AH challenge: could the spread of tobacco use be preempted?

[Hendryk]

In OTL, about a third of the world's adult population consumes tobacco in one form or another, with massive effects on public health. This is remarkable for a drug that was entirely unknown outside of Mesoamerica and the Eastern seaboard of North America until the 16th century. Like most people born before the 1990s, I personally had to put up with its ubiquitous presence in public spaces whether I wanted to or not, which has, I confess, given me opinions about it--opinions that haven't mellowed from seeing kids at my school try to vape indoors in violation of the rules.

Hence the challenge: what would be the smallest and most plausible POD necessary to preempt the worldwide spread of tobacco, and what would the consequences be in the modern era? I assume they would appear early on, since the absence of tobacco as a cash crop would likely impact the fortunes of colonial Virginia, probably resulting in a different pattern of settlement in British North America.

 

[Alexander Rooksmoor]

Interestingly in 1992 traces of tobacco and cocaine were found in the hair of the mummy of the Egyptian priestess Henut Taui who lived around 1000 BCE, so it seems that the transport of these items which were exclusively grown in the Americas for many centuries to come, was already underway at that time. Thus, Ancient Egyptians, perhaps Greeks and Romans, puffing away and snorting, seems to have been quite feasible.

I could see a range of AH scenarios stemming from this. Pharaohs dying young from lung cancer; Cocaine barons busy in supplying various Greek city states or how about the Viking trade in tobacco across the North Atlantic to early medieval Europe? Would the Papacy ban their use or see them as being better than alcohol? Even into the mid-20th Century tobacco smoking was promoted as something good for you; could it have been as something to ward off the Black Death? Hussars were supposed to ride into battle having snorted some cocaine and it was probably used by soldiers or at least their officers, throughout the First World War. Would Napoleon's armies have marched faster into battle? With the earlier use of cocaine in Europe would the economies have suffered the way that the British pushing opium on the Chinese population resulted in for the economy of China?

 

[Hendryk]

Interestingly in 1992 traces of tobacco and cocaine were found in the hair of the mummy of the Egyptian priestess Henut Taui who lived around 1000 BCE, so it seems that the transport of these items which were exclusively grown in the Americas for many centuries to come, was already underway at that time. Thus, Ancient Egyptians, perhaps Greeks and Romans, puffing away and snorting, seems to have been quite feasible.

I could see a range of AH scenarios stemming from this. Pharaohs dying young from lung cancer; Cocaine barons busy in supplying various Greek city states or how about the Viking trade in tobacco across the North Atlantic to early medieval Europe? Would the Papacy ban their use or see them as being better than alcohol? Even into the mid-20th Century tobacco smoking was promoted as something good for you; could it have been as something to ward off the Black Death? Hussars were supposed to ride into battle having snorted some cocaine and it was probably used by soldiers or at least their officers, throughout the First World War. Would Napoleon's armies have marched faster into battle? With the earlier use of cocaine in Europe would the economies have suffered the way that the British pushing opium on the Chinese population resulted in for the economy of China?

Er, that's the opposite of what the challenge is about, and if Europeans had had access to New World crops in classical antiquity, they wouldn't have limited themselves to tobacco when so many other useful ones were around. As for cocaine, refining it requires modern chemistry to be invented first, not that there isn't interesting POD in the idea that the coca plant could be acclimated to, say, the Near East, in early modern times.

 

[Jared]

Interestingly in 1992 traces of tobacco and cocaine were found in the hair of the mummy of the Egyptian priestess Henut Taui who lived around 1000 BCE, so it seems that the transport of these items which were exclusively grown in the Americas for many centuries to come, was already underway at that time. Thus, Ancient Egyptians, perhaps Greeks and Romans, puffing away and snorting, seems to have been quite feasible.

I can't immediately find a reliable source online, but there's been considerable debate about whether the presence of cocaine in Egyptian mummies is due to external contamination, and also how reliable the results are, with replication attempts often failing to find any traces of cocaine.

The presence of nicotine is no surprise at all since nicotine is available in a variety of Old World plants, most notably in common celery (Apium graveolens) which Egyptians are known to have consumed - again, ignoring possible external contamination.

 

[Charles EP M.]

The grimmest way to curtail it would be if the Spanish deliberately wreck the crops during their conquests, as a way to punish/control the natives or because (as Spaniards got addicted quickly) it gets seen as an unclean 'Indian' sickness before anyone can figure out to sell it. That would delay its spread and reduce its use in Mesoamerica (and kill a lot of the farmers), until Europeans go to North America and run into tobacco usage there.