A king raised tobacco taxes 4000 percent in 1604, and smoking still spread
James I of England loathed tobacco so much that he wrote a treatise against it and hiked the tax on it by 4000 percent. It barely mattered: London soon had around 7,000 tobacco outlets. Rulers from Istanbul to Beijing tried bans too, and most eventually gave up and turned the trade into state monopolies.
People in Mesoamerica and South America were cultivating tobacco by around 5000 to 3000 BC, and one archaeological find hints at smoking in what is now Nevada some 12,000 years ago. Smoking probably grew out of shamans' incense ceremonies before becoming a pleasure and a social habit. Tribes in eastern North America carried pouches of it as trade goods and smoked ceremonial pipes to seal deals, believing the smoke carried prayers to the Great Spirit.
Europe caught on fast. An English sailor was reported blowing smoke from his nose in Bristol in 1556, and Jean Nicot, whose name gave us nicotine, brought the plant to France in 1560. In Virginia, John Rolfe raised it as a cash crop in 1612; this brown gold rescued a colony whose hunt for real gold had failed, and soil exhaustion pushed planters west. By the 1650s tobacco was popular across Africa. Resistance was widespread but futile. The Ottoman sultan Murad IV tried a ban, the Qing rulers ranked smoking worse than neglecting archery, and Pope Urban VIII condemned it in holy places in 1624. The word smoking itself only became common in the late 18th century; earlier English speakers talked of drinking smoke.
Mass consumption arrived with machines. In 1881 James Bonsack built a device that partly automated cigarette making. Science lagged behind. Fritz Lickint of Dresden published statistical evidence linking tobacco and lung cancer in 1929, and Nazi Germany ran the first modern anti-smoking campaign, which collapsed with the regime. After the war the United States shipped free tobacco to Germany under the Marshall Plan, 69,000 tons in 1949 alone.
In 1950 Richard Doll reported a close link with lung cancer in the British Medical Journal, and the British Doctors Study, following some 40,000 doctors, confirmed it in 1954. The US Surgeon General followed in January 1964. The Master Settlement Agreement between the largest US tobacco firms and 46 states became the biggest civil settlement in American history. The World Health Organization attributes 8 million deaths a year to smoking.
Source: Tobacco smoking
