Zimmermann co-authors chapter about tobacco’s history and Indigenous heritage

How did a plant revered as a sacred medicine by Indigenous peoples across the Americas become one of the leading causes of death in contemporary society?

Mario Zimmermann, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Anthropology, and his co-author Shannon Tushingham answer this question in a chapter of the book "Tobacco Through Time: Interdisciplinary Perspectives."

"Tobacco Through Time" delves into the historical journey of tobacco, including both its profound cultural significance and its troubling evolution into a global health crisis. The book points out that much of tobacco research has been Eurocentric and focused primarily on recent post-colonial history. This narrow focus has often obscured the deep time history of humanity's interactions with tobacco, which spans thousands of years prior to the colonization of the Americas.

At the time of European contact, tobacco was likely the most widely used psychoactive plant across the continent. Its utilization spanned diverse ecological regions, with farming societies cultivating domesticated species (N. rustica and N. tabacum), while hunting-gathering communities harvested their "wild" counterparts.

The various species of tobacco were ingested through multiple means -smoking (in pipes, cigars and reed "cigarettes"), snuffing,
chewing, drinking and by enema - with each practice embedded within specific spiritual and healing traditions. This widespread use reflects tobacco's profound cultural significance, and its sacred relationship continues among many Indigenous peoples today, even as commercial tobacco has dramatically altered its role in global society. The scale of this transformation is stark. Today, nicotine dependence affects over 1.1 billion people worldwide (WHO 2022), making tobacco use the leading cause of preventable death globally. How did we get to this place, and how can we better address the global health impacts of tobacco?

In the book chapter, Zimmerman and Tushingham argue that a deep time understanding of human-tobacco co-evolution is essential to developing more effective approaches to addressing nicotine addiction and its devastating global health impacts.

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