When Christopher Columbus explored the New World in 1492, he found the natives smoking a native plant, tobacco, which they did both for medicinal and ceremonial purposes, and was the first to introduce it in Europe.
From 1617 to 1793, tobacco was the most widely used and valuable staple export from the English American mainland colonies and the United States. Columbus would have never imagined that shortly after its introduction in Europe tobacco would become one of the main threats to health in several Latin American and Asian countries, as opium did in the 19th century, particularly in China.
Tobacco, one of the most addictive substances in the world, was introduced to China via Japan or the Philippines in the 1600s. In 1643, Fang Yizhi, a Chinese scholar, was one of the first to alert on the dangers of tobacco when he wrote that smoking tobacco for too long would “blacken the lungs” and lead to death. Chongzhen, the emperor at the time, outlawed growing tobacco and smoking its leaves.
In 1858, the Treaty of Tianjin (Tientsin) which ended the first part of the Second Opium War (1856–1860) not only legalized the import of opium but allowed cigarettes to be imported to China duty-free. By 1900, China was almost entirely permeated by foreign companies.
In 1929, Fritz Lickint, a German scientist from Dresden, published the first statistical evidence linking tobacco use and lung cancer, a finding that was confirmed in 1950 in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Only in 1999, did the Philipp Morris tobacco company acknowledge that, “There is an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other serious diseases in smokers.”
