More Nicotine: A History of Cigarettes
Some brands have 20 percent more nicotine than they did six years ago. Nearly all have about 10 percent more. When researchers tested 116 brands in 1998, 84 percent contained the highest range of nicotine. By 2004, when researchers tested 179 brands, 93 percent did.
Cigarette makers refused to comment on the study. But we’ll comment on the history of tobacco smoking – not to mention tobacco snorting, chewing, licking, and enemas.
Sowing the Seeds
Tobacco is a plant in the nightshade family, which also includes potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, and chili peppers. It may have been cultivated in the Peruvian Andes as far back as 5000 BC. The first documented tobacco users were the Maya, who flourished in Central America between 1500 BC and AD 900.
By the time Columbus showed up in 1492, tobacco and its use had spread throughout the Americas. Native Americans valued tobacco’s medicinal and psychoactive properties. Depending on the dose, the highly addictive nicotine in tobacco leaves can both stimulate and tranquilize.
Native American shamans weren’t gathering for a puff in the parlor. They took tobacco in doses large enough to produce hallucinations, trances, or even death. It’s hard to smoke your way to a dose that large, so they used other methods – chewing tobacco leaves, drinking tobacco tea, snorting tobacco snuff, or even taking tobacco enemas.
Tobacco Takes Off
When Columbus returned to the Old World, he took tobacco with him. By the 16th century, Europe had acquired a taste for this new “wonder drug” – though Europeans were more likely to smoke cigars than take tobacco enemas.
Tobacco gained a foothold in England’s American colonies in 1610, when John Rolfe (later Pocahontas’s husband) arrived in Virginia’s Jamestown. On his way, Rolfe had stopped in the West Indies and picked up some tobacco seeds. Planting those seeds in Virginia made Rolfe rich and helped turn tobacco into a colonial cash crop. There was a side effect, though. Demand for manual labor on tobacco farms helped spread slavery throughout the American South.
American tobacco fed Europe’s new demand for smoke. Cigars and pipes gained a following as luxury items, but they were priced beyond the reach of most. So beggars in Spain got the idea of shredding discarded cigar butts and rolling the tobacco in scraps of paper. These were called cigarillos, Spanish for “little cigars.” By Napoleon’s time, French and English soldiers acquired a taste for these “cigarettes.” Ordinary folks have been smoking ever since.
Cancer Sticks
The cigarette’s heyday came during World War I, when American tobacco companies managed to get them included in military field rations. When the war was over, soldiers brought their nicotine habits home, and cigarette sales boomed. But the party didn’t last. By 1950, research had linked cigarettes to lung cancer. By the close of the 20th century, smoking was linked to as many as a third of all cancer deaths among men.
Over the last two decades, smoking has decreased in America and western Europe, but it has increased in the developing world. Today there are more than a billion smokers worldwide, inheritors of tobacco’s ancient tradition – and its deadly side effects, too.
