| Brief History of Tobacco Use and Abuse |
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| Introduction |
Humankind has had a long history of using plants and weeds for their intoxicant, medicinal or social properties. Throughout the world and through the ages, plants have been smoked, chewed, applied on, or ingested, and their use has been accompanied often by elaborate social and religious rituals. Today, the use of one of these plants, tobacco, is one of the most widely recognized human social habit and the addiction it causes is also one of the most difficult to overcome. As Mark Twain once declared (perhaps tongue in cheek): "to cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did; I ought to know because I have done it a thousand times".
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The origin of tobacco use (mostly Nicotania tabacum ) in the Western world started with the
Discovery of the Americas. When, in what we now know was his 1492 maiden trip to the Americas--not the
West Indies as he imagined, Christopher Columbus arrived to Bahia Bariay in the Oriente Province of
Cuba, and heard from the local natives that there was gold at nearby Cubanacan (or the "middle of
Cuba"). Columbus misunderstood the word 'Cubanacan' and heard it say "el Gran Can," the Great Khan of
China. Immediately, he sent emissaries bearing gifts (glass beads and trinkets) to meet this famous
potentate. They met the local "cacique" or chief, but the Great Khan was nowhere to be found. In their
return to the ship they met a walking party of Taino indians who "were going to their villages, with a
firebrand in their hand, and herbs to drink the smoke thereof, as they are accustomed." They relighted
the cigar at every stop and passed it around for everyone to take a few drags though their nostrils.
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Indians used the 'indian weed' in many ways including chewing the leaves, but they smoked it also using a calumet or peace pipe.
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After the Spanish successfully introduced tobacco to Europe and the British aristocracy adopted pipe smoking as a popular passtime, its increasing cultivation formed the economic basis of the first successful English colonies in North America.
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Virginia tobacco created a substantial and highly profitable English market, despite smoking's ill repute. In 1604, King James I pronounced in his "Counterblast to Tobacco" that smoking was "loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the brain, [and] dangerous to the lungs". However, it was good for tax rolls, and by the 1630s tobacco was firmly established as Virginia's staple crop and chief source of revenue. Thomas Jefferson would be puzzled today if he were to decide on the conflicting economic and health issues of tobacco use in the context of his admonition that "the greatest service that can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture".
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| Tobacco Use in the Sixteenth Century |
Soon after Christopher Columbus had chronicled the use of tobacco among local natives, plants and seeds were brought to Europe. Local herbalists grew them in their private gardens. Jean Nicot, the French embassador to Portugal, took a keen interest in this new plant and quickly sent off a letter to Catherine de Medici, the Queen of France, extolling its medicinal value--it would cure gout and even cancer! Click here for a partial list of diseases which were thought to be cured by tobacco. Tobacco became nicotiana in Nicot's honor and by 1570 physicians used it for everything. In 1577 an Englishman named John Frampton wrote "Joyful News Out of the New Found World" describing the curative virtues of tobacco.
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In addition to its medicinal use, smoking a tobacco pipe became a hobby of the upper European class. The clergy believe it was a substance from the devil while others felt that a medicinal substance should not be abused lightly.
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| Tobacco Use in the Seventeenth Century |
European traders dispersed tobacco throughout Asia and Africa and by 1605 it was recognized the world over. From England, Sir Walter Raleigh set up a tobacco-growing colony in Roanoke, Virginia (now North Carolina), but its failure did not dampen his enthusiasm for smoking tobacco. Soon the Bristish and Irish adopted pipe smoking.
Around 1612, the entrepreneurial Virginian colonist John Rolfe seized on the growing popularity of pipe smoking in England, planted imported seeds from Trinidad and Orinoco plants in Roanoke, and succeeded in harvesting good quality tobacco, not the bitter Virginia weed used by Native Americans.
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These imported plants took root in the Chesapeake Bay region and by 1618 Virginia farmers exported 50,000 of tobacco, and 300,000 by 1626, a six-fold increase! In 1622, Virginian farmers became the exclusive suppliers of tobacco to a large English and Irish market for a seven-year period. Every acre of land was devoted to growing tobacco to the neglect of other crops, thus dooming the emerging colonies to a single crop economy dependent on slave labor.
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Tobacco became the economic lifeblood of the colonies and the means to exchange goods and services. Virgin land was replaced by tobacco fields as settlers moved westward and southward in an unrelenting drive. By the mid-eighteen century, as new European markets were being opened for American tobacco, it fueled a golden age along the Chesapeake Bay (Maryland and Virginia) that mirrored the British Enlightment era and lasted until the American Revolution.
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| Tobacco Use in the Eighteenth Century |
Following a tobacco-industry recession, (1680-1720), production grew rapidly and by 1740 the Chesapeake Bay region was exporting 50% of the combined production of the world's tobacco-raising regions. The increase in production, however, was not the due to better farming methods but a result of increasing human slavery and the clearing of virgin land. Chesapeake planters imported over 100,000 Africans between 1700 and 1770.
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By the end of the 1600s use of the pipe spread to the working class, and the aristocracy adopted the French way of using tobacco--snuff.
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Snuff required the tobacco leaf to be fermented, dried, ground (also called mulling), sieved, and mixed with essences. This tedious process resulted in different sizes of granules, flavors and scents. A whole ritual developed around it and elaborate and fashionable, pocket-sized snuff boxes wered designed to make it portable. Inhaling the powder (regardless of amount) provoked a sneeze that created a feeling of well being which was interpreted as a cathartic effect that cleared the head, brightened the eyes and invigorated the brain.
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Spain, on the other hand, preferred cigar smoking. American colonists adopted the habit of chewing tobacco but its heyday ended with he advent of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike most of his contemporary Americans, Mark Twain boistful enjoyement in the smoking of cigars became his trademark--"If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven, I shall not go." It is said that while visiting friends Mark Twain smoked a cigar and left the ashes in the window sill. Promptly scooped into a glass jar, his host requested Mark Twain's autograph to prove its authenticity. Twain wrote on the jar label: "These are positively my ashes S. L. Clemens".
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| Tobacco Use in the Nineteenth Century |
The use of snuff declined in the 1830s due largely to Queen Victoria's intolerance for stained handkerchief and drippy noses. The British then switched to cigars and later to cigarettes. The Spanish, on the other hand, had introduced the cigar to Asia via the Phillipines and then to Russia and Turkey. During the Crimean War (1854-1856) Spanish soldiers introduced the forerunner of the modern-day cigarette, the 'pepelete', to their British, French and Russian comrades-in-arms. Upon conclusion of the War, soldiers brough back to their communities the tiny sticks of tobacco--miniature cigars--rolled in thin papers, thus ushering an extraordinary worldwide growth in tobacco comsumption and creating one of the world's largest industries.
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| Tobacco Use in the Twentieth Century |
Smoking is glorified in Western society. world political leaders (Kennedy, Roosevelt, Winston Churchill), painters (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne), actors (Errol Flynn, Edward G. Robinson, George Burns, Humphrey Bogart), singers (Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra), and actresses (Rosalind Russell, Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe), and writers (John Steinbeck, Mark Twain), are just a few of the famous who have smoked it.
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Use of tobacco among World War II soldiers had an extraordinary effect on relieving the tedium of war, but hooked an entire generation into nicotine addiction. Lucky Strikes were free and tobacco companies made it a patriotic duty to contribute to the war effort. Such was the importance of tobacco use among troops that when asked General John J. Pershing said, "You ask me what we need to win the war? I answer tobacco as much as bullets"
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The manufacture and commercialization of tobacco reached a zenith right after World War II and over time it became a considerable source of revenue as local, state, and federal government have imposed increasing consumption taxes. For a long time, perhaps, this created a reluctance in the part of elected officials to regulate further tobacco's marketing and sales. In response to those who argued that tobacco use should be banned, Napoleon Bonaparte once said that "this vice brings in 100 million francs each year. I will certainly forbid it at once--as soon as you can name a virtue that brings in as much revenue."
However, in the 1950 a backlash against smoking begun in earnest. The Journal of the American Medical Association made a definite statement linking smoking to lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (bronchitis-bronchiolitis and emphysema). The British Royal College of Physicians of London did the same in 1962. Subsequent independent studies in numerous research laboratories have incriminated the abuse of tobacco as a cause of coronary heart disease and of fetal abnormalities when used by pregnant women. In 1966 the Surgeon General of the United States required all packs to be stamped with warning labels. Today, the Surgeon General's warning reads: "Smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy". The extraordinary amount of federal and privately funded research has yielded an equally extraordinary amount of data linking smoking to increased morbidity and mortality. In fact, Fletcher Knebel has said that "smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics".
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In 1971, television advertisement was banned and, as a result, tobacco comsumption in the U.S. dropped by 10%. In the mid 1990s, Joe Camel, a cartoon character used to promote tobacco sales, was banned because of evidence that children identified with it and started to smoke cigarrette at a young age. As the public have become more aware of the health hazards associated with tobacco use and judicial courts have ruled against the tobacco industry, cigarrette smoking continue to decline. Yet, smoking among American women has increased considerably, and cigar comsumption is making a comeback among men. <
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Smoke cessation classes
are offered at Walter Reed to help patients understand the
psychological, physiological and environmental factors that need to be addressed when
planning to quit tobacco use. Nicotine replacement therapy (patch or chewing gum) and Zyban
are additional drug treatment modalities being used in conjuction with smoke cessation
classes.
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| References |
Garrett W.: American Colonial--Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace. the Monacelli Press, 1995).
Kuntz K.M.: Smoke. Todtri Productions, Inc., 1997.
Dowell S. S.: Great Houses of Maryland. Tidewater Publishers, 1988.
Boorstin D. J.: The Discoverers. Random House, 1983.
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JLR & SFR, 10 February 1998
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