[Sca-cooks] : Drugs and tobacco

Lilinah lilinah at earthlink.net
Mon Mar 3 16:24:14 PST 2008


Suey wrote:
>Conversing with friends we tried to remember when drugs and tobacco
>entered Europe. We recalled that the first Duchess of Alba, in her own
>right - Goya's maja -, took some kind of powder or snuff, a drug from
>Mexico which could have caused her premature death at the turn of the
>19th century. An Italian friend related his father smoked tobacco
>leaves without paper in the 20th century. Today's conversation turned
>into a void as we have no references between the 16th and the 19th C so
>to speak, off hand.

Can't give you an exact source, but there were broadsides and sermons 
condemning the use of tobacco in 16th C. England, especially the 2nd 
half. Smoking tobacco was often called "drinking tobacco" because 
inhaling the smoke was considered to be a form of drinking. At this 
point the smoking was via pipe.

The end of each verse of one, which has nothing nice to say about tobacco, is
"Thus think, and drink tobacco"

It equates the ash of the burning tobacco with the ashes one will 
become at death.

IIRC the colony that was to become the state of Virginia was a source 
of cultivated tobacco imported to England.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilinah



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