History of the Tobacco Industry: Ethics and Ecology

Ancient Times

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).

Fifteenth Century

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).

Sixteenth Century

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).

Seventeenth Century

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).

Eighteenth Century

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).

Nineteenth Century

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).