Landmarks of Tobacco Use in the United States

¹ Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Tennesee College of Health Sciences, Memphis., University of Utah Medical Center, Salt Lake City.

The idea of inhaling smoke from cigarettes is historically new, actually less than a century old. Consumption of tobacco has changed from chewing tobacco and pipe smoking to smoking cigarettes; smokeless tobaccos are growing tremendously in popularity. The modern smoker is confronted with a highly engineered, complex composite of specially designed paper, tobacco, tobacco additives, and a panoply of filters, a far cry from the hollow reed Columbus saw. Tobacco has been glibly referred to as a form of revenge by native Indians. There is little similarity between ceremonial use of tobacco by the Indians and the robotic puffing of the modern smoker. The real culprit is the cigarette.