Tobacco
Tobacco is a crop with a long history of cultivation, known for its leaves that can be smoked, chewed, or snuffed. Indigenous peoples in the Americas used tobacco for medicinal purposes and rituals long before European settlers arrived, introducing it to figures like Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century. Initially, tobacco was believed to have health benefits, with physicians of the time promoting its medicinal properties. However, by the mid-20th century, research began revealing the serious negative health effects associated with tobacco use, including its links to various diseases and cancers.
The commercial production of tobacco, particularly as cigarettes, surged from the 19th century onward, significantly impacting economies and lifestyles. Despite growing awareness of its dangers, tobacco remains addictive, and smoking prevalence has seen fluctuations over the decades. Public health initiatives and regulations have emerged to combat smoking-related health issues, leading to a decline in smoking rates in the U.S. by 2015. While many individuals have successfully quit smoking with significant health benefits, the addictive nature of tobacco poses ongoing challenges for public health efforts.
Tobacco
Tobacco is a crop that produces leaves that are dried and smoked in cigarettes, pipes, or cigars. It also can be chewed or snuffed (inhaled). Tobacco has been used for thousands of years in the Americas and has been cultivated for many centuries. Early Indigenous people used tobacco to cure ailments and as part of religious ceremonies. The negative health effects of tobacco were not initially known. Researchers did not begin to realize the negative effects smoking tobacco had on health until the mid-twentieth century. Since then, efforts have been under way to warn people of these dangers.
History
Tobacco has been cultivated since the pre-Columbian era. It can be traced to the Mayans of what later became the country of Mexico. The tribe members carved drawings of the tobacco plant that date to around 600 to 900 C.E. They smoked it for medicinal and ceremonial purposes long before the Europeans began to settle the New World.
Native Americans introduced explorer Christopher Columbus to tobacco when he was exploring the New World in the late fifteenth century. He took the plant with him back to Europe; however, the Europeans did not begin smoking tobacco for its health benefits until the sixteenth century. Physicians touted the benefits and healing powers of tobacco for an array of ailments. In addition to smoking tobacco, the leaves were used to dress wounds to fight infection, and people chewed them to alleviate tooth pain and freshen breath.
In the American colonies, John Rolfe cultivated the first commercial tobacco crop in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1612. It became very profitable and helped boost the economy of the fledging colony; it eventually developed into Virginia's largest export. People rolled tobacco in paper and smoked it as cigarettes. They also used pipes to smoke it, as well as snuffed and chewed it. The growth of the crop over the next two centuries eventually spurred the need for slave labor in the colonies.
The commercial production of cigarettes began in 1865 with Washington Duke, who grew tobacco on his farm in Raleigh, North Carolina, and then hand-rolled it into cigarettes and sold them. In the 1880s, the sales of cigarettes rose with the advent of a machine that rolled them. James Bonsack invented the device, which was able to roll more than one hundred thousand cigarettes a day. Bonsack then partnered with Duke's son, James Duke, and opened a cigarette factory. The Dukes later formed the American Tobacco Company, which became the largest tobacco company in the United States at the time. By the twentieth century, several more tobacco companies had been established throughout the United States, including Philip Morris, which made the popular Marlboro brand of cigarettes. Cigarettes became a huge industry during World War II and were popular with both men and women alike.
However, up until this time, people were unaware how cigarettes affected their health. Many thought tobacco cured ailments. Researchers began to correlate various illnesses with smoking. Near the end of the 1930s, Raymond Pearl, a physician at Johns Hopkins University, released a report that showed smokers died sooner than nonsmokers. By the following decade, the American Cancer Society began to study the correlation between cancer and smoking. Reader's Digest published one of the first articles to detail the negative health effects of smoking in 1952. Soon, numerous other publications began to report on the dangers of smoking. Cigarette sales immediately began to decline. The tobacco industry formed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee in 1953 to counter the claims. Low-tar cigarettes and those with filters flooded the market, and sales increased again.
In 1964, the US surgeon general released a report about the perils of smoking. The report linked nicotine and tar in cigarettes to lung cancer and warned of the dangers of secondhand smoke, or smoke created by the lighting and exhaling of cigarettes. The US Congress passed in 1966 the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, which required packs of cigarettes to carry a label warning of their negative health effects. Congress then passed other laws that limited advertising and required stricter warning labels on cigarettes.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13058 — Protecting Federal Employees and the Public from Exposure to Tobacco Smoke in the Federal Workplace. The order prohibited the smoking of tobacco in "all interior space owned, rented, or leased by the executive branch of the Federal Government, and in any outdoor areas under executive branch control in front of air intake ducts" but allowed smoking in certain designated smoking areas, residences in federally owned, leased or rented buildings, portions of federal buildings used by parties other than the federal government, and several other exceptions.
Tobacco Today
Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, many people began to realize how dangerous cigarettes were to their health, and some even filed lawsuits against the tobacco industry. The government continued to take aim at the tobacco industry for producing and marketing hazardous products. Many organizations continued to release findings on the dangers of smoking.
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 2023 that out of the world's population, 1.3 billion people were tobacco users. Of these users, 80 percent lived in low- and middle-income countries. The WHO also estimated that tobacco was killing up to half of those who do not quit using it and, furthermore, that more than 8 million people were dying each year due to tobacco use, including nonsmokers exposed to second-hand smoke.
According to the American Cancer Society (ACS) in 2024, cigarette smoking caused 480,000 deaths each year in the United States. It is linked to various diseases, cancers, and medical issues. About 20 percent of all cancers are caused by smoking, according to the ACS. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that in 2022, tobacco product use remained the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the US, where 19.8 percent of adults reported that they used such products.
By 2025, no federal smoking ban existed in the United States; however, individual states had passed ordinances to restrict smoking in public spaces. Many airlines and bus companies prohibited smoking. Auto manufacturers even stopped producing cars that came equipped with ashtrays and cigarette lighters in an effort to deter people from smoking. States continued to tax heavily cigarettes and other tobacco products to deter people from buying them. Many organizations launched antismoking campaigns and programs aimed at both adults and children to warn them of the negative health effects of smoking and secondhand smoke.
Although smoking has been linked to various diseases and cancers, it is very difficult for many people to stop smoking because of how addictive cigarettes can be. Research has shown that individuals can cut their cardiovascular risks in half in just one year after smoking cessation. Within five years of quitting, people can cut their risk of cancer to the mouth, throat, esophagus, and bladder by 50 percent. Lung cancer risks drop by half after ten years.
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