Call it a 'stinking wed,' just don't try to ban it

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 16, 1997 | by Stephen Goode

Tobacco advocates and opponents have been around since the plant first was grown commercially in America in the early 1600s. Those who would ban it today run up against freedom-lovers who cry foul.

Fussy, cranky King James I of England didn't like tobacco. Indeed, he didn't like it at all, becoming one of the earliest highly placed people to denounce the "stinking weed," which was what he called it.

Pipe-smoking rapidly was becoming fashionable in England during the early 1600s, particularly among the London elite. But smoking, James declared, is "a custome Lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs." It is a hellish habit, the monarch continued, "in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse."

But James didn't outlaw tobacco. It already had become far too profitable. By 1624, the colony of Jamestown (founded only 17 years earlier and named for James) was exporting 60,000 pounds of tobacco each year. So profitable had the crop become that the people of the village of Jamestown planted the streets of their community with tobacco, not letting any plot go unplanted.

Not so the people of Connecticut. In that colony, the Puritan fathers outlawed tobacco in the legal code drawn up in 1650, a fact that surprised and startled the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville on his famous visit to the United States nearly two centuries later, in the 1830s.

Tocqueville ranked the forbidding of tobacco as among the "ridiculous and tyrannical laws" that the Puritans were all too prone to adopt, and he thought such laws served no purpose in a nation such as the United States, whose experiment in freedom and democracy de Tocqueville had come across the Atlantic to observe and which he for the most part championed.

"Sometimes," the French writer summed up, "the passion for regulation led [the Puritans] to interfere in matters completely unworthy of such attention."

The question of a tobacco ban or at the least severe regulation is before Americans again. "I think we're making a big mistake to outlaw tobacco," investment expert Charles Allmon tells Insight. Allmon fears the slippery slope: first tobacco, "then what is next? Booze? Driving a Harley-Davidson motorcycle? You cannot have a free society that's always trying to ban this, then that."

Similarly, syndicated columnist Doug Bandow warns, "If guaranteeing an individual's good health becomes the purpose of government, what's to stop every bureaucrat who has a notion of how to have good health?" For Bandow, what is next on the do-gooder list may be potato chips, high-cholesterol foods, hang gooders or mountain climbing. "After all, they can be determined to have been dangerous to health on many occasions."

Worthy of legislative attention or not, tobacco certainly played a major role in American history. American Indians smoked the native variety, Nicotiana rustica, a strong, bitter tobacco, long before the Norsemen or Columbus arrived in the New World. They made cigarettes using corn husks as wrappers. They chewed tobacco, smoked cigars and made snuff.

For the Indians, tobacco had medicinal and religious significance. For the early colonists, who learned its uses from the Indians and imported a milder variety from the West Indies, it had important medicinal uses -- early settlers claimed it cured headaches and cramps, "female troubles" and even cancer.

But what made tobacco wildly popular wasn't its role as panacea, but its ability to bring pleasure -- which is, after all, what disturbed the Puritans the most about it.

In James' time, pipe smoking had been the dominant form of consumption in America. During the 1700s, the use of snuff became widespread. Some users chose to sniff it, others "dipped" by placing it under the tongue. By the early 19th century American men had turned to chewing tobacco, the popularity of which was underlined by the damage done by tobacco stains to White House rugs when Andrew Jackson opened the presidential mansion to the "common man" following his inauguration in 1829.

Chewing tobacco was a habit that revolted 19th-century middle-class English visitors to the United States, much as pipe smoking had revolted the aristocratic James.

The novelist Charles Dickens was horrified by the crudeness of tobacco chewing -- and the constant spitting that accompanied the habit. His fellow countryman Charles Mackay suggested after a visit to the United States that the national symbol for America should be the spittoon rather than the bald eagle. Traveling in Kentucky during the late 1840s, the German liberal and writer Moritz Busch said the standard friendly greeting he received was, "Want a chaw, stranger?" Then Busch would be handed a very smelly plug of tobacco bearing the teethmarks of the last man to take a bite from it.

For a later English visitor, the use of tobacco symbolized the unruliness, disorder and lack of maturity he believed characteristic of Americans. Charles Janson wrote that "most parents make it a principle never to check those ungovernable passions which are born with us, or to correct the growing vices of the children. Often have I, with horror, seen boys, whose dress indicated wealthy parents, intoxicated, shouting and swearing in the public streets. In the use of that stupefying weed, tobacco, apeing their fathers, they smoke segars [sic] to immoderate ... degree."