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The Forbidden Game
Brian Inglis
3. The Impact of Drugs on Civilisation
Tobacco: herba panacea
THERE WAS SOME dispute at the time—among scholars,
there still is—over who deserved the praise or execration for introducing
tobacco into Europe. The Spanish colonists soon took to it, in
spite of official disapproval. Bartholomew de las Casas found
some of them on the island of Hispaniola who had been reported
for smoking; when remonstrated with for indulging in so vicious
a habit, they had replied it was 'not in their power to stop'.
And sailors brought the habit home. But it gained its initial
popularity in Europe as a medicine. Its value in treating fevers
and other disorders led Jean Nicot, French Ambassador at the Portuguese
Court, to take tobacco plants to France, when he returned there
in 1561, as a present for Catherine de Medici; and by the time
Nicholas Monardes published his Joyful News out of the New
Found World, a few years later, it had begun to be regarded
as the great cure-all: herba panacea, valuable whether
taken into the lungs, or into the digestive system—or applied
externally, to wounds; effective alike against headaches carbuncles,
chilblains, worms, or venereal disease.
This was not illogical, in the prevailing climate of orthodox
medical opinion, based on the assumption that health depended
on a correct balance of the humours: blood, bile, and phlegm.
A medicine which could 'cleanse the superfluous humors of the
brain' could be expected to remove whatever symptoms that superfluity
had brought on, mental or physical; and also to preserve health—those
who took it, according to the mathematician Thomas Hariot, who
was with Raleigh's expedition to Virginia in 1585, were 'not subject
to many grievous diseases with which we in England are sometimes
afflicted'.
It was for this reason, presumably, that Raleigh brought tobacco
plants back from Virginia to plant on his Irish estate; his friend
Edmund Spenser, who used to stay there, listed 'divine tobacco'
in The Faery Queen as one of the herbs Belphoebe gathered
to staunch the flow of blood from Timais's wound. But Raleigh
began to enjoy tobacco in its own right, smoking it in a pipe
as the Indians did in Virginia. Friends and acquaintances, introduced
to smoking, caught the habit; and soon, it became the fashion.
Tobacco caught on not because it induced a trance state, and visions.
Young Englishmen of the time would have been terrified if it had.
They took to the drug simply because it was fashionable and—as
soon as they got over the initial reaction of giddiness or nausea—enjoyable.
It provided a mild 'lift', when that was desired; or it assisted
relaxation. But it had one unwelcome consequence. It created a
craving so powerful that by the 1890s, the writer of an English
herbal was complaining that some men could not restrain themselves
from having a smoke, 'no, not in the middle of their dinner'.
Smoking happened to become fashionable in England at a time when
Puritanism was also establishing itself, based on an ethic closer
to that of John the Baptist than of Jesus. The Puritan was not
then in a position to deny tobacco's medicinal virtues, but it
did not escape him that the people who smoked it were rarely concerned
for their health. It was consequently possible to argue that because
tobacco 'drinking' (as it was then often described, in the sense
of 'drinking it all in') was not confined to specific doses at
certain times of day, it could actually be harmful— like other
drugs whose dosage was inadequately regulated: particularly to
the young. Here, the Puritan found allies in the nobility and
gentry who, even if they themselves liked to smoke, were apt to
be indignant when their sons insisted on following the fashion.
Ben Jonson portrayed the type—the clown Sogliardo in Every
Man out of his Humour, 'so enamoured of the name of a gentleman
that he will have it, though he buys it. He comes up every term
to learn to take tobacco'. The parents suffered—'the patrimony
of many noble young gentlemen', Edmund Gardner, author of the
Trial of Tobacco, observed, had 'vanished clear away with
this smoky vapour'.
It was this aspect of the dangers of tobacco that 'Philaretes'
emphasised in his Work for Chimney Sweepers, which appeared
in 1602, denouncing smoking as a 'pestiferous vice'. Still fresh
in the memory, he recalled, were reports
that divers young Gentlemen, by the daily use of this tobacco,
have brought themselves to fluxes and dysentries, and of late
at Bath a scholar of some good account and worshipful calling
was supposed to have perished by this practice, for his humours
being sharpened and made thin by the frequent use of tobacco,
after that they had once taken a course downward, they ran in
such violence, that by no art or physician's skill could they
be stayed, till the man most miserably ended his life, being then
in the very prime and vigour of his age.
Philaretes explained how this had happened. Tobacco, he asserted,
worked by evaporating man's 'unctuous and radical moistures'—as
was demonstrated in the fact that it was employed to cure gonorrhea
by drying up the discharge. But this process, if too long continued,
could only end by drying up 'spermatical humidity', too, rendering
him incapable of propagation. Experience also showed that tobacco
left men in a state of depression, 'mopishness and sottishness',
which in the long run must damage memory, imagination and understanding.
Nor was it any use the defenders of tobacco arguing that the Indians
took it without such ill-effects; the Indians had accustomed themselves
to taking it from childhood.
Tobacco: counterblast
Work for Chimney Sweepers was the first of scores of similar
pamphlets which were to appear later on the same theme, denouncing
the use of tobacco—and later of other drugs—for non-medical
purposes. Whatever the drug, the writer was likely to claim that
it was physically and mentally destructive, if not in its immediate
effects, then in the long term; that it put the youth of the country
particularly at risk—as some scarifying illustration from Bath
(or Baden, or Ballston Spa, N.Y.) would demonstrate; and that
it had a sinister past record. As the composer of the prototypical
broadside, Philaretes could be cited as deserving of some small
niche in the history of drugs. But his offering was to be overshadowed
by the more famous Counterblast to Tobacco which came out
two years later, in 1604—its anonymous author's identity not
being concealed for long: James I, newly ascended to the British
throne.
In certain respects, the Counterblast was ahead of its
time. James did not waste time trying to explode tobacco's reputation
as a cure-all by citing examples of its failures; he contented
himself with exposing the contradictions in the claims made on
its behalf.
It cures the gout in the feet and (which is miraculous) in that
very instant when the smoke thereof—light—flies up into the
head, the virtue thereof—as heavy—runs down to the little
toe. It helps all sorts of agues. It makes a man sober that was
drunk. It refreshes a weary man, and yet makes a man hungry. Being
taken on going to bed, it makes one sleep soundly; and yet being
taken when a man is sleepy and drowsy, it will, as they say, awake
his brain, and quicken his understanding. As for the curing of
the Pox, it serves for that use only among the poxy Indian slaves.
Here in England it is refined, and will not deign to cure here
any other than cleanly and gentlemanly diseases. Omnipotent power
of tobacco!
James also emphasised tobacco's most commonly encountered pernicious
effect: 'many in this kingdom have had such a continual use of
taking this unsavoury smoke, they are not now able to resist the
same, no more than an old drunkard can abide to be long sober'.
But he spoiled his case by clearly hinting at one of the reasons
for his dislike of tobacco: his hatred of Raleigh. Nor could he
resist the temptation to set out his arguments against tobacco
in the form of literary conceits. Tobacco, he sought to prove,
was 'the lively image and pattern of hell', because it had in
it all the vices for which man might expect hell to await him:
to wit; first, it was a smoke; so are the vanities of this world.
Secondly, it delighteth them who take it; so do the pleasures
of the world delight the men of the world. Thirdly, it maketh
men drunken, and light in the head; so do the vanities of the
world, men are drunken therewith. Fourthly, he that taketh tobacco
saith he cannot leave it, it doth bewitch him; even so, the pleasures
of the world make men loath to leave them, they are for the most
part so enchanted with them; and further, besides all this, it
is like hell in the very substance of it, for it is a stinking
loathsome thing; and so is hell.
It was a little too pat, confirming that James was less the shrewd
observer of the effects of the drug that he appeared to be, than
the diligent collector of all the possible rationalisations which
could be mustered against it.
That autumn, James informed the High Treasurer of England that
all importers of tobacco would have to pay, in addition to the
customs duty of 2d a pound that Elizabeth had imposed, the sum
of 6/8d; an increase of 4,000 per cent. It was the first attempt
of its kind to get rid of a drug by indirect prohibition—by
imposing a tax so heavy that only the very rich would be able
to afford to buy it. And this discrimination was deliberate. When
tobacco had been discovered, the preamble recalled, it had been
taken 'by the better sort', only as physic. But it had recently,
'through evil custom and the toleration thereof, been taken in
excess by a number of riotous and disorderly persons of mean and
base condition who, contrary to the usages of which persons of
good calling and quality make, spend most of their time in idle
vanity, to the evil example and corrupting of others'. They also
spent too much of their wages, which they ought to be spending
on their families, 'not caring at what price they buy'; so that
people's health was being impaired, making them unfit for work,
and consuming their resources, and also the country's, because
'a great part of the treasure of our land is spent and exhausted
by this drug alone'. James, in other words, had been moved to
action less because of the drug's effect on his subjects' health,
than because it might make them less loyal and hard-working. Men
who took time off to smoke could be expected to expend much of
that time in talk; and the talk might turn to gunpowder, treason
and plot . . .
To judge by the Counterblast, James would have preferred
to ban tobacco outright; but that could possibly have been dangerous,
with so many pipe-smokers among the Court circle; and it would
certainly have been difficult, with tobacco in such demand as
a medicine. So the intention—the preamble continued—was simply
to provide a restraint on consumption, in order to reduce the
amount being imported, while leaving 'sufficient store to serve
for the necessary use of those who are of the better sort, and
have and will use the same with moderation to preserve their health'.
But the new duty, James soon found, had precisely the opposite
effect to that which he had intended. The people who used tobacco
to cure ailments, finding it so expensive, were forced back on
older herbal remedies which cost little or nothing. Those who
had begun to smoke for pleasure, however, and become addicted
could not bear to do without their pipefuls. And although with
so heavy a duty to be paid, merchants did indeed, as James had
hoped, find it less profitable to import tobacco, this only meant
that they found it more profitable to smuggle it. In the decade
that followed the introduction of the duty, tobacco consumption
continued to increase, not least among the poor. 'There is not
so base a groom'—the pamphleteer Barnabe Rich complained in
1614—
that comes into the alehouse to call for his pot, but he must
have his pipe of tobacco, for it is a commodity that is now as
saleable in every tavern, inn, and ale house, as either wine,
ale or beer, and in apothecaries' shops, grocers' shops, chandlers'
shops, they are (almost) never without company, that from morning
to night are still taking of tobacco; what a number are there
besides, that keep houses, or open shops, which have no other
trade to live by but the selling of tobacco.
Tobacco: fund-raiser
In ordinary circumstances James, with his sublime intellectual
arrogance, would have been likely to try stiffer measures to check
smuggling. But that would have meant increased expenditure, which
he was in no position to undertake. He was chronically desperate
for funds; and the signs that tobacco smoking was on the increase
had suggested a way to secure them. In 1608 he had ordered a reduction
in the duty to a shilling a pound, selling the right to collect
it to one of his favourites, Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery.
Tobacco imports began to rise so rapidly that James found he had
sold himself short; in 1615 he revoked the deal (paying Montgomery
compensation) so that he could sell the right to collect the duty
for a sum more closely approximating to what it would be worth
to the patent holder—£16,000 a year, by 1620.
For the remainder of James's reign solvency was the essential
consideration. By farming out the duty, he in effect ensured that
it would be kept as high as it could go without causing the importer
to switch to smuggling. But the importers were not the only problem.
Distributors and retailers, it was found, were stretching their
stocks by adulterating the tobacco with ground up stalks and leaves
of other plants, and disguising the thinness of the flavour by
adding small quantities of spirits, and spices, to delude the
customer—unlike Jonson's Abel Drugger:
He lets me have good tobacco, and he does not
Sophisticate it with sack, lees, or oil
Nor washes it in muscadel and grains
Nor buries it in gravel, underground
Wrapped up in greasy leather, or piss'd clouts.
'Sophistication' was frowned on by the authorities because it
lost them revenue. When half of what was sold was no longer pure
tobacco, this meant, in effect, that duty was being paid only
on one out of two pipefuls smoked. The practice became so notorious
that James had to intervene to authorise the inspection of stocks
held by retailers. As a result, before the end of his reign he
found himself setting himself up as guardian of the purity of
the drug which twenty years before he had tried to suppress. And
the irony only began there. The British colonists in Virginia,
who for some years had almost despaired of being able to survive,
experimented in 1611 with growing tobacco. The flavour happened
to appeal to the British smoker. It was very much in James's financial
interest that this taste should be encouraged because, as the
House of Commons was told in 1620, the amount of sterling leaving
the country in bullion to pay for tobacco had reached six figures.
Such vast (for that period) sums were better channelled into British
colonies—helping them to become self-supporting, and eventually
to contribute to the Treasury—than shipped to swell the treasure
chests of Portugal and Spain.
Without wishing it, therefore—to the end of his life, James
continued to recall 'the dislike which we have always had of the
use of tobacco in general', and to share the uneasiness of the
Virginia Company about allowing the colony's economy to rely on
a 'deceivable weed', the fashion for which 'must soon vanish into
smoke'—the British Government had embarked upon a course of
economic imperialism, based on two assumptions. One was that as
colonies were revenue-raising enterprises—or at least, it was
hoped, financially self-supporting—they must be allowed, and
if necessary encouraged, to produce any commodity which could
be sold profitably, even if it were not regarded as desirable
in itself. The other was that if the commodity were not regarded
as desirable in itself, its manufacture and sale could always
be excused by pointing out that people were going to buy it anyway,
so they might as well buy a British product. By this means, quality
would be ensured; and the profits would benefit the British taxpayer.
Tobacco: banned
Hypocritical though James's attitude to tobacco became, at least
his policies were flexible enough to be administratively feasible.
In other parts of the Old World, the reaction of rulers to the
introduction of tobacco was generally the same, but they often
preferred to take what must have appeared to be the simplest course;
outright prohibition of the drug, with severe penalties for anybody
caught selling or taking it.
Visiting Constantinople in 1611, George Sandys was told that on
the orders of the Sultan Amurath a man caught smoking had been
paraded through the streets mounted facing backwards on an ass,
with a pipe drawn through the cartilage of his nose. In Iran,
the Sultan's brother Shah Abbas imposed similar penalties; Sir
Thomas Herbert, arriving there with a British delegation in 1628,
found that Abbas had sentenced two merchants who had been caught
importing tobacco to have their noses and ears cut off; and their
consignment, forty camel loads, was burned—its 'black vapour
gave the whole city infernal incense for two whole days and nights
together'. Both rulers, when such punishments proved insufficient
to check smuggling, introduced the death penalty. Jean Tavernier,
visiting Iran in the 1670s, was told that some rich merchants
found smoking in an inn had been punished, by Abbas's heir, as
befitted the nature of their crime, by having molten lead poured
down their throats. In India, the Great Mogul Jehangir Khan decreed
that anybody found smoking should have his lips slit. When ambassadors
from the Duke of Holstein arrived in Moscow in 1634, they saw
eight men and a woman publicly knouted for selling tobacco, and
the death penalty was decreed that year for habitual offenders.
The fashion of tobacco-smoking for some reason took longer to
spread through Europe; but by the middle of the seventeenth century
several states had laws against it. In the Canton of Berne, where
the laws were related to the Ten Commandments, tobacco smoking
was put in the same category as adultery, punishable by fines,
the pillory, and imprisonment. And when this failed, the Canton
set up a special Tobacco Court, modelled on the Inquisition, with
payments for informers and harsh penalties for those who were
convicted.
These laws and penalties, admittedly, were not based exclusively
on the objection to tobacco as a drug. The Tsar Michael claimed
also to be concerned about fire hazards; there were objections
to the fumes and the spitting which accompanied smoking; and there
was the fear that where men smoked together, they might be conspiring
together. But whatever the motive, and however savage the penalties,
the result was everywhere the same; prohibition was an utter failure.
Sandys noted that in spite of the warning given by the sight of
the convicted smoker paraded round Constantinople, people continued
to smoke clandestinely. Tavernier found men and women in Persia
'so addicted to tobacco that to take their tobacco from them,
is to take away their lives'.
Everywhere, eventually, the ban had to be lifted, and tobacco
allowed in. Its consumption was in future to be restricted only
by a variety of Government expedients to make money out of it
by the levying of customs or excise duties—or by a state monopoly
of the kind Richelieu introduced in France and which lasts to
this day; and by local by-laws, directed not against tobacco as
a drug, but against its unwelcome social side-effects.
Tobacco: tamed
How did it come about that tobacco, from being the drug most commonly
used to induce visions in the New World, should have soon been
domesticated in Europe; so that, as the flow of tributes from
essayists and poets reveal, it was welcomed as a mild mental stimulant,
stirring ideas, and as a mild tranquilliser, soothing away nervous
tensions? The tobacco smoked in Europe may not have been as strong
as that used by the Indians, and it was probably not taken in
such powerful doses; but that is not sufficient to account for
the difference. The most likely explanation is that the European
mind had been carried too far from its moorings in instinct for
tobacco to be capable of producing the trance state; and there
was no shamanist tradition which could have been taken up to exploit
tobacco in the way the medicine man was accustomed to do.
When tobacco smokers were seen to be physically no worse off for
their indulgence—their semen did not dry up, and many of them
lived on into old age—suspicions died; and during the Great
Plague, tobacco attained respectability even among those who,
like Samuel Pepys, had feared it as a dangerous drug. In the spring
of 1665 he saw how a cat could be killed by 'the oil of tobacco';
but a month later the sight of doors marked with a red cross and
the inscription 'Lord Have Mercy Upon Us' prompted him to resort
to it: 'I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell and to
chew, which took away the apprehension.' And with a growing sense
of Britain's maritime destiny, the tobacco trade attained full
respectability, coming to be regarded not simply as a commercial,
but as a national, asset. When an increase in the tobacco duty
was mooted in 1685, a critic of the project was quick to point
out that in addition to bringing in so much revenue, and providing
the colonists with the wherewithal to buy vast quantities of English
manufactures, 'the tobacco trade employed nearly two hundred ships,
the breeding ground of many mariners'.
In America, too, tobacco-smoking among the colonists followed
the pattern newly established in Europe. Even the Indians began
to use it more for ritual and symbolic purposes—the 'pipe of
peace'. In some States where tobacco was not grown attempts were
made to curb consumption: Massachusetts banned smoking in company
(even among consenting adults) in 1632, and three years later
tried to stop its sale by retailers. But such regulations proved
unenforceable, and tobacco developed into an industry second only
in importance to alcoholic liquor. The effects on the health of
the community cannot now be estimated; but some idea of the social
and economic significance of the development was provided by Joseph
C. Robert in The Story of Tobacco in America, published
in 1949. Tobacco not merely saved the Virginia settlement; it
created the pattern of the Southern plantation; encouraged the
introduction of Negro slavery, then softened the institution;
begot an immortal group of colonial leaders; strained the bonds
between mother country and Chesapeake colonies; burdened the diplomacy
of the post-Revolutionary period; promoted the Louisiana purchase;
and, after the Civil War, helped to create the New South . . .
Dispute and violence are milestones along this tobacco road; Culpeper's
Rebellion marked the seventeenth century, the Black Patch war
the twentieth. Colonial Virginians used tobacco as money; in the
confusion following the Second World War the American cigarette
was currency 'from Paris to Peking'.
Tea: coffee
Tobacco was the only drug from the Americas which caught on in
the Old World; but in the middle of the seventeenth century two
other drugs which had not been known before in Europe began to
appear from the East: tea—which Pepys recorded as a novelty
in 1661—and coffee. Both were originally introduced, as tobacco
had been, for medicinal purposes—the apothecary telling Mrs.
Pepys it was 'good for her cold and defluxions'. Both, like tobacco,
aroused authority's suspicion when it was found they were being
taken for pleasure.
Coffee came from the Middle East, where its appearance had so
alarmed the authorities in Mecca and Cairo that they had tried
to prohibit its sale, with regulations that all stocks found should
be burned, and all people found drinking it punished. As with
Indian hemp, earlier, the accusation was that coffee was an intoxicant—a
reputation which Sir Anthony Shirley, one of three brothers with
a reputation as travellers in far-away lands, confirmed after
he had tasted it in Aleppo in 1598. So when it was introduced
into Europe, a number of rulers reacted to it as their forbears
had reacted a century before to tobacco, decreeing fines, imprisonment
and corporal punishment for those involved in its distribution
or consumption. But the tendency was to regard it as a danger
chiefly to the lower orders; the aristocracy reserved the right
to drink coffee. Inevitably such qualified prohibition proved
unworkable; and rulers soon switched to the method King James
had pioneered, taxing it instead.
Tea did not attract the same hostility because, except in Britain,
it continued for two centuries to be sold by druggists, and bought
by the public, chiefly as a remedy for internal disorders (it
was to surprise the town of Angouleme when Balzac's Mme Bargeton
gave a tea party, as tea was still sold there in chemists' shops
for indigestion—for which purpose the cure of Yonville was to
recommend it to Madame Bovary). In Britain, where it became popular
as a pick-me-up, it provoked some virulent attacks from satirists
and from politicians; Henry Savile told Mr. Secretary Coventry
in 1678 that it was a base, unworthy and filthy substitute for
wine. But by then it was too late. One of Charles II's first acts
at his restoration had been to impose a duty on tea; and it had
proved to be one of his most profitable fiscal expedients. When
the traveller and philanthropist Jonas Hanway tried to launch
a campaign against it a century later, he had against him not
only Dr. Johnson—'a hardened and shameless tea drinker' as he
described himself, 'who with tea amuses the evening, with tea
solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning'—but
also almost the entire population of Britain, poor and rich alike,
who by this time were consuming it in such quantities that it
had become one of the State's chief sources of revenue.
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