By the late sixteenth century, a plant that Maya priests had once burned in sacred rituals to carry prayers to the spirits had reached the royal courts of Europe, where physicians prescribed it as a cure for everything from toothaches to the plague. Within three hundred years, that same plant would be rolled into cigarettes by machine, handed to soldiers as part of their military rations, and marketed with images of doctors endorsing its safety. And for decades, the companies selling it would know that the evidence against it was mounting, while publicly insisting that the science was still unsettled. Tobacco had been used in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.
Around five thousand years before Christ, Maya tribes in the highlands of what is now Mexico discovered that burning the dried leaves of a broad-leafed green plant produced a smoke that, when inhaled, brought on a mild dizziness and a feeling of connection to the supernatural. Smoking was reserved for priests and rulers, who believed that the smoke carried their prayers to the spirit world, while ordinary community members were barred from the ritual. The plant also served as medicine, used to treat insect bites, cleanse wounds, and relieve pain. Among other Native American peoples, tobacco became a fixture of political life as well.
Pipes were smoked during negotiations, the signing of agreements, and the welcoming of guests, sealing trust between rival groups. When Christopher Columbus’s ships reached the Caribbean in 1492, his sailors encountered locals smoking rolled leaves and had no word for what they were seeing. They described the practice as drinking smoke. One sailor, Rodrigo de Jerez, tried it himself and lit a rolled leaf in public after returning to Spain.
His neighbors, never having seen anything like it, reported him to the Inquisition, and de Jerez was sentenced to seven years in prison, the first documented criminal punishment for smoking in European history. It would not be the last. By the time he was released, tobacco had already become a regular cargo on Spanish ships, deliberately brought back because merchants knew there was demand for it. Tobacco reached the royal courts of Europe in the mid-sixteenth century.
In 1560, the French diplomat Jean Nicot brought seeds to France and presented them to Queen Catherine de Medici, who suffered from severe migraines, as a remedy for headaches. The plant was later named Nicotiana in his honor, giving the world the word nicotine. Physicians across Europe prescribed tobacco for toothaches, asthma, rheumatism, and protection against the plague, and by the end of the century it was sold in pharmacies alongside established medicines. Not all rulers welcomed it.
King James I of England published a pamphlet in 1604 describing smoking as a habit harmful to the brain and dangerous to the lungs, and raised the import duty on tobacco by four thousand percent, but demand did not fall. In the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Murad IV imposed the death penalty for smoking and reportedly roamed the streets of Istanbul in disguise to catch offenders. Persia punished smokers by pouring molten lead down their throats, and Russia ordered flogging for a first offense and execution for a second. The bans were driven less by health concerns than by the flow of money abroad and the fear of a habit spreading too quickly to control.
None of the measures worked. By the end of the seventeenth century, tobacco had become deeply woven into the economies of three continents, and the question was no longer whether it could be stopped, but who would profit from it most. The modern cigarette appeared in the early nineteenth century in Seville, where poor residents wrapped leftover tobacco from discarded cigar butts in thin paper as a cheaper alternative to a full cigar. The practice spread to France, and during the Crimean War of the 1850s, British and French soldiers adopted it from their Ottoman allies.
Until the 1880s, every cigarette was rolled by hand, and even an experienced worker could produce no more than four a minute. The tobacco company Allen and Ginter offered a reward of seventy-five thousand dollars, an enormous sum at the time, to anyone who could build a machine that could do the job. An eighteen-year-old Virginian named James Bonsack took up the challenge. With no formal engineering education but years of tinkering with machinery, he built a machine in 1880 that could roll more than two hundred cigarettes a minute, fifty times faster than manual labor.
Allen and Ginter tested the machine and rejected it, officially on quality grounds, claiming that machine-rolled cigarettes were drier than hand-rolled ones and that customers could taste the difference. Historical accounts of the episode still include claims that the demonstration was deliberately sabotaged by workers who feared the machine would cost them their livelihoods. Bonsack never received the reward. He then offered the invention to other manufacturers, and one man accepted it, James Buchanan Duke.
Duke was an ambitious outsider from a small family tobacco farm in North Carolina, far from the industry’s dominant figure, searching for a way to outmaneuver stronger competitors. He worked alongside Bonsack to refine the technology, solving the quality problems that had led Allen and Ginter to reject it. By the early 1880s, his factory was the only one in the United States producing cigarettes by machine on an industrial scale, giving him a decisive advantage over competitors who still relied on manual labor. Duke spent heavily on advertising, gave away free cigarettes to create demand, and bought out smaller competitors.
He placed collectible cards featuring celebrities and athletes inside cigarette packs, knowing that children and teenagers would want to complete the full sets and would buy more cigarettes to do it. By 1890, his American Tobacco Company controlled about ninety percent of the US tobacco market, effectively a monopoly. In 1911, the US Supreme Court ruled the monopoly illegal and ordered the company broken into several smaller firms. By then, however, the model of mass production had already become the foundation of the tobacco industry, and dismantling a single corporation did nothing to change the market’s direction.
Mechanization had made cigarettes so cheap that they became affordable to almost everyone. During the First World War, cigarettes were officially included in military rations for soldiers on both sides of the front. General John Pershing declared that supplying troops with tobacco was no less important than supplying them with ammunition, and President Woodrow Wilson ordered cigarettes to be classified as an essential military supply. Tobacco companies shipped millions of packs to the front free of charge, investing in the habits of an entire generation of young men who often had never smoked before but now received cigarettes alongside their daily rations for years.
The Red Cross and the YMCA raised donations specifically to provide cigarettes for soldiers, and newspapers ran slogans claiming that cigarettes were more important to a soldier than chocolate. Soldiers returned home with the habit deeply ingrained, and smoking rates among men rose sharply. Women rarely smoked, however. By the social standards of the time, a woman smoking in public was considered improper, and by the late 1920s, the industry had built production capacity that exceeded demand.
Expanding the market to women had become a strategic necessity. In 1929, Lucky Strike hired Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and one of the founders of modern public relations, to solve the problem. During New York City’s Easter parade, Bernays arranged for a carefully selected group of young women to light cigarettes in front of reporters he had personally invited. He called the cigarettes torches of freedom and presented the event not as an advertisement but as a symbolic act in the fight for women’s equality.
The photographs appeared in newspapers across the country the next day, and most articles framed the event as a milestone in women’s emancipation, with little mention of its commercial purpose. Bernays understood that people were more likely to change their behavior in response to social symbols than to straightforward arguments about a product’s quality, and he later described his approach as the engineering of consent. Smoking among American women increased significantly in the following years. During the 1940s and 1950s, tobacco advertisements routinely featured doctors claiming that certain brands were gentler on the throat.
One of Camel’s most famous campaigns declared that more doctors smoked Camel than any other brand. At the same time, a very different picture was emerging behind the scenes. In 1950, independent research groups in the United States and the United Kingdom published the first statistical studies linking smoking to lung cancer. In 1953, scientists at the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York demonstrated that tobacco tar applied to the skin of laboratory mice caused malignant tumors.
Executives of the largest tobacco companies were aware of these findings. In December 1953, industry representatives met at the Plaza Hotel in New York to develop a unified strategy of denial. The following month, they published a document titled A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers, claiming that the link between smoking and cancer had not been proven and promising to fund their own scientific research. The statement appeared as full-page advertisements in hundreds of newspapers across the country.
The companies did establish a research committee, but internal industry documents made public decades later during court proceedings revealed that its true purpose was not to investigate the issue but to create doubt. One internal memo expressed the strategy bluntly: Doubt is our product. In 1964, the US Surgeon General released a landmark report officially recognizing smoking as a proven cause of lung cancer and other serious diseases. Warning labels followed, then a ban on television advertising for cigarettes, then the first major lawsuits against tobacco companies.
In the 1990s, the industry’s position became even more difficult as former executives began testifying in court. Jeffrey Wigand, who had served as vice president of research and development at Brown and Williamson, testified under oath that the company had deliberately manipulated nicotine levels to make cigarettes more addictive while publicly denying that nicotine caused addiction at all. After agreeing to give an interview to CBS, he was sued for violating his non-disclosure agreement, and according to Wigand, his family began receiving anonymous threats. His story later became the basis for the film The Insider.
The turning point came with the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, under which forty-six US states and the nation’s largest tobacco companies agreed that the companies would pay more than two hundred six billion dollars over twenty-five years to reimburse states for the public cost of treating smoking-related diseases. The agreement also imposed major restrictions on tobacco advertising, including bans on certain advertising characters and the direct sponsorship of youth-oriented events, and it became a model for similar settlements in other countries. Testimony from Wigand and other former insiders proved decisive because the courts were presented not only with statistical evidence but with internal company documents and first-hand accounts from people who had worked inside the industry itself. After sales declined and regulations tightened in the United States and Western Europe, tobacco companies redirected their marketing budgets to regions with weaker regulations, younger populations, and faster population growth, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
More than eighty percent of the world’s smokers now live in low- and middle-income countries, where companies sponsor local sporting and music events, distribute free samples near schools and universities, and place billboards where advertising restrictions are weaker. At the same time, electronic cigarettes entered the market, initially promoted as a safer alternative for adult smokers. Devices featuring fruit and dessert flavors and brightly colored designs attracted large numbers of teenagers who had never smoked before, and one of the world’s largest e-cigarette manufacturers was ultimately fined hundreds of millions of dollars for marketing practices that targeted minors. Regulators responded with restrictions on flavored vaping products and age limits, but the pattern remained familiar: a new product entered the market with claims of greater safety, gained popularity among an audience the previous product had failed to reach, and only afterward came under intense regulatory scrutiny.
The tobacco industry has changed remarkably little over the past century and a half. The packaging, flavors, and methods of distribution have evolved, but the underlying strategy has remained the same: find an audience the previous product did not reach, and offer it a new form of the same substance. At every stage, from the royal courts of the sixteenth century to the factories of the late nineteenth century, the advertising agencies of the 1920s, and the federal courtrooms of the 1990s, decisions were made by people who possessed information unavailable to the ordinary consumer.
That gap between what the industry knew and what the public knew shaped the entire history of the plant, and it continues to shape the global tobacco market today.
