... The story of smoking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is capacious enough to include the distillation apparatus of the alchemist, the water pipe of the cannabis smoker, and even medicinal smoke enemas.
This diversity is not what we would expect from the standard history of smoking, which goes something like this.
Before 1492 smoking was widespread among the tobacco-loving peoples of the Americas but unknown across the Atlantic. Then Christopher Columbus witnessed Taíno men in Cuba puffing on “certain herbs...by which they become benumbed and almost drunk” and, upon further investigation, learned that “they call this tabaco” (this, at least, is what Bartolomé de Las Casas claimed Columbus had recorded in his now-lost journal of his 1492 voyage). By the 1560s a growing number of Spanish authorities began advocating that Europeans take up the practice—particularly the Seville physician Nicolás Monardes, who hailed smoking as a “miraculous” cure for over twenty diseases. And by century’s end tobacco was being grown domestically in areas stretching from Spain to Turkey to Gujarat. Meanwhile, tobacco plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil were emerging as hubs of the Atlantic slave trade. All were in the service of an enormous growth in consumer demand for tobacco that stretched beyond Europe and into Asia and Africa. (...)
By the 1650s the tobacco pipe was perhaps the most widespread emblem of globalization and European empire. Smoking had gone global.
Versions of this account of the globalization of smoking have been told countless times. Broadly speaking, they’re true. But they can also be misleading.
Tobacco is indeed native to the Americas, and early modern Europeans, Africans, and Asians did encounter tobacco smoking as a new practice without precedent in ancient texts or preexisting social conventions. But, as archaeologists and anthropologists have been documenting for decades, tobacco was not the only drug that the peoples of the Old World smoked—even before the voyages of Columbus.
While tobacco was becoming a global drug, cannabis was, too—just in a stealthier and far less heralded fashion. Archaeological evidence points to cannabis smoking in Central and South Asia since at least 1000 bc, probably linked to the migrations of proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. One apparent offshoot of this ancient practice attracted the notice of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that Scythian nomads inhaled cannabis smoke inside their woolen tents: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” By circa 800 cannabis use had also crossed the Indian Ocean and become part of daily life in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
As European slave traders and merchants reached the cannabis-smoking regions of both South Asia and East and west central Africa, the phenomenon of “intoxicating” cannabis again attracted notice. The Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta, living in 1550s India, admitted that cannabis could be “pleasantly intoxicating” but also saw it as a source of “nausea” and “melancholy.” By the seventeenth centuries, however, some European merchants in the Indian Ocean region had become users of the drug themselves, and at least one brought back samples of the drug to Europe with an eye toward growing the plant locally as a new cash crop, following the model of tobacco.
In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.
Hooke also never specified if the anonymous “patient” of his report was, in fact, himself. But he did end his address on a decidedly upbeat note. “Here are diverse of the seeds,” Hooke said, presenting them to the Royal Society at their final weekly meeting before Christmas, “which I intend to try this spring, to see if the plant can be here produced.” If he succeeded in this labor, Hooke believed the drug could prove to be “of considerable use for lunatics.” He concluded: “There is no cause of fear, tho’ possibly there may be of laughter.”
This diversity is not what we would expect from the standard history of smoking, which goes something like this.
By the 1650s the tobacco pipe was perhaps the most widespread emblem of globalization and European empire. Smoking had gone global.
Versions of this account of the globalization of smoking have been told countless times. Broadly speaking, they’re true. But they can also be misleading.
Tobacco is indeed native to the Americas, and early modern Europeans, Africans, and Asians did encounter tobacco smoking as a new practice without precedent in ancient texts or preexisting social conventions. But, as archaeologists and anthropologists have been documenting for decades, tobacco was not the only drug that the peoples of the Old World smoked—even before the voyages of Columbus.
While tobacco was becoming a global drug, cannabis was, too—just in a stealthier and far less heralded fashion. Archaeological evidence points to cannabis smoking in Central and South Asia since at least 1000 bc, probably linked to the migrations of proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. One apparent offshoot of this ancient practice attracted the notice of the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote that Scythian nomads inhaled cannabis smoke inside their woolen tents: “The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.” By circa 800 cannabis use had also crossed the Indian Ocean and become part of daily life in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
As European slave traders and merchants reached the cannabis-smoking regions of both South Asia and East and west central Africa, the phenomenon of “intoxicating” cannabis again attracted notice. The Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta, living in 1550s India, admitted that cannabis could be “pleasantly intoxicating” but also saw it as a source of “nausea” and “melancholy.” By the seventeenth centuries, however, some European merchants in the Indian Ocean region had become users of the drug themselves, and at least one brought back samples of the drug to Europe with an eye toward growing the plant locally as a new cash crop, following the model of tobacco.
In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.
Hooke also never specified if the anonymous “patient” of his report was, in fact, himself. But he did end his address on a decidedly upbeat note. “Here are diverse of the seeds,” Hooke said, presenting them to the Royal Society at their final weekly meeting before Christmas, “which I intend to try this spring, to see if the plant can be here produced.” If he succeeded in this labor, Hooke believed the drug could prove to be “of considerable use for lunatics.” He concluded: “There is no cause of fear, tho’ possibly there may be of laughter.”
Image: Monkey Trick, by David Teniers the Younger, c. 1670
