"You Breathe In The Smoke?"
"Tobacco" was a big hit when it first reached London, and, within a decade, had become a craze across Europe. Familiar with the corporate industry of today, which needs to massively advertise to make people even try tobacco, any fair minded observer must ask: why was it so immediately popular?

As every Englishman learns in school, when Sir Walter Raleigh was presented to Queen Elizabeth on his return from America, she enquired what fine delicacy he'd brought this time. Little impressed when he replied "Tobacco, Your Highness!", she was even less impressed when he produced some "dried leaves."

But it was when he explained that you had to burn it that the monarch was less than amused: "You mean to set fire the very gift you brought your queen from across the Great Ocean?!" she exclaimed. The last reported line of this royal dialogue is a shocked "You... you breathe in the smoke, Sir Walter?!!!!" Finally the queen is reported to have tried "tobacco" and "liked" it.

Now; if it had actually been what's today called "tobacco", and she was already so shocked by the whole idea of inhaling smoke, she'd have been seriously sick! Certainly she would not have "liked" it. That Queen Elizabeth liked "tobacco," strongly suggests she loved it - she got high.

The "Tobacconists"
Soon after the arrival of "tobacco" in London, a group of the sons of the nobility used to meet regularly to smoke "tobacco", calling themselves "The Tobacconists," writing poetry and getting up to "all manner of debaucheries", or so the enraged fathers claimed when scandal hit and the meetings were finally banned. This sounds curiously like Beaudelaire's Hashishins in 1920s' Paris.

If the Sitting Bull Theory is correct, at some point the "good stuff" was taken out, but whether by an overzealous customs officer ("The green stuff is banned, but the brown stuff is still okay, sir") or whether "tobacco" remained "a most interesting mixture" until very much later is still unclear. Perhaps "special mixture" was a later advertising ploy.

The Pipe of Peace
The first report of "tobacco" being smoked is by Columbus himself, in 1492, on Guahani Island in the Bahamas. The natives were smoking cigars of maize leaves filled with herbs which they called "tobaccos". If you've never tried it, you might be stimulated to know they were inhaling it through their noses.

Columbus later recorded that it was actually their pipes the Indians called "tabacos", and this seems the most likely.

The hundreds of different Indian tribes of South and North America digested all sorts of herbal mixes - by smoking in cigars, in pipes, through their noses, as drinks and as snuffs. As for the content in their "tobacco", the Spaniards arriving in Mexico in 1519 recorded "tobacco" smoking, "with fragrant resins and herbs". Other established smoking mixtures included Aristolelia, Maqui, Calafate wood shavings, Guevara Silva and many other plants.

Here's Aguilar's description of the Aztec king Montezuma's dinner aperitif: "They also placed on the table 3 tubes, much painted and guilded, in which they put liquid amber mixed with some herbs which they called tobacco." Beginning to get the picture?

Did Someone Put Marijuana in the Peace Pipe?
Though most anthropologists claim that the white man introduced hemp to America (specifically the Cannabis Indica plant) the Hippies might still be correct in that a local marijuana-type could have been used.

"Not many people know that under the name of Marijuana a very different product is hidden, the resin from a plant almost identical with Cannabis Indica called Urticacea. No narcotic in the world is as available to the common man as this substance." Magische Gifte (1938) by Prof. Victor A Reko, a member of the Academy of Sciences in Mexico.

But we're not finished yet!
1200 year old snuffs from mummy bundles found in Northern Chile contained entheogenic tryptamines. And in the 1950s Stronberg and others established that the active agents of one popular snuff, Cohoba, also often smoked, were "short acting tryptamines, especially NN-dimethyltryptamine." That's DMT!

Sitting Bull, Queen Elizabeth, the early upper class European aficionados, even your grandfather, depending where they'd scored this month, could have been smoking marijuana, DMT, coca or damn near anything else!