The W.o.D, Users and Addiction
The W.o.D, The Big Three
The W.o.D The Little Three
Tobacco
Europeans learned of tobacco in 1492, when two members of Columbus’s party observed Taino’s Indians smoking leaves rolled into large cigars. Subsequent contacts revealed that Indians also chewed and sniffed the drug, methods of administration that one day would be emulated by millions of Europe ans.
But for most of the sixteenth century tobacco was a sideshow—a botanical curiosity, an exotic medicine, or a raffish toy introduced to English courtiers by Sir Walter Raleigh. Sailors spread the smoking habit in humbler circles, in the taverns and brothels of numberless ports of call.
Spanish, English, and Dutch soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) introduced tobacco into the German-speaking lands of central Europe.
From there it spread to northern, eastern, and southern Europe. Soldiers, along with sailors, merchants, diplomats, students, immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and tourists, have long constituted the advance guard of the psychoactive revolution.
Armies, whose ranks are filled with single, lower-class men plagued by alternating cycles of boredom, fatigue, and terror, were natural incubators of drug use. Highly mobile, they introduced novel drugs and drug-taking methods into the countries in which they fought and returned home with drug knowledge acquired abroad.
The troops who fought under Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War brought smoking to the interior of Scandinavia. (English and Dutch sailors had already exposed the seaport populations.) Veterans of the Mexican War (1846–1848) boosted cigar smoking in the United States, and veterans of the Crimean War (1853–1856) did the same for cigarettes in Britain.
Demobilized Greek soldiers, who learned to smoke hashish in Turkey, helped spread the practice in Greece in the 1920s. American deserters who had begun using heroin in Vietnam brought the drug to Amsterdam in 1972.
Whether advanced by military or by other means, two things are remark able about tobacco’s conquest of Europe and Asia during the seventeenth century. The first is that use of the drug cut across all social categories.
Low born and high, ortho- and heterodox partook of its pleasures, though whether by quid, pipe, or snuff varied with class, gender, and local custom. The second is that tobacco managed to overcome sharp and sometimes violent initial opposition by civil and clerical authorities.
English smokers risked the disapproval of James I, who declaimed against the Stygian weed. Monarchs of more absolute sway meted out cruel punishments. Russian smokers suffered beatings and exile; snuff-takers had their noses torn off.
Chinese smokers had their heads impaled on pikes. Turkish smokers under the reign of Ahmed I endured pipe stems thrust through their noses; Murad IV ordered them tortured to death. Priests who indulged in tobacco during Mass—one vomited up the Sacrament after dipping snuff—were threatened with excommunication.
Smoking again became fashionable in Europe during the nineteenth century. Romantics, bohemians, soldiers, and dandies led the way. By the 1850s pipes and cigars were rapidly gaining ground, though oral snuff remained popular in Sweden and Iceland. In the first half of the twentieth century cigarettes triumphed over all competitors, becoming the smoking norm—or, more accurately, a kind of international language and freemasonry—in Eu rope, the United States, Turkey, China, and much of the rest of the world Sumption
. In France, a bellwether for continental drug practices, the use of tobacco products per person was only about three-quarters of a pound in 1819. Snuff then accounted for 58 percent of the market. In 1925, when the French were using well over three pounds per person, snuff held just 7 per cent of the market, chewing tobacco only 2 percent.
The French remarked an American physician in 1909, after visiting the spotless modern tobacco factory at Issy les Molineaux, did not indulge in the vile mastication so beloved of his fellow citizens.
Caffeinated Beverages and Foods
As impressive as the cigarette’s triumph was, its principal active ingredient, nicotine, is by no means the earth’s most widely used drug. It is in third place. Alcohol ranks second, caffeine first. World per capita consumption is about 70 milligrams a day. In some countries, such as Sweden and Britain, the average is well over 400 milligrams a day, roughly equivalent to four cups of coffee.
According to the anthropologist Eugene Anderson, the most widespread words on the planet, found in virtually every language, are the names of the four great caffeine plants: coffee, tea, cacao, and KOLA.
Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Economically, coffee became the most important of the caffeine plants. By the late twentieth century it consistently trailed only oil as the world’s most widely traded commodity. In its own way, coffee had become just as indispensable as a fuel of industrial civilization.
Yet it began its career in the relative obscurity of the Ethiopian highlands, whose residents chewed rather than infused the beans for their stimulating effects. Coffee drinking made its earliest appearance outside Ethiopia in Yemen, in southern Arabia, sometime in the fifteenth century, likely before 1470.
Ottoman Empire
By the late fifteenth century, it had spread to Mecca and Medina; by the early sixteenth to Cairo; by the mid-sixteenth to Istanbul. Iran, connected to the Ottoman Empire by warfare and commerce, soon followed. Exporters shipped the beans to southeastern Europe. They sold in Venice as an exotic drug as early as 1615 and came into more general use by the 1640s.
Except for tea, coffee was the only important stimulant beverage whose use spread beyond its original zone of cultivation prior to and independently of European commercial expansion. But it was Europeans who made coffee into a worldwide drink and global crop. Coffee caught on in Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century.
As in Islamic lands, the public centre of consumption was the coffee house. Itinerant vendors also sold coffee, though fixed distribution was more practical because of the bulky equipment and frre required to brew and warm the drink. Coffee houses quickly emerged as centres of male conviviality, gossip, and business.
Luminaries such as Voltaire— “the most illustrious of the coffee addicts,” as one French physician styled him—gathered to discuss literature and politics. Coffee houses became incubators of liberal and revolutionary ideas: Camille Desmoulins delivered his “to arms, to arms” speech to a crowd gathered just outside the Café Foy, two days before the storming of the Bastille.
Secular and religious authorities were, with good reason, suspicious of coffee houses, and sometimes ordered them closed. But they did so because they feared what went on inside them, rather than the stimulating effects of coffee itself European coffee consumption exploded in the eighteenth century, rising from an estimated to 120 million pounds.
Tea imports rose from 1 to 40 million pounds, cacao from 2 to 13 million. Allowing for smuggling, customs fraud, spoilage, adulteration, and other sources of measurement error, the growth of caffeinated beverage consumption clearly outstripped that of population, up 50 percent during the same period.
Price and social-class usage moved in the same direction, downward, as cooks and chambermaids took to greeting the day with café au lait.
