximately 1,700 K (1,430 °C; 2,600 °F). This temperature is high enough to melt many common metals, such as aluminum and copper, and hot enough to vaporize many Organic chemistry compounds as well.
Butane torches are frequently employed as kitchen gadgets to caramelize sugar in cooking, such as the crème brûlée. These may be called kitchen torches or culinary torches. Another application is metal and glass working, for which specialized nozzles may be used. Torch lighters can be used for vaporizing certain drugs. Torch lighters intended for such use may have multiple nozzles arranged so that their flames all intersect at a given point, where heating would be faster than with just a single 'torch,' like the lighter in the example image.
Applications in drug usage
Torch lighters are used to smoke or vaporize various drugs or drug-containing plants. While a butane lighter is serviceable for lighting tobacco or marijuana cigarettes, torch lighters are generally employed in smoking more concentrated drugs such as hashish, crack cocaine, or heroin. Generally this is done in a pipe that resembles a typical pipe for smoking tobacco or marijuana in shape, but has a recessed column under the 'bowl' of the pipe, at the bottom of which is a glass bulb that, with a torch lighter, can be heated to the point of glowing, at which point a user would drop a pellet of a drug into the bowl, which quickly melts and slides down to the bulb, which causes the substance to either sublimate, or melt and then vaporize. The resulting vapor generally will resemble steam more than smoke, and is inhaled through a narrow glass tube to cool it so that the user does not inhale 1500'C vapor. Aluminum foil methods of smoking may utilize a torch lighter to better effect than a regular lighter, as well.
Notably, typical butane lighters cannot substitute for a torch lighter in most instances of the above process; although most boiling points of organic compounds are hundreds of degrees below the temperature the glass bulb may reach, and a typical butane lighter could feasibly reach it, it cools off with extreme rapidity. Thus, in the several seconds it takes to turn off the lighter, grab a pellet of drug-containing substance, and drop it in the bowl, the glass bulb may cool several hundred degrees due to its small size, exposure, and surface area.
For applications where a regular lighter suffices, such as smoking relatively low-melting crack or freebase cocaine in a straight cylinder pipe with [[steel wool|Brillo], a torch lighter may be superior, but may also be inferior if used directly on the material, where the high temperature could cause it to combust instead of the desired smoking or vaporization.
See also
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