Tobacco is the name given to several species of plant in the nightshade family. Evidence exists that it was cultivated in Mexico as long as three to four thousand years ago.
Europeans encountered it in the Americas in the 16th century, along with chocolate, syphilis, the tomato, the potato and the humble mealie.
An early English traveller claimed it “openeth all the pores and passages of the body,” and thereby accounted for the superior health of the native inhabitants of the continent. Today, the general view of the plant is less favourable, but is it good for anything at all?
Nicotine, the active and addictive ingredient of tobacco, is known to enhance attention, focus, and reaction times, and might improve memory. It might help in the treatment and prevention of certain neuro-degenerative diseases. Tobacco smokers were less susceptible to Covid-19 infection. People with schizophrenia are not only much more likely to smoke than the general population, presumably because it helps them, but they also react better to treatment when they smoke.
For some people, smoking reduces anxiety. Basically, a cigarette is a quick dopamine hit. There is, of course, a tolerance problem. As the brain gets used to this, people need to smoke more. Indeed, quite a bit of the pleasure that habitual smokers get from consuming tobacco is probably just withdrawal relief. The tobacco enema kits provided along the Thames in the late 18th century for the resuscitation of the partially drowned might have exaggerated the resuscitating power of nicotine, but there is no doubt that it exists.
Regular tobacco smoking, like the regular use of alcoholic beverages, is certainly also associated with many detrimental health outcomes. However, nicotine (unlike alcohol) is not thought to be dangerous on its own. The delivery system (chiefly, smoking) is the harmful agent. As opposed to alcohol, excessive use of nicotine is not associated with road deaths or other kinds of immediate harm to other people. Smoking can definitely not be recommended to people seeking to improve their health, but it is difficult to ignore the fact that Spain has the 11th highest life expectancy in the world: 84 years, with a smoking rate and alcohol consumption rate of substantially above the EU average.
So, nicotine is definitely a completely harmless drug which is often administered by the harmful mechanism of smoking tobacco. None of this quite explains why so many people light up in the first place, or why prohibition campaigns have such a stubbornly poor track record. The answer probably lies further back than the 16th century: much further back. Robert Dudley’s “drunken ape” hypothesis suggests that our taste for intoxicants is not a modern aberration, but an ancient inheritance.
Wired into us
Our fruit-eating primate ancestors were drawn to the faint ethanol scent of ripe, fermenting fruit, and the genes that wired them to seek it out, tolerate it, and enjoy it are still wired into us. Something similar can be said for our appetite for stimulants and sedatives more generally: caffeine, coca, betel, opium, cannabis, and tobacco have all been cultivated and chewed and brewed and smoked for thousands of years across cultures that had no contact with one another. A behaviour so universal is not a moral failing; it is a feature of the species.
If we accept that the urge to self-medicate and ritually share a small intoxication is a deeply natural one (it’s not going anywhere, regardless of what governments do about it), then the relevant question is not how to abolish it, but which vector causes the least collateral damage. And on that score, tobacco is in a class of its own.
Consider the alternatives. Alcohol is implicated in a large share of road deaths, domestic violence incidents, assaults, drownings, and workplace accidents. A drunk driver kills strangers; a drunk husband terrorises a family; a drunk fight in a pub puts bystanders in hospital.
The Global Burden of Disease studies consistently find that a significant portion of alcohol’s total harm falls on people other than the drinker. Opioids kill tens of thousands of bystanders a year through overdose, drug-driving, and the social wreckage of addiction. Methamphetamine and cocaine fund violent supply chains and drive acquisitive crime. Even cannabis, mild as it is, contributes to impaired driving statistics.
None of this
Tobacco does almost none of this. Nobody has ever been run over by a smoker because they were too ‘nicotined’ to brake. No one starts a bar fight after one cigarette too many. There are no nicotine-fueled domestic homicides, no smokers’ blackouts, no cigarette-related child neglect cases clogging the family courts.
The smoker is not a danger to their spouse, their children, their colleagues, or the motorist in the next lane. Second-hand smoke is a real but modest harm, easily managed by the now universal convention of stepping outside.
In other words, the cigarette harms mainly the person holding it, and does so slowly, predictably, and with full informed consent. Among the vectors by which humans satisfy an ancient and ineradicable appetite, that is about as considerate as it gets.
[Image: https://picryl.com/media/tobacco-nicotiana-tabacum-leaves-nature-landscapes-a8cb94]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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