Nicotine - Overview

Overview

The first European to record seeing tobacco use was the explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), in 1492. On his initial voyage to the New World, Columbus wrote in his diary that the native peoples he encountered "drank" smoke from the burning leaves of a certain plant. Even without understanding their language, Columbus could see that the people he met highly valued their tobacco.

Use Originated in the Americas

Archaeologists are not sure where or when tobacco use began in the Americas. More than sixty varieties of tobacco grew all over North and South America. Even the garden flower known as the petunia is related to tobacco. The earliest documented use of tobacco among Native Americans occurred with the Mayan culture, a civilization from Central America that peaked about 2,000 years ago. A carving on a Mayan temple shows an elaborately dressed man smoking a long-stemmed pipe. Other historians of ancient America believe that pipe smoking may have begun in North America and spread south. Whatever the case, by 1000 CE, most Native American cultures used tobacco in religious and political rituals. The plant did not grow in Europe.

Columbus and his crew were baffled and disturbed by the sight of people smoking tobacco. Nevertheless, they collected specimens of the plant, as well as pipes, and took them back to Spain. As the Spanish and Portuguese began to explore and settle the Americas, they began "drinking smoke" themselves. Sailors who moved between Europe and America were among the first to discover that once they began smoking tobacco, they could not stop.

By 1535, Spanish colonists in the New World were planting tobacco for their own use. At around the same time, farmers in Europe began to cultivate the plant. In 1559, the French ambassador to Portugal, Jean Nicot (1530–1600), became interested in tobacco. He thought it might be useful as a medicine. He introduced powdered tobacco—snuff—at the French court and made the substance fashionable. It is from his name, "Nicot," that the word nicotine is derived.

Tobacco in the American Colonies

Tobacco was one of the first crops planted when English colonists arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. Ships filled with tobacco sailed from America to Europe, where the tobacco was traded for items the colonists could not make or buy in the New World, including tea, furniture, and high-quality cloth. In some parts of America, tobacco could be used instead of money. The need for new fields to grow tobacco—a plant that uses up the rich nutrients in the ground—pushed settlers westward, into territories occupied by Native Americans. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, tobacco smoking was common in America. Every tavern kept a supply of clay pipes for use by visitors. When smokers were finished with their pipes, they broke off the part of the stems their lips had touched and passed the pipe to a new user.

Tobacco plants are hung up to dry out in barns and other buildings. Once dried, the plants are prepared for use in cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco. Kevin Fleming/Corbis.
Tobacco plants are hung up to dry out in barns and other buildings. Once dried, the plants are prepared for use in cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco. © Kevin Fleming/Corbis.

By the nineteenth century, different classes of people used tobacco in different ways. The upper classes tended to "take snuff," inhaling powdered tobacco through the nose. The middle classes preferred pipes, and the lower classes held wads of tobacco between their gums and teeth, a practice known as "chewing." Within 300 years of its discovery by Columbus, tobacco had spread to all parts of the world. Many cultures considered it a beneficial medicine. The Native Americans had wrapped shredded tobacco in larger leaves, and "cigars" became popular by the turn of the twentieth century. "Cigarettes" were invented by people who gathered the shredded cigar tobacco that had gone to waste and wrapped it in small papers to smoke it.

The popularity of cigarettes skyrocketed during World War I (1914–1918), because they were easy to transport into battle. Many young soldiers brought the cigarette habit home with them, and factories stood ready to create the product on assembly lines. By the 1920s, whole industries built on tobacco advertised in print, on billboards, and through movies and radio. Women were encouraged to smoke, and they took up the habit as well. The "Jazz Era" generation was the first to embrace tobacco in great numbers. The era's great athletes smoked when not on the playing field and chewed tobacco during games. During the Great Depression (1929–1941), U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) was sometimes photographed with a cigarette, in a holder, in his mouth.

Tobacco-Related Illness Begin to Surface

Americans who had been young in the 1920s were entering their sixties by the 1960s. At that time, tobacco use began to show its downside. Even as new generations became hooked on nicotine, older Americans suffered increasing numbers of lung, throat, and mouth cancers. Others died of emphysema, a disorder that affects the lungs' ability to process oxygen. In 1961 the Surgeon General of the United States requested a report on the effects of tobacco use on health. Facing opposition from tobacco companies—who claimed to have done their own research—a panel of experts met to study the problem.

In 1964 the panel submitted a report to the Surgeon General that linked tobacco use to lung cancer, mouth and throat cancer, heart attacks, strokesA loss of feeling, consciousness, or movement caused by the breaking or blocking of a blood vessel in the brain., emphysema, and other diseases of the stomach and liver. The report, to no one's surprise, declared that nicotine was habit-forming. At the time the report was issued, 40 percent of adult Americans used some form of tobacco.

By the late 1960s, nonprofit groups from many sectors were uniting to stop tobacco use in the United States. Groups such as the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and the American Cancer Society launched advertisements to counter the popular characters featured in cigarette ads, including Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man. Perhaps just as effective for younger people was the personal experience of a loved one—a parent, a grandparent, or an older sibling—suffering the ill effects of tobacco use. Smoking declined among the American public as a result.

The terms passive smokingInhaling smoke from someone else's burning cigarette. and "secondhand smoke" had not been invented in the 1960s. However, by the 1990s people had become aware that tobacco smoke posed a threat not only to the smoker, but also to those exposed to the smoldering cigarette or cigar, and the exhaled smoke. Private companies began to ban smoking in office buildings, and a whole series of laws followed, banning smoking in public transportation, on airplanes, in health care facilities, and in government buildings. People who had once puffed at their desks were forced to smoke on their breaks, huddled outside in all sorts of weather. At the same time, states began to levy higher taxes on cigarettes to help pay for Medicaid and other social welfare programs.

Tighter Laws Cut Down on Nicotine Abuse

On November 16, 1998, forty-seven states and the District of Columbia came to an out-of-court settlement with four major American tobacco companies. (The other three states had previously come to agreements.) The states had sued the tobacco companies for the costs of providing health care to poor people suffering from tobacco-related illnesses. The cigarette companies agreed to pay the states $206 billion for health care. The companies also agreed not to market their product to adolescents through advertisements or promotional items. They further agreed to fund a program to discourage teenage smoking. One consequence of this settlement: The average price of a pack of cigarettes rose fifty cents in one year, from $2.20 in 1998 to $2.70 in 1999. By 2005, cigarettes were selling for about $4.00 per pack. For heavy smokers, many of them poor already, this was a difficult increase to manage.

Despite the successes made in the anti-tobacco campaign, smoking still appealed to youth who wanted to rebel against authority. In fact, by suggesting that tobacco was something that only adults should use just made it more popular with rebellious youth who wanted to seem hip and mature. Smoking was also glamorized in various movies as something that cool people do. As of the early twenty-first century, a large number of teens still take up smoking. The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion estimates that about 4,000 people under the age of eighteen begin smoking each day in the United States.

More recently, the healthcare industry has focused on smoking in films. "Product placement" is very important in movies. When a character in a film uses a particular food or beverage product, sales of that product often climb. In 2005 the American Medical Association recommended that the film industry adopt a policy that would automatically give an "R" rating to any movie in which a character uses tobacco. (People under seventeen are not supposed to be admitted to "R" rated movies without a parent or adult.) Whether the film industry will honor that request is uncertain.