We Didn’t Start the Fire
Imagine never having seen a smoker before.
It’s a pipe dream these days (no pun intended) but go with me here. Imagine seeing someone put something in their mouth and then they...breathed fire?!
Columbus supposedly claimed that the natives he met “ate smoke.” Surely, this was some sort of magic.
Archaeologists believe that the first person to have ever smoked tobacco did so many centuries ago in Central America when the Mayan people first brought tobacco leaves into their religious ceremonies. From there, the practice of smoking is thought to have spread north and south as the Mayans migrated and other tribes took up the use of tobacco in spiritual ceremonies and for medicinal purposes. By the time Columbus and other European explorers arrived here, the use of cigars, pipes, and dried tobacco was well-known to the natives.
Because they were big-time copycats, when the Europeans saw what the natives were doing, they too tried smoking. And loved it. Spanish ship crewman Rodrigo de Jerez is generally credited as being the first European tobacco user; the Spanish couldn’t wait to take tobacco home. French diplomat Jean Nicot de Villemain suggested to Catherine de Medice that inhaling dried tobacco might cure her headaches. Using tobacco was on fire.
But there was one little problem: the best tobacco came from America.
The Spanish began growing tobacco in the New World, and they started importing it in the early 1500s. British sailors took up pipe smoking in the mid-1500s and Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists brought tobacco back to Britain with them when they left Roanoke. Frenchman Nicot even gave his name to a by-product of smoking. By the late 1500s, everyone in Europe saw tobacco as both medicinal and recreational. They were addicted.
This led to another little problem.
Tobacco is a crop that takes a lot of effort to grow and harvest and by the early 1600s, the demand for the product was larger than the number of indentured servants—individuals whose ticket to the New World was exchanged for a defined period of work before they received manumission—who were available for harvest. When growers started to look for a solution to the lack of workers, they hit upon a heinous thought: there was no lack of humans in Africa. And so Africans were captured, imported, enslaved, and forced to work on farms and tobacco plantations the moment they were brought to eastern American shores.
We know how that turned out.
Back then, tobacco was a powerhouse for farmers in the US but today, America ranks fourth in tobacco production, behind China, Brazil, and India. Still, we are the world’s second-highest consumers of tobacco products; China’s first. Tobacco in the US is an $82 billion industry run by extremely large entities that participate in the stock market. It’s serious business.
The CDC says that more than 11 percent of Americans—that’s more than 28 million people—are active smokers, down from just over 42 percent in 1965. Other reports state that over two percent—more than five million (mostly) men—report using smokeless tobacco products. Around five percent of Americans report vaping on a regular basis.
Some 16 million Americans live with a disease caused by tobacco.
Great American Smoke-Out, anyone? ▼
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s second book, The Book of American Facts and Trivia, comes out this winter. Her first (Big Book of Facts) is available now.