Ellen J. Meany
Tobacco is a solanaceae, a member of the nightshade family; its siblings include potatoes, chili peppers, tomatoes, eggplant and petunias. When consumed in a variety of quantities and under differing conditions, these plants can function as anything from a stimulant, to a mild narcotic, to a deadly poison.
Tobacco, like the potato, is native to the Americas; cultivation most likely originated in Peru. It was introduced in Europe by the Portuguese and Spanish; imperial Spain made more money from New World tobacco than it ever made in gold.
Iain Gately, in his 2003 opus Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World, tells how in South American societies "tobacco was sniffed, chewed, eaten, drunk, smeared over bodies, used in eye drops and enemas, and smoked," mostly as a medicine by shamans and witch doctors.
French nobleman Jean Nicot, in the mid-1500s, made a gift of some powdered tobacco to his queen, Catherine de Medici, to alleviate her migraines. Nicot popularized the notion that tobacco was a powerful drug, able to comfort and cure. Snuff hit the big time, and an addictive drug is now named in his honor: nicotine.
In America, the plant was classified as a pharmaceutical until 1905, when the, uh, forward-thinking tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke successfully lobbied to have it removed from the official U.S. Pharmacopeia. This was just ahead of the formation, in 1906, of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, charged with regulating everything listed in it.
Remarkably, this didn't change until last year, when a Democratic Congress passed a law giving the FDA regulatory control over tobacco. President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in June 2009.
Tobacco's fortunes have been further affected by vast reductions in smoking rates in the U.S. over the last 20 years. This has been spurred by the tobacco control movement, including comprehensive indoor smoking bans enacted by the city of Madison in 2005 and the state of Wisconsin in 2010. But smoking rates remain high in China and other industrialized countries, and this vast market, far bigger than the U.S., is the clear future of the cigarette biz. Sweden is currently pushing for a more open market for snus (small sachets of tobacco, a no-spit option) in the European Union.
But there are other possibilities. Just this year, researchers at Jefferson University in Philadelphia developed a method to increase the oil content in the leaves and seeds through genetic modification. This could make tobacco more attractive for use in biofuels.
Dane County tobacco farmer Eric Stokstad is skeptical, noting that this could require large amounts of petrochemical-based fertilizers. (A much better though currently prohibited biofuel plant is industrial hemp, which typically requires no herbicides, pesticides or fungicides.)
In Vernon County, where the total tobacco base once topped 47,000 acres, UW-Extension agent Tim Rehbein has helped farmers find other high-value crops to replace it. One that's been especially lucrative is grapes.
"I thought it would take 10 years before we saw a winery," he told the Vernon County Broadcaster in 2007, but it happened "much sooner than expected." Rehbein helped get the region designated part of the Upper Mississippi River Valley Viticultural Area, approved by the federal government in July 2009.
Perhaps a more promising path for tobacco leads back to its ancient roots as a medicine. Nicotine has been shown to reverse memory loss in lab animals, though initial studies testing nicotine for treatment or prevention of Alzheimer's disease in humans went nowhere.
And researchers in India have patented a tobacco extract for use in cardiac drugs, anti-ulcer drugs and, ironically, anti-cancer drugs.