We’Ve Been Puffing Away for Centuries

TOBACCO came to the UK in the mid to late 1500s, but it is not known exactly who brought it – either the first English slave trader, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake, or Sir Walter Raleigh, who popularised the drug in the court of Elizabeth I.

British cities including Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow grew rich on tobacco, cotton, sugar and the trade of African slaves to work on the crops But alarmbells were already ringing about tobacco’s downside.

In 1604, King James I published his treatise A Counterblast to Tobacco in which he railed against the plant as “an invention of Satan”, banned tobacco from London’s alehouses and imposed heavy taxes on it.

The Royal College of Physicians held a debate in which many eminent doctors, clutching their pipes, declared the King was wrong.

Others voiced their concerns, including Sir Francis Bacon who warned of the addictiveness of the weed. It was also outlawed in several countries including Switzerland, Russia, Turkey, China, Persia and India.

Diarist Samuel Pepys described a Royal Society experiment in which a cat died after being fed “a drop of distilled oil of tobacco”.

Smoking was also banned in the House of Commons chamber.

Pipes were the most popular way to smoke tobacco in the UK and abroad, but as more people took up the habit, the upper classes saw it as common and switched to snuff.

In the 1800s cigarettes were developed in Spain by beggars who took tobacco from used cigars and rolled them in paper.

In 1964 the US Surgeon General announced that smoking caused lung cancer, then ordered that his warnings be written on packets. The UK followed suit in 1971.

In 1965 broadcast adverts for cigarettes were banned by the UK government.

Over the next 40 years, the clamour to quit smoking grew as medical evidence showing that smoking caused heart and lung diseases, miscarriage, birth defects, asthma and allergies became more clear cut.

The first lawsuits against tobacco firms in America were followed by others in the UK.

Then after a series of fires thought to be caused by cigarettes, culminating with the King’s Cross Underground fire in 1987, in which 31 people died, London Underground banned smoking throughout the network.

Companies such as Virgin, British Airways, Midland Bank and IBM cracked down on tobacco advertising and smoking in the workplace and offered workers incentives to quit.

In February last year, MPs voted to introduce a ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces from July 2007.

(c) 2007 Daily Post; Liverpool. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.