Tobacco: Smokeless
Since tobacco is a plant native to the New World, Native Americans were the first to use it. In addition to smoking it, they used it in smokeless forms—mainly chewing it, making teas and drinks from it, even using the ash in rituals that ranged from South America to Central America and the Caribbean to North America. It was used along with many other plants for both ritual and medicinal purposes.
The use of tobacco was brought to Europe by Columbus and other explorers, where it was taken up for recreation in both the smoked form (cigars and pipes) and the smokeless. Smokeless tobacco (ST) became popular in British society in the practice called sniffing, but British colonists in the Americas preferred to chewtobacco or use snuff. In the 1800s, chewing tobacco was widespread in the United States; its use decreased, however, when the spitting that resulted (into spittoons or cuspidors or wherever the spit fell) was linked to the spread of tuberculosis, one of the most dreaded and fatal of diseases. In addition, the mass production of machine-rolled cigarettes further decreased smokeless tobacco consumption. Around 1900, 52 percent of all tobacco used was smokeless; by 1952, that number had dropped to 6 percent (Lewis, Harrell, Deng, & Bradley, 1999).
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