Depending where you are in the world, smoking tobacco is seen as highly social or highly anti-social.

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Believe it or not smoking opponents and the tobacco lobby have been duking it out for centuries.

Tobacco arrived as a substance in Europe—depending on who you believe—when Andre Thevet brought seeds into France in 1556, or two years later when Francisco Fernandes imported the actual leaves into Spain.

According to the OED the word tobacco arrived in English about 20 years later.

There is no disputing that the stuff itself originally came from South America and so it is pretty credible that its name tobacco derives from a word from one of the native Caribbean languages.

There is no clear winner as to whether the parent word referred to a kind of pipe or to a sort of cigar that was smoked by these natives.

However, etymonline.com suggests that the word existed in Spanish and Italian before the European discovery of the American plant, and that it’s earlier meaning referred to medicinal herbs and relates back to an even older Arabic word with the same sound and meaning.

In any case people were beginning to get addicted to the smoking habit in England right around the time of Shakespeare and although his contemporaries wove scenes of smoking into their plays, old Will never even mentioned the evil weed.

It may be a coincidence but Shakespeare’s troop was called “the King’s men” because it was supported by King James who himself was a bit of a writer, publishing in 1604 a little item named A Counterblast to Tobacco in which he says smoking is

‘a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.”

But it was under King James that the first colonies in America were begun and within 30 years of James’ objection to the filthy habit, England had banned the planting of tobacco.

But they didn’t do it for health reasons, instead they did it so that the growers in Virginia could have a monopoly.