BAD MEDICINE

Smoke ’Em if You Got ‘Em

Everybody knows that smoking, dipping, or even hookahing tobacco is a terrible idea if you, like most of us, are allotted only one human body for use on Earth. But what if, this whole time, we’ve just been ignoring the incredible health benefits of this unfairly maligned and highly addictive plant? Wouldn’t that be an amazing discovery?

It might be, but that’s irrelevant, because we haven’t been ignoring any such benefits, no matter what folks may have thought at one time. But hey, we’ve already started this section, so we might as well just keep on trucking.

The Innovators

When Europeans first encountered Indigenous Americans burning tobacco, it was already being used for both pleasure and (medical) business. Early on, native people realized that inhaling too much of the burning plant’s smoke would feel great right until it knocked you out, a side effect that may have been used as an anaesthetic for trepanation.

It was also likely used as a toothpaste after being mixed with lime and salt. (Tobacco toothpaste, called “creamy snuff,” was actually sold in India until it was outlawed in 1997.)

The Treatment

After explorers brought tobacco to Europe, it was used for a staggering number of maladies largely based on real (and fabricated) accounts of its use by natives in the “New World.” Tobacco was mixed into tonics designed to prevent hunger and thirst, to treat colds and fevers, to aid in digestion, and to heal skin lesions. In 1747, John Wesley’s Primitive Physick prescribed tobacco smoke for earaches—yup, just blow it right in the ear—and for hemorrhoids. (no, we don’t know if you blow it in there as well. Stop asking.)

One of the problems with tobacco being used as a medicine, besides the whole being poisonous and giving you cancer thing, is that it’s a stimulant. That means that tobacco products actually do have an obvious effect when ingested. In an era when so many “treatments” did absolutely nothing, it was easy to buy its efficacy for all manner of illnesses based on that quality alone.

How’d That Work Out?

As early as 1602, doctors were raising concerns about using tobacco. It was addictive and harmful if abused, and it was being prescribed higgledy-piggledy, with very little concern for proper dosing, let alone actual efficacy. By the late 1800s, as the real dangers of tobacco became evident, medical use largely died out.

Tobacco doesn’t play much of a role in modern medicine, unless you happen to count “dastardly villain.” There has been some research into a possible connection between cigarette smoking and a reduced risk of Parkinson’s, but the risks still vastly outweigh whatever potential benefits there may be.

FUN FACT: In 1560, the French ambassador to Lisbon, Jean Nicot, was gifted a tobacco plant by a warden during a prison visit. After one of his pages used the leaves to treat a skin lesion, Nicot started hailing the plant as a miracle cure. He foisted it on so many people, it was eventually renamed in his honor: Nicotane. We spell it with an “i” now, and use it to refer to tobacco’s active ingredient, but the name has stuck around to this day.