History Of Smoking
The
last twenty years have seen the gradual decline of smoking in the West, paired with a rapid rise in tobacco use in the
developing world. Not so long ago though, it was Europe and North America who were experiencing the soaring rates of smoking.
On this page we track tobacco's rise from a small plant cultivated in the Americas, to a global addiction that in many places shows no signs of abating.
Learning about the history of smoking helps to strip away some of the mystique that can surround it for young people. We can discover exactly how and why smoking's 'cool' image was debunked in the late 20th century, and indeed why it took this long for the truth to be widely known.
Early Use Of Tobacco
According to archaeologists, the first known traces of tobacco come from around 6000 BC. At first it grew exclusively in the Americas, from where it has since been exported around the world. The plant wasn't cultivated until around 5,000 years later though, when it began to be smoked and chewed by the Mayans.
Initially, it is thought that the leaf was chewed by the Mayans to curb their appetite on long hikes, rather like the way the Coca leaf is still used today. A variety of different smoking techniques soon followed, and it was quickly adopted into Mayan ceremonial customs.
When the Mayas began to spread through central America, they took their tobacco with them. It eventually became incorporated into cultures across the Americas, including the nascent Aztec kingdom. The first pictorial evidence of smoking comes from Guatemala, around 800 AD, where pottery was found showing the Maya smoking rudimentary cigarettes made of tobacco leaves and string.
Discovery By Columbus And Arrival Into Europe
Upon meeting a group of Caribbean natives who believed he was a returning deity, Columbus was gifted some of the goods that they held most valuable. His journal notes, "the natives brought fruit, wooden spears, and certain dried leaves which gave off a distinct fragrance." Not recognising the tobacco for what it was, his sailors cast it into the sea.
A month later in the same trip, a European began to smoke for the first time. Unfortunately, on his return to Spain the locals took his smoking mouth and nose as a sign of the devil, and he was promptly locked up for his troubles!
Smoking quickly spread through Europe, both from Spain and from other European excursions to the Americas. The Tobacco leaf then underwent a long metamorphosis before reaching its current form as a cigarette.
The first European smokers used a pipe, but the eighteenth century saw the noble classes switching to snuff. It was said that Napoleon himself used more than 6lbs of snuff each month. From then, the focus switched more to cigars (the paper rolled cigarette wasn't even invented until 1832).
By the early twentieth century the modern paper-rolled cigarette was widespread. Originally a Turkish invention, it was taken and produced in large quantities by the British tobacconist Philip Morris. Popularized even further by conditions in the trenches of World War I, smoking continued to spread unabated until the 1950s.
The Tide Turns
In 1950 the first major study to link smoking and lung cancer was published. This overturned decades of advertising that claimed smoking was beneficial for your health, and prompted a rapid public reaction. In the 1950s 'tar derby', cigarette manufacturers competed to introduce filters. By 1960, 95% of US cigarettes were filter tip, vs only 2% when the research report was published.
Although the profits of the tobacco companies continued to climb, by 1960 the lawsuits had begun. Dr Larry Hastings was the first to win, against the American Tobacco Co., and in the next 10 years legislators in the US and Europe began to take cigarette ads off the television screens.
Although every lawsuit against the tobacco companies was by now becoming interminably long and drawn out, a 1983 case produced the first landmark ruling. Rose Cipolline, a smoker dying of lung cancer, was awarded $400,000 after nine years in court.
Even in 1994, executives from the tobacco firms appeared in US Congress and swore that tobacco wasn't addictive. By 1998 though, $206bn compensation was awarded to 46 US states, and the humbled tobacco executives were forced to return to Congress and reverse their previous testimony.
Regulators took further steps to improve public health after the turn of the millennium, as smoking bans began to spread around the world. Rates of smoking are now gradually deteriorating throughout the West. This leaves the developing world, with its looser regulations and poorly monitored public health, as the big growth area in smoking (and profits) for the tobacco companies.