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it or putting it up their noses derived gradual, low-level doses of nicotine, but none of these forms of smoking proved to be intensely addicting. The drugging dependency invited by nicotine and the effects of its suspect partners in pathology were not prominently evident until the full flowering of Bright leaf and, with it, the arrival of the readily inhaled cigarette.
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    BEFORE the white man’s arrival in the New World, tobacco was grown, used, and revered there from Brazil to the St. Lawrence River. Typically its dried leaves were crumbled and chewed or smoked in pipes, while in the more tropical regions smaller leaves were wrapped within larger ones or with corn husks and consumed as an early and doubtless potent form of cigar. Each tribe or nation of the native peoples likely evolved its own uses and blends, improving the flavor of the imperfectly cured leaf with pungent herbs and such additives as sumac leaves and dogwood bark. And how better to enhance the efficacy of their prayers than to send up tobacco’s aromatic vapors into the great void where the Spirit of Manitou dwelled and might be persuaded to bless the efforts of warriors and hunters and make the earth and tribal loins fruitful. No object was more sacred among the Indians of North America thanthe calumet, the shared pipe of peace and greeting, and no substance served so well as tobacco smoke for a magical palliative or a cloak for the medicine man’s illusory arts. More profanely, it was chewed and smoked as a narcotic in an age lean on diversions beyond sex and blood sport.
    Within a week of their landfall, Columbus and his crews took notice of the natives’ fondness for chewing the aromatic dried leaves or drinking their smoke through a Y-shaped pipe the Indians called the toboca or, possibly, tobaga , commonly claimed by etymologists to be the origin of the name of the plant. In short order, his sailors were sharing in the local custom, and in a foreshadowing of both the delight and danger attributable to the plant, Columbus scolded his men for sinking to the level of the savages by partaking of the smoky pastime, only to discover, as he was reported to have said, “it was not within their power to refrain from indulging in the habit.”
    Within a century and a quarter, for better or worse, tobacco was spread throughout the globe, eventually recognized along with coffee, chocolate, and cane sugar as one of the treasured and unanticipated gifts of the New World to the Old.
    The Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian sailors who manned the early transatlantic voyages were eager bearers of the exotic leaf to their home ports, where its use took hold in the demimonde as a notorious heathen import, then followed the trade routes east to the Levant and on to Araby, Persia, and India. Dutch and Portuguese mariners are credited with extending the leafs sway to China, Japan, and the East Indies, where it took root. Turkish soil was also soon found hospitable, and a regional variant won ready consumers despite the strictures of Islam against its use as a denier of body and soul. In Western Europe, tobacco quickly gained astounding acceptance among the better classes, thanks in no small measure to its two most eminent patrons, the Frenchman Jean Nicot and the English courtier Walter Raleigh. As ambassador to Portugal in the mid-sixteenth century, Nicot learned that the court physicians prized the Indian leaf for its healing powers, and when a tobacco poultice was credited with curing the chronic ulcer of a relative of one of his aides, Nicot wrote home to Paris rhapsodizing about its curative powers and sending seed samples from his own garden in Lisbon to acquaintances at the royal court, thereby assuring its prompt fame in France. Within two generations, tobacco smoke was widely accepted as an antitoxin and disinfectant, a panacea reportedly so versatile that it could fend off the plague, cure gonorrhea, and serve potently as an unguent, a laxative, a styptic, a