Page 227 - Encyclopedia Of World History

drugs 577

France. Only their merchants, planters, and seamen had
the means to ensure that the drugs they valued became
worldwide trade goods and cash crops.

Tobacco as a Model
Tobacco offers the clearest example of European adop-
tion and global dissemination of a novel psychoactive
drug. Tobacco use and cultivation had originated in
South America and spread northward, reaching the upper
Mississippi Valley by 160 CE. It also had taken root in the
Caribbean, where in 1492 two of Columbus’s crew ob-
served Taino Indians smoking tobacco. Later explorers
and missionaries often described native smoking rituals.
The tobacco plant.
But in Europe, early interest in tobacco centered on its
possible medical uses. The Seville physician Nicolas
Monardes (1493–1588) recommended that tobacco be
applied topically to aches and wounds; swallowed to kill tobacco settled into a long career as a lucrative nuisance.
worms; or chewed to alleviate hunger and thirst. Others It became a major source of tax revenue and, for Euro-
valued it as an antidote to epidemics.Tobacco was much pean overseas empires, a mainstay of colonial agriculture,
in demand when plague visited Europe’s cities. expanding through the African slave trade.The more the
Tobacco also caught on among soldiers, sailors, and American plantations produced, the more Europeans
courtiers, including England’s Sir Walter Raleigh (1552– and their reexport customers consumed. As with sugar,
1618). Begun as a pastime and continued as an addic- plantation agriculture increased supply and drove down
tion, nonmedical tobacco use proved controversial. Crit- the price. Chesapeake tobacco that had sold for as much
ics said it sickened and impoverished its enslaved users. as sixteen English pennies a pound in the early 1620s
The practice nevertheless continued to spread in taverns was bringing only one penny by 1670. Practically every-
and brothels, and in distant lands visited by pipe- one could afford to smoke, chew, or snuff the drug—the
smoking sailors. Demand grew, and so did profits for method of consumption varying by region, gender, class,
cultivators.The Spanish introduced tobacco to the Philip- and shifting fashion.
pines, where it became a cash crop after 1575. About
1600 sailors and merchants from Fujian, in southeastern The Advantages of
China, took the plant back with them from the Philip- Drug Commerce
pines. Between about 1590 and 1610 the Portuguese The story of tobacco repeated itself, with variations, for all
introduced tobacco to West Africa, India, Java, Japan, and the major global drugs. When Europeans discovered a
Iran. Subsequent diffusion from these places made novel psychoactive substance (or learned to manufacture
tobacco a truly global crop. one, as in the case of distilled spirits) they always investi-
Seventeenth-century clerics, physicians, and monarchs gated possible medical uses.This aspect of drug dissemi-
in lands as far separated as Great Britain and China con- nation—doctors debating indications, doses, and side
demned the nonmedical use of tobacco. But even public effects—seldom caused public alarm. Several therapeutic
executions of recalcitrant smokers failed to check breakthroughs, such as the 1884 discovery of cocaine’s
tobacco’s progress. By the end of the seventeenth century local anesthetic properties, won universal approval. Con-
prohibition had given way to regulation and taxation, as troversy arose only when a pattern of nonmedical use