Is this just a local thing?

If you smoke weed you will probly notice that people use different smoking techniques in different cities and sometimes even in different areas of the same city.

I used to live in Liverpool, England and everyone there smokes joints using kingsize skins and a small amount of tobacco. No one i met there smokes bongs or pipes, just joints.
In my hometown of Derry, Ireland, most people smoke bongs and rarely smoke joints. They usually only smoke a joint if they dont have a bong or if theyre somewhere they cant bring it with them.

Anyway theres a technique people use in derry that i havnt seen anywhere else. You use a normal bong with a stem but no bowl.
1. Rip off a small corner from the end of a cigarette, just big enought to block the end of the pipe so you can put bud on top of it and it wont fall through.
2. Put bud in the end of the pipe.
3. Hold a flame to the bud and suck lightly to get the flame to go in and burn the bud and the tobacco.
4. Once it has all burned, it will turn into ash and fall down the pipe into the water. It will then become easier to breathe all the smoke through and finish the bong.

So basically, once the stem clears, you suck all the smoke through. Kinda like a carb.

The whole point it that you dont need a pipe screen and you can easily make a bong using a metel stem and a plastic bottle and nothing else.

Has anyone ever seen this technique?