Can you imagine having to undergo the inquisition just because you smoked? Me either. Being a smoker myself, I'll admit that I do get some nasty looks from time to time from the non-smoking set, but so far they haven't sent me to jail for it. Maybe I'm just lucky, who knows?
When Smoking Was A Sign Of Demon Possession
While tobacco is an extremely popular drug all over the world today, it did not enjoy an easy introduction to Europe. The first European smoker was perceived to be possessed by the devil and received jail time for his crime. And he fared much better than many.When Christopher Columbus famously accidentally discovered the American landmasses in 1492, he brought home plenty of slaves and native goods. One of those goods was a supply of tobacco which the natives had been smoking since, by some estimations, the time of Christ. The first one to sample smoking the new product was an a sailor named Rodrigo de Jerez.
Smoking turned out to be bad for de Jerez in a manner unrelated to his health when he got to his hometown of Ayamote, Spain. When people saw smoke exiting his nose and mouth, they concluded that it was evidence that he was possessed by Satan. So Rodrigo wasn’t just arrested, he was taken before an inquisition. He spent seven years in prison and when he reentered society it was one that had seemingly well-embraced smoking.
As infuriating as it might have been to know he was jailed for doing something that both quickly became not only legal but popular, he actually was a fairly lucky smoker. For centuries, absurdly oppressive laws would be made to attempt to abolish the horrid smoking habit. In Great Britain, tariffs were passed and King James I personally wrote pamphlets in 1601 claiming that smoking, among other things, caused brain damage. He forbade its growth in Britain and tried to make it prohibitively expensive to tariff (a measure overruled by Parliament since it was such a vital crop for His Majesty’s American Colonies). Pope Urban VIII let it be known in 1642 that he would excommunicate any Catholic that used tobacco or snuff in a church or other holy place. In Russia, a law was passed in 1634 which made smoking punishable by whipping and nostril slitting.
For all that, it was in China and Turkey where the measures went the farthest. In 1638, the Chinese government made being in possession of tobacco punishable by death by beheading. In Turkey, however, the extremist anti-tobacco Sultan Murad IV made smoking the weed punishable by hanging, beheading, or starvation and then added the seizure of all property on top of that. Such was the degree of his craze to stamp out the demon weed that he would disguise himself and visit cafes to personally scout out smokers to have killed and their families ruined. As if that wasn’t enough, he would then order the businesses where the smoking had taken place destroyed. Part of the reason behind Murad’s anti-tobacco crusade seems to be that a horrible fire broke out in Constantinople during celebrations for the birth of his son during his reign, although there was hardly proof that smokers were responsible for it.
Many of these draconian laws were repealed within a generation because smoking was so profitable to tax and because smokers like Peter the Great of Russia ascended to power. There are certain similarities between this controversy and the one that, as of 2014, continues to surround the drug marijuana. Perish the thought that someone gets their nostrils slit for lighting a blunt.
I can just imagine what would happen if some of these anti-smoking groups were alive today! Talk about having a back up in the court system!
Coffee out on the patio today. Be warned, this is a "smoking allowed" patio!
6 comments:
I smoked for over 30 years until they found what the Drs were sure was cancer in my lungs in Nov. of 05. A biopsy proved it was sarcoidosis instead, a very unpleasent disease, but at least i'm alive to complain...Thank the Lord....I'll see everyone on the patio :))
Government likes the tax money the sales bring in - Even those electric cigarettes are taxed. I think NY has the highest tax on them
Can't see our Government ever banning smoking just raising the tax on it until no one can afford to smoke. The tax on "all" cigarettes is just too good to pass up. See y'all on the patio.
I'm glad I quit when I couldn't afford to buy them anymore back in 07. Some people claim all kinds of feel betters about it. I gained lots of weight and all I got out of it was not smelling like a dirty ashtray. But that's as good as anything else I think.
I quit quite a few years ago. So glad I did. It was a lot harder to stop the Copenhagen snuff. Not only was it a source of nicotine, since I didn't spit, it was a laxative, too.
Now I was always taught to be kind to smokers . . . as it's good to be kind to the dying. :)
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