Negative Space: tobacco
- American Indian Myths and Legends
- Tobacco and peyote were ritual drugs for tribes that had access to them. Their legends tell of the discovery of rites that made the drugs more useful for insight and medicine.
- Big Business vs. Public Health: The Cigarette Dilemma
- Elizabeth M. Whelan writes about the dangers of tobacco compared to milder drugs such as heroin in USA Today, May 1984, pp. 61-66.
- Methods of Tobacco Use in South America
- In ritualistic use, tobacco was consumed in quantities large enough to cause hallucinations. The most common method of use was some form of smoking. Among some cultures, tobacco use replaced coca use.
- Pharmacology of South American Tobacco Use
- Nicotine is generally considered the main, if not only, drug in tobacco. It is a powerful chemical, with enough nicotine in the average cigar to kill two people. Topically, it can act as an analgesic.
- The Sacred Weed
- Tobacco was a “sacred weed”, “meant to be shared.” This Blackfoot story “retold from several nineteenth-century sources” tells of how to plant “in a sacred manner”.
- Stimulants
- Caffeine occurs in many plants, but it has its strongest effect in coffee.
- Tobacco
- Rulers punished smokers with beheadings, mutliation, and the most painful of deaths. Yet, in the end, tobacco use continued.
- Tobacco and Shamanism in South America
- Johannes Wilbert summarizes methods of tobacco use in South America, European perception of tobacco use in South America, and likely actual use, from historical documents and modern ethnography.
- Tobacco Shamanism
- Tobacco use as part of shamanism appears to have followed horticulture, and tribes that relied on farming also recognized tobacco as a powerful insecticide. It is used both to rid plants of vermin and to cure humans of, for example, intestinal worms, a practice that Europeans also adopted.
- Wild and Cultivated Nicotianas
- Tobacco most likely originated in South America, but even before Europeans began spreading it across the world it had traveled throughout the Americas and even to Australia and Africa, though these species may not have had a high nicotine content.
- The World’s Oldest On-Going Protest Demonstration: North American Indian Drinking Patterns
- Nancy Oestreich Lurie compares European use of tobacco with Native American use of alcohol.
More Information
- Tobacco and Shamanism in South America•
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This fascinating book covers the use of tobacco for religious purposes throughout hundreds of tribes in South American. It’s a fun read for the layman and a resource for scholars.
