By Stan Davis, 9/98: a performance piece for grades 3-12
Copyright Stan Davis 1998
Let's start in the 1500s:

When explorers reached the New World, Native Americans had been growing and using tobacco for centuries. The Native Americans used tobacco in rituals as a way to communicate with the spirits.  Tobacco was seen as a gift from the spirit world.  It was also used in ceremonies to make peace (You've heard of the 'peace pipe'), at the beginning of a new undertaking, and in religious ceremonies.

"Unlike the native peoples who used tobacco for sacred purposes such as enhancing fertility, predicting weather, conducting war councils, and enabling vision quests, the Europeans used it mainly because they enjoyed using it....They learned too soon about its addictive properties." (Dying to Quit, Janet Brigham, Joseph Henry press, 1998, page 11)

Seeing tobacco being smoked frightened the explorers: they thought they were seeing the Indians drink fire.
The explorers tried tobacco smoking. They used tobacco without the rituals. They smoked often and quickly got addicted (though no one knew what addiction was then). They brought tobacco back to England. There people who smoked were followed and watched on the street- as if they were eating or drinking fire. Smoking became a thing for rich noblemen to do- an extreme thing like tongue piercing- to show how tough they were. To buy tobacco in England, you had to put silver coins on one pan of a balance scale and then the tobacco seller would put tobacco on the other side until the scale balanced. 
The southern US colonies bought the supplies they needed to survive by growing and selling tobacco. They found that those young rich men in England would pay any price for tobacco, so the colonies could make a lot of money. In fact, the two foundations of the southern colonies were cheap slaves from Africa, who worked the fields, and expensive tobacco. Actually they had two sets of slaves. African slaves in the fields and….(audience volunteers: rich slaves (customers) in England). If their African slaves died, what did the colonists do? Get more? If their tobacco customers died because of smoking, what did they do?The tobacco companies we have now came from those early colonies- a continuation of the same business. Now they only have one kind of slaves. 

And when their products kill off 400,000 of those slaves a year, they have to get more. HOW?
One thing has changed about this story since colonial times: in the 1950s the tobacco companies learned two new pieces of information, that no one had known before:

• They learned that tobacco causes lung cancer

 

• and they learned that nicotine, one of the chemicals in tobacco, is addictive.

 

They had a choice to make at that point.

• They could start growing and selling some other product that doesn't kill people.

 

• They could find a way to take the nicotine out of tobacco so people could quit when they wanted to.

 

• or they could keep growing and selling tobacco just as they always had.

 

Why do you think they did that?
And when the government started restricting advertising to young people, the industry found other ways to get their messages across. 90% of movies show characters smoking, even though 75% of americans don't  smoke. Movie makers won't tell how much they are paid to include smoking in movies.
The RJR company, which makes cigarettes, also owns the childrens' newspaper The Weekly Reader. The Weekly Reader carries twice as many pro-tobacco articles as the other major childrens' newspaper, The Scholastic News. The cartoon character "Joe Camel" has had his picture in the Weekly Reader eight times in two years. (Dying to Quit, p. 23)

Here's some interesting information:
Raising the price of cigarettes stops young people from starting to smoke. But, no matter how high the price gets, smokers keep smoking at about the same rate. Smokers buy less food, go to the doctor less, but they find the $$ to keep smoking. Why?

"45 to 70% of smokers who survive a heart attack resume smoking again within a year. Half of smokers who have lung cancer surgery take up smoking again" 
(Dying to Quit, p. 99) Why?

Are any of you angry about any parts of this story?
Which parts? What do you plan to do about your anger?

There is a great deal of historical information about tobacco in the book Licit and Illicit Drugs, by Brecher. This book is an indispensible resource for anyone trying to bring a historical perspective to the study of tobacco.
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