Fruit of the New World

The tobacco plant grew naturally in North and South America starting about 6,000 B.C. Mayans in Mexico and Central America were among the first to use the plant as a medicinal and spiritual aid, incorporating it into their religious rituals and using it to combat pain and heal wounds. As the Mayan culture declined from about 600 - 800 A.D., emigrants from the crumbling empire spread the use of tobacco to the Aztecs and the Native American tribes of the United States, South America, and the Caribbean.

By the time Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, tobacco use was a common and revered feature of indigenous culture. The Arawak tribe Columbus encountered when he made his first landfall in the New World offered him some dried tobacco leaves as a gift. Soon sailors and explorers alike were smoking rolled tobacco leaves or combining raw leaves with ash and placing it in their cheeks. They brought these habits back to Europe, where it was widely believed that tobacco was good for your health and could cure a variety of ailments.

By the 1600s, demand for tobacco in Europe had skyrocketed, prompting settlers in southern New England colonies like Virginia to begin cultivating the plant in large amounts. Tobacco was the first cash crop of the New World and was a key resource for the embryonic United States, composing a huge portion of its economy and exports. It played a role in enticing France into helping America in its Revolutionary War and spurred slave imports to help grow more tobacco as demand increased. In 1610, Sir Francis Bacon noted how difficult it was to quit smoking, a poignant indicator of why tobacco demand kept increasing and a dark harbinger of what was to come in future centuries.

In 1826, scientists isolated nicotine, the psychoactive ingredient of tobacco. After studying its properties, they determined nicotine to be a poisonous substance capable of killing a man and said it should therefore only be used as an insecticide. By then, tobacco’s use was so widespread that it was already too late. The first American tobacco company, Phillip Morris, was started in 1847; by the turn of the century, several tobacco companies were selling their products in the United States.

War and the Cigarette

Cigarette smoking as a way of ingesting nicotine did not surge in popularity until the 20th century. Until then, many tobacco users chewed plugs of tobacco or took nasal snuff, a fine ground tobacco inhaled through the nostrils. That changed when America sent many of its young men to fight in World War I. Smoking became very popular with the soldiers on the front, and when they returned from war, they passed the habit on to their civilian friends and relatives. In the 1920s, women took up smoking in earnest, partly because of specific advertising from tobacco companies, but also because smoking became a symbol of the new freedoms wrought by the women’s suffrage movement.

World War II only exacerbated the situation, as millions of American soldiers took up smoking. Lucky Strike cigarettes were included in soldier rations, and many soldiers returned from the service addicted to nicotine, a habit they would sustain long after the end of the war. Back home, millions watched our brave GIs on the front resting and having a cigarette between battles on thousands of newsreels, and the cigarette’s image as the mark of a hero was irrevocably stamped on the American consciousness.

The Anti-Smoking Movement

In 1964, the Surgeon General released a report linking cigarette smoking with many ailments and diseases, based upon 15 years of research. The tobacco companies, by now powerful conglomerates with lobbyists in Washington and armies of lawyers, fought the conclusions of the Surgeon General’s study for years. They did not admit that smoking was addictive or even dangerous until the late 1990s.

Even so, anti-smoking campaigns have persisted for years. At first, smoking was portrayed by socially conservative groups as being immoral, like drinking. But as the health risks of smoking became more and more evident, anti-smoking groups turned to education about the dangers of cigarettes as a deterrent. As smoking has declined in the United States and other developed western nations, tobacco companies have turned their focus to the developing world, where smoking has skyrocketed as incomes increase. As education prevails, the marketing and sale of tobacco will continue to search for new populations ignorant to the risks and costs of tobacco use.