History of smoking

Before this cannabis and numerous other plants were vaporized on hot rocks or charcoal, burned as incense or in vessels and censers and inhaled indirectly.

Tobacco and various hallucinogenic drugs were smoked all over the Americas as early as 5000 BC in shamanistic rituals and originated in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes.

[1][2][page needed] Many ancient civilizations, such as the Babylonians, Indians and Chinese, burnt incense as a part of religious rituals, as did the Israelites and the later Catholic and Orthodox churches.

In 1947–1949 Sergei Ivanovich Rudenko excavated a Scythian burial site that included a miniature version at Pazyryk in the Tien Shen Mountains.

No concrete evidence of exactly what they smoked exists, but the most probable theory is that the tobacco was much stronger, consumed in extreme amounts, or was mixed with other, unknown psychoactive drugs.

In early North America the most common form of smoking by indigenous peoples involved pipes, either for social or for religious purposes (which varied between different cultures).

At the end of the feast, which would last all night, the remaining flowers, smoking tubes, and food would be given as a kind of alms to old and poor people who had been invited to witness the social occasion, or would be given as a reward to the servants.

[11] Four baked-clay, non-Arab produced pipes were found at the Iron Age Sebanzi Hill site in the Lochinvar National Park, Zambia.

The English king James I was one of the first outspoken skeptics and wrote A Counterblaste to Tobacco, an unforgiving literary assault on what he believed was a menace to society.

[17] Fumigation and fire offerings have been performed with various substances, including clarified butter (ghee), fish offal, dried snake skins, and various pastes molded around incense sticks and lit to spread the smoke over wide areas.

It quickly became a popular cough remedy, and in the early 20th century kretek, producers began to market pre-rolled clove cigarettes.

In the 1960s and 1970s, kretek took on the form of a national symbol, with tax breaks compared to "white" cigarettes[19] and the production began to shift from traditional hand-rolling to machine-rolling.

Smoking, especially after the introduction of tobacco, was an essential component of Muslim society and culture and became integrated with important traditions like weddings and funerals, and was expressed in architecture, clothing, literature and poetry.

The next reliable eyewitness account of tobacco smoking is by a Spanish envoy in 1617, but by this time the practice was already deeply engrained in Persian society.

The pipes of the rich were made of finely crafted glass and precious metals while common people used coconuts with bamboo tubing, and these were used to smoke cannabis before the arrival of tobacco.

After the Meiji restoration and abolition of the caste system, many craftsmen who previously decorated swords switched to designing kiserus and buckles for tobacco pouches.

Though mass-production of cigarettes began in the late 19th century, not until after World War II did the kiseru go out of style and become an object of tradition and relative obscurity.

The practice spawned a rich artistic tradition of decorated pipes of wood, ceramics, and eventually metal in an endless variety of themes and motifs of all shapes and sizes.

In what is today Congo, a society called Bena Diemba ("People of Cannabis") was organized in the late 19th century in Lubuko ("The Land of Friendship").

[citation needed] Some groups, such as the Fang of Gabon consume eboga (Tabernanthe iboga), a mind-altering drug in religious rituals.

Due to a massive trade imbalance, however, foreign merchants started to smuggle opium into China via Canton, to the chagrin of the Chinese authorities.

[31] Early 17th-century descriptive notices of various characteristic types and fashions of men portray tobacconists and smokers as individuals who suffer from false self-images and mistaken illusions about the properties of tobacco taking.

[32] Though physicians such as Benjamin Rush claimed tobacco use (including smoking) negatively impacted health as far back as 1798,[33] not until the early 20th century did researchers begin to conduct serious medical studies.

Werner Huttig of the Nazi Party's Rassenpolitisches Amt (Office of Racial Politics) said that a smoking mother's breast milk contained nicotine,[44] a claim that modern research has verified.

A true breakthrough came in 1948, when the British epidemiologist Richard Doll published the first major studies that demonstrated that smoking could cause serious health damage.

[47] In 1950, Richard Doll published research in the British Medical Journal that showed a close link between smoking and lung cancer.

By late 2019,[54] the life-threatening 'vaping associated lung injury' syndrome was described,[55] it is a form of Lipoid pneumonia caused by black market e-liquids containing lipids.

[56] Since the popularisation of e-cigarettes, the tobacco industry protected its interests in a few ways: In the United Kingdom, it was estimated in September 2018 that there are now 3,000,000 people who vape, 40% of whom are smokers trying to quit smoking.

Confronted with falling profits for their illegal product, drug dealers decided to convert the powder to crack, a solid, smokable form of cocaine, that they could sell in smaller quantities to more people.

Described by criminologist Alfred Blumstein, this change resulted from four factors: tighter gun restrictions in areas where crack cocaine is prevalent, a shrinking market and its institutionalization, the robustness of the economy, and the availability of jobs.