History of the Tobacco Industry: Ethics and Ecology

There is no indication of habitual human tobacco use in the ancient world except in the Americas. Evidence found in caves and excavations suggests that tobacco was cultivated in Central and South America as early as 6,000 BCE. Native peoples began using tobacco for religious and medicinal purposes around 1 BCE. Tobacco was seen by these early inhabitants as a miracle drug: used to dress wounds, relieve toothache pain, and as a hallucinogenic enema by the Peruvian aboriginals (Borio, 2011).

Between 470 and 630 CE, the Mayan tribes of Mexico — driven out by the aggressive Aztec Empire — began moving north as far as the Mississippi Valley. The Aztecs borrowed the use of tobacco from the Mayas who remained behind. Smoking developed along two distinct lines depending on Aztec economic and social castes. Members of the Court of Montezuma mixed tobacco with the resin found in other leaves and smoked ceremonial pipes after their evening meals. Common Indians rolled tobacco leaves together and smoked crude cigars. The Mayas who settled in the Mississippi Valley spread their custom to neighboring tribes. North American Indians adapted tobacco smoking as a key ingredient in their native religion, believing that the Great Spirit could be seen in the rising smoke (Borio, 2011).

On a bright morning in October 1492, Columbus and his men set foot in the New World for the first time, landing on the beach of an island in the Caribbean. The indigenous Indians — being either naturally friendly or possibly believing the strange visitors were gods — offered them gifts. Columbus wrote in his journal, "The natives brought fruit, wooden spears, and certain dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance." As each item seemed to be of value to the natives, Columbus accepted the gifts and his men brought them back to the ship. The record shows that they ate the fruits and threw away the pungent dried leaves.

Robert Pane, a monk who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage in 1493, wrote lengthy descriptions of the native custom of taking snuff through the nose and described how the Indians inhaled smoke through a Y-shaped tube. Pane is usually credited as the first man to introduce tobacco to Europe (Borio, 2011).

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish and Portuguese sailors spread the use of tobacco along their trading routes, including as far as Japan. Dutch and Portuguese trading vessels calling at ports in Nagasaki and Kagoshima introduced tobacco to their hosts. It spread through the country over the next few decades, often carried by Buddhist monks, who used tobacco seeds to pay for lodging in the inns they occupied as they moved along the Tokaido highway from Osaka to Tokyo (Borio, 2011).

During the second half of the sixteenth century, tobacco's supposed healing properties dramatically increased its use across most European countries. A Spanish doctor wrote a book about the medicinal plants of the New World in which he asserted that tobacco could cure 36 health problems, including colic, nephritis, hysteria, hernia, dysentery, toothache, falling fingernails, worms, halitosis, lockjaw, and cancer (BU Medical Center, 2011).

In 1561, Jean Nicot de Villemain, France's ambassador to Portugal, wrote of tobacco's medicinal properties, described it as a panacea, and sent snuff to Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother of France, to treat her son Francis II's migraine headaches. She later decreed that tobacco be referred to as Herba Regina (Borio, 2011).

Sir Francis Drake returned to England from the Americas in 1573 with Nicotiana tabacum. Ten years later, Queen Elizabeth granted Sir Walter Raleigh a royal charter for establishing a settlement in America. Before his departure to the New World, he was introduced to smoking tobacco by Sir Francis Drake. In 1586, Ralph Lane, first governor of the colony of Virginia, taught Sir Walter Raleigh to smoke the long-stemmed clay pipe Lane is credited with inventing. That same year, Virginia colonists returning to England caused a sensation as they disembarked at Plymouth smoking tobacco from pipes. William Camden (1551–1623), a contemporary witness, reported that "these men who were thus brought back were the first that I know of that brought into England that Indian plant which they call Tobacco." Tobacco in the Elizabethan age was called "sotweed" (Borio, 2011).

The dawning of the seventeenth century was marked by tobacco being so popular that it had become a medium of commercial exchange — "tobacco was literally as good as gold." It was also the time when the medical profession was just beginning to recognize the dangerous side effects of smoking. In 1610, Sir Francis Bacon noted in his writings that trying to quit the tobacco habit was extremely difficult. An anonymous English doctor, identified only as "Philaretes," published The Worke of Chimney Sweepers, in which he stated that chimney sweepers' chronic illness was caused by coal soot and hypothesized that tobacco could have similar effects. He observed that tobacco dried up a man's "unctuous and radical moistures." Tobacco was also used as a supposed cure for gonorrhea, but Philaretes believed that this desiccating effect, if continued, would damage a man's "spermatical humidity," resulting in sterility. He also wrote that tobacco left men in a state of depression — "mopishness and sottishness, which in the long run must damage memory, imagination and understanding." Many of the health risks Philaretes discussed later proved to be true (BU Medical Center, 2011).

King Philip III of Spain established Seville as the tobacco center of the world. In a first attempt to exercise market control, Philip required that all tobacco grown in the Spanish New World be shipped to Seville, where it was stored and metered out to meet demand. Seville became the cigar capital of Europe, and a side market in cigarettes developed as beggars gathered tobacco from used cigars and rolled it in paper. Spanish and Portuguese sailors spread the practice to Russia and the Middle East. In 1643, Tsar Michael of Russia declared smoking a deadly sin and ordered that smokers be arrested, flogged, have their lips slit, and be exiled to Siberia. A visitor wrote, "Those convicted of taking snuff, both men and women, can expect to have their noses taken away." Fifty years later, Peter the Great, who advocated smoking, repealed the Romanov's harsh penalties (Borio, 2011).

In 1724, Pope Benedict XIII personally took up the smoking habit and used snuff. He also repealed previously enacted papal bulls prohibiting priests from smoking. Shortly thereafter, "Tobacco Notes" became legal tender in Virginia. These notes represented ownership of a certain quantity of tobacco stored in public warehouses and attested to its quality. Used in America as units of monetary exchange throughout the eighteenth century, these notes were more convenient than the actual tobacco leaf, which had been in use as money for over a century.

Virginia also enacted the Inspection Acts, which standardized and regulated tobacco sales and exports. Their basic purpose was to give inspection warehouses the authority to prevent the export of "trash tobacco" — shipments often laced with debris that was debasing the value of Virginia tobacco. At mid-century, American tobacco factories began operating in Virginia, initially as small snuff mills. This began the process of converting the colonial economy from agricultural exports to trading in manufactured goods. In 1760, Pierre Lorillard established a company in New York City to process tobacco, cigars, and snuff. Today, P. Lorillard is the oldest tobacco company in the United States. During the American Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress partly financed George Washington's army by using tobacco as collateral for loans from France (Borio, 2011).

During the early years of the nineteenth century, more and more scientists began to understand the nature of the chemicals in tobacco and the dangerous health effects smoking produces. In 1826, the pure form of nicotine was finally isolated in the chemistry laboratory. The science quickly became clear: nicotine was a dangerous poison. In 1836, Reverend Samuel Green, pastor of Union Church in Boston, preached from the pulpit that tobacco was an insecticide, a poison, and could kill a man (BU Medical Center, 2011).

An Egyptian artillery sergeant in the Turko-Egyptian War of 1832 is credited with the invention of the cigarette as we know it today. The sergeant had increased his crew's rate of fire by loading gunpowder in paper tubes. As a reward, the captain gave the sergeant and his crew a pound of tobacco. The gun crew had only one pipe among them and it was broken. Showing rare initiative, they began rolling the pipe tobacco in the paper cartridges. The invention spread among both Egyptian and Turkish soldiers (Borio, 2011).

In 1847, the Philip Morris Company was established, selling hand-rolled Turkish cigarettes. Cigarettes became more widely visible when British soldiers brought them back to England after acquiring them from Russian and Turkish soldiers. In the United States, cigarettes were mainly made from scraps left over after the production of other tobacco products, especially chewing tobacco. Chewing tobacco became quite popular among the "cowboys" of the American West. In 1875, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was established to produce chewing tobacco. U.S. soldiers in the war with Mexico also brought back from the Southwest a taste for the darker, richer tobacco favored in Latin countries in the form of cigarros and cigarillos. What followed was an explosive increase in cigar use in America, although the South remained firmly attached to chewing tobacco (Borio, 2011).

James Albert Bonsack of Roanoke, Virginia, invented the first cigarette rolling machine in 1880. Until then, cigarettes had been rolled by hand — a skilled roller could produce only about four cigarettes per minute in the 1870s. Bonsack's machine was able to produce 200 per minute, revolutionizing the industry. One year later, James Buchanan ("Buck") Duke entered the manufactured cigarette business, relocating 125 Russian Jewish immigrants to Durham, North Carolina. Duke purchased two Bonsack machines and received an exclusive contract that allowed him to drive down the price of his product against all competitors. In 1881, Duke produced 744 million cigarettes — more than the entire national total for 1883. Duke formed a cartel that would become the American Tobacco Company. The first documented use of "Lucky Strike" as a brand name (named for the 1849 California Gold Rush) was made by American Tobacco in 1883 (Borio, 2011).

It was not until the 1900s that the cigarette became the major tobacco product manufactured and sold. Still, in 1901 some 4.4 billion cigarettes were sold (90% by Buck Duke) while six billion cigars were sold. In 1902, the British Philip Morris set up a New York headquarters to market its cigarettes, including the now famous "Marlboro" brand. The demand for cigarettes grew despite calls by a few states for a smoking ban, and in 1913 R.J. Reynolds began to market a cigarette brand called "Camel" (Borio, 2011).

Camel went to war in 1917 as the United States joined World War I. Cigarette rations were determined by domestic market share, which provided a great boost to Camel, which held over a third of the domestic market. General John J. Pershing replied to those opposed to sending tobacco to the troops: "You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets. Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have thousands of tons without delay." Virtually an entire generation returned from the war addicted to cigarettes (BU Medical Center, 2011).

1930 Market Share:

1. Lucky Strike Regulars — 43.2 billion sold
2. Camel — 35.3 billion sold
3. Chesterfield Regulars — 26.4 billion sold
4. Old Gold Regulars — 8.5 billion sold
5. Raleigh 85s — 0.2 billion sold
(Borio, 2011)

By the end of 1937, Camels were outselling Lucky Strike and Chesterfield by about 40%. In 1939, Fortune magazine reported that 53% of adult American males smoked; 66% of males under 40 smoked. That same year, U.S. tobacco companies were found guilty of price-fixing. In 1940, adult Americans smoked 2,558 cigarettes per capita per year — two and a half times the consumption level of 1930 (Borio, 2011).

In 1938, Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University reported to the New York Academy of Medicine that smokers do not live as long as non-smokers. His findings were published in the Science News Letter under the title "Tobacco Smoking and Longevity": "Smoking is associated with a definite impairment of longevity... This impairment is proportional to the habitual amount of tobacco usage by smoking, being great for heavy smokers and less for moderate smokers." Of the 6,813 persons studied, two-thirds of the nonsmokers had lived beyond sixty, but only 46% of the heavy smokers reached age sixty. Time magazine suggested that Pearl's results should frighten tobacco manufacturers to death and "make tobacco users' flesh creep" (Borio, 2011).

In 1939, Fritz Lickint, in pre-war Germany, published Tabak und Organismus (Tobacco and the Organism), which has been called "arguably the most comprehensive scholarly indictment of tobacco ever published." It blamed smoking for cancers all along the Rauchstrasse ("smoke alley") — lips, tongue, mouth, jaw, esophagus, windpipe, and lungs — and included "a convincing argument that 'passive smoking' posed a serious threat to nonsmokers" (Borio, 2011).

As part of the war effort in World War II, President Roosevelt placed tobacco on the protected crop list. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was often pictured smoking a cigarette. For General Douglas MacArthur, the corncob pipe became part of his trademark, along with his battered hat. Cigarettes were included in GI C-rations packages. Tobacco companies donated millions of free cigarettes to soldiers, mostly popular brands ("Lucky Strike Goes to War"). When those soldiers came home, the tobacco companies were assured a steady stream of loyal customers. By the end of the war, cigarette sales were at an all-time high (Borio, 2011).

1950 Market Share:

1. Camel — 98.2 billion sold
2. Lucky Strike Regulars — 82.5 billion sold
3. Chesterfield Regulars — 66.1 billion sold
4. Commander — 39.9 billion sold
(Borio, 2011)

During the 1950s, evidence was mounting that cigarette smoking was linked to lung cancer. The tobacco industry steadfastly denied that any medical harm could be associated with their products. However, they began introducing new products they called "safer," such as cigarettes with lower tar and filters. In 1952, P. Lorillard announced its Kent brand with the "micronite" filter, which contained asbestos. Lorillard sold this doubly poisonous product for four years before discontinuing it in 1956. In 1953, Dr. Ernst L. Wynder found that applying cigarette tar to the backs of mice caused tumors. In 1954, R.J. Reynolds promoted the filtered Winston brand. In 1956, Reynolds introduced the first filter-tipped menthol cigarette under the Salem brand (BU Medical Center, 2011).

In 1964, the Surgeon General's landmark report on "Smoking and Health" was released. This report permitted the government to regulate the advertising and selling of cigarettes. The report stated that the nicotine and tar in cigarettes cause lung cancer. In 1965, Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, requiring every cigarette pack to carry the warning: "Cigarettes may be hazardous to your health." In 1968, Bravo, a non-tobacco cigarette brand made primarily of lettuce, was marketed but proved a miserable failure.

Owing to the constant barrage of negative press about tobacco, the major tobacco companies reacted by diversifying their products. Philip Morris bought into the Miller Brewing Company. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company dropped "Tobacco Company" from its name and became R.J. Reynolds Industries. American Tobacco Company also dropped "Tobacco" from its name, becoming American Brands, Inc. In 1969, Congress enacted the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act of 1969, amending the 1965 Act to require the following warning: "The Surgeon General Has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health" (BU Medical Center, 2011).

In 1971, advertisements for cigarettes were no longer permitted on television or radio in the United States. Ads in other media, however, made cigarettes the most heavily advertised product in the country second only to automobiles. In 1979, the Surgeon General reported on the health consequences of smoking for women, in the context of a growing number of women becoming addicted to cigarettes — a trend some attributed to the compelling Virginia Slims ad campaign, "You've Come a Long Way, Baby!" (BU Medical Center, 2011).

The 1980s was a tumultuous decade for the industry. Courts were hyperactive dealing with plaintiffs seeking compensation for the harmful effects of tobacco products. Smoking was becoming a political pariah, with a growing number of city ordinances forbidding smoking in public places and in the workplace. In 1982, the Surgeon General reported that secondhand smoke may cause lung cancer. By mid-decade, lung cancer had become the top killer of women, surpassing breast cancer. Philip Morris continued to diversify, buying into General Foods Corporation and Kraft Inc. R.J. Reynolds diversified by purchasing Nabisco, becoming RJR/Nabisco — and providing the backdrop for Barbarians at the Gate. Philip Morris gained market share for the twenty-first consecutive year to reach 34.4% and overtook RJR to become the number one tobacco company in the United States in sales, announcing record revenues of $13 billion and earnings of $904 million. In 1987, Congress forbade smoking on all domestic airline flights lasting less than two hours, later extending the ban to all domestic flights except to Alaska and Hawaii. Even Ben & Jerry's ice cream company boycotted RJR/Nabisco and dropped Oreos from its "cookies 'n' cream" products (BU Medical Center, 2011).

In 1990, Dr. David Kessler became head of the Food and Drug Administration. He attempted for seven years to regulate cigarettes as nicotine delivery devices. His ruling was ultimately invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1999. During the 1990s, the tobacco industry launched a marketing blitz in areas outside the United States, especially in developing countries in Asia. The Marlboro brand surpassed all others and was judged to be worth over $30 billion, battling Coca-Cola for the title of the world's most valuable brand (BU Medical Center, 2011).

1990 Market Share:

1. Marlboro — 134.43 billion sold
2. Winston — 45.81 billion sold
3. Salem — 32.01 billion sold
4. Kool — 25.67 billion sold
5. Newport — (increasing)
(Borio, 2011)

On April 14, 1994, the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment convened a hearing at which seven CEOs of the top tobacco companies were called to testify. The executives were all asked whether nicotine was addictive. Their responses were as follows:

William I. Campbell (Philip Morris): "I believe that nicotine is not addictive."
James Johnston (RJ Reynolds): "Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definition of addiction; there is no intoxication."
Joseph Taddeo (US Tobacco): "I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive."
Andrew Tisch (P. Lorillard): "I believe that nicotine is not addictive."
Edward Horrigan (Liggett Group): "I believe that nicotine is not addictive."
Thomas Sandefur (Brown & Williamson): "I believe that nicotine is not addictive."
Donald Johnston (American Tobacco Co.): "And I too believe that nicotine is not addictive."
(Borio, 2011)

By 1997, China had become the largest producer of cigarettes in the world, surpassing the United States. That year, China produced an estimated 1.7 trillion cigarettes — almost two and a half times the 720 billion produced in the United States. The United States was the largest cigarette-exporting nation in the world, with exports estimated at 217 billion cigarettes, or 21% of the world total. Fifty percent of the sales of U.S. tobacco companies went to Asian countries such as Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. China was the largest consumer market in the world, with over 300 million smokers consuming 1.7 trillion cigarettes (Borio, 2011).

The following were the countries with the largest annual cigarette consumption by the end of the 1990s (Borio, 2011):

China: 1.7 trillion | United States: 415 billion | Japan: 327 billion | Russia: 257 billion | Germany: 140 billion | India: 100 billion | Brazil: 97 billion