Someone once made, what I consider a very profound observation; a cigarette is a pipe with a fire at one end and a fool at the other. And while the embers continue to glow and consume the oxygen, the fool at the other end, true to his or her classification (as a fool), continues to "nicotinize" the air and blood pathways of the human body.
Some people smoke to look cool. I have never figured out why you need to heat yourself up by clogging your body engine to look cool. Then there are some people, who do so, as a stress relieving thing; you puff away the stress, so to speak; or maybe, in the overall murky gloom, you don't really "see" the stress as it puffs away.
Weight control. happens to be an objective of those who like to be statistical in the manner of 36-24-36, and doesn't matter if they end up being another kind of statistic at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital later on...
I have always wondered, how and when people started smoking.
Tobacco appears to have existed in plant form in prehistoric times. Certain medicinal plants associated with those ages, such as Belladona, and "Nicotiana africana" show small amounts of nicotine. However, a study of human remains, and various kinds of pipes used then show no traces of habitual use of tobacco, like say in Africa and the near East; there is some use noticed in, once again, what were then called the Americas.
As far back as 6000 BC, turns out that tobacco was known in the Americas. Which is a fairly confusing statement as its not really clear what constituted the Americas at that point. May be the continents were joined to each other someplace, may be they were drifting, and depending on the direction of the drift, we could be talking of Russia, South America or even Europe. Never mind.
Around one thousand years before Christ, folks started figuring out that chewing and smoking tobacco was fun. They say the Mayan civilization was the leader in this regard then , and slowly the bad habits spread, once again, through the Americas. Not only did people figure out the pleasures of chewing and spitting the tobacco (the original pollutants), , or smoking the tobacco in various ways, but the more innovative types like the Peruvian Aguaruna Aboriginals, used it to give each other Hallucinogenic Enemas (and I thought enemas, per se, were bad news. This was probably the first and last time, anyone ever got high on an enema).
Subsequent to Christ, roughly around Anno Domini 430-650, turns out that the Mayans were really getting around. They went as far as the Mississippi valley , and introduced the folks there to the smoking habit. The creators of the Aztec empire then started experimenting around, mixing tobacco with resins of various weird leaves and smoking it in all kinds of pipes and tubes. These guys were really the pioneers, as you might say, of the after-dinner smoke. The fancy types used pipes and stuff and puffed away , looking at each other and the future through heavily lidded eyes, pretending to see various deities and stuff appearing in the haze. The hoi-polloi simply rolled up tobacco leaves and smoked them, and history probably says that they certainly didn't see any gods through the pervading gloom. Smoking basically became a vice and a fashion from then on.
Lest you think Columbus discovered only America, it would be interesting for folks to know that he discovered the use of tobacco too. While cruising around, Columbus managed to land at the Bahamas and the native Arawaks, seeing these fair men in their finery, decided to honor them with among other things, leaves. Typically Columbus took all the other goodies and threw the leaves away. Some time later they intercepted a man in a canoe taking a bunch of these leaves someplace else, and figured out that these were a trade item, and of good value. The stuff was taken away from the canoe. This was Columbus's introduction to tobacco , as a smokable entity.
Taking after Columbus, who navigated to the US thinking he was going to India, two of his colleagues Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, landed up in Cuba, thinking they were looking at China. Seems to have been a habit.
Jerez fooled around with the local cigars, got addicted and took the bad habit back to Spain with him. His style was his undoing, while he nonchalantly sat around smoking and puffing smoke rings from his mouth and nose, the neighbors got petrified and complained, and the Spanish Inquisition people simply caught him and threw him in jail for 7 years. However, by he time he was released, the whole of Spain had gone crazy over the habit of smoking.
