No More Puffs
Zulema Torres
November 19, 2009
For ENGL 111, Fall 2009
New Mexico State University
Niki Mott, Instructor
When people pick up a cigarette for the first time they probably don’t think about the consequences of smoking. They just light up and start using this product, without realizing that this can potentially endanger their health and possibly even kill them. So why aren’t cigarettes illegal even though they are dangerous to people? The tobacco industry is vicious and cruel because they know the damage they are causing to their customers yet they continue to produce this product. It is time that they have more regulations because what they are doing is causing so much damage to so many people.
Where did tobacco originate from? Who were the first people to ever smoke? According to the book Smoke: A Global History of Smoking:
On November 6 1492 two members of Columbus’s crew returned from their adventures in the interior of Cuba. They reported an encounter with the natives in which they had smoked dried leaves like those that Columbus had been offered as a present a month earlier, on October 15 1492. Luis de Torres and Rodrigo de Jerez, in inhaling the smoke from these burning leaves, became the first Europeans to smoke tobacco. This marked the beginning of a series of encounters between the two cultures of smoking.
According to Gilman, in the book Smoke A global history of smoking: “The plant where they smoked tobacco from was called Nicotiana tabacum. This plant was grown in the upper half of South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The Spaniards though, misunderstood and named it tabaco, which was actually the tube or pipe in which the Indians smoked the plant. The plant was already widely cultivated throughout the Americas, from Northern Mexico to southern Canada in the form of Nicotine rustica”. The plant had been smoked as part of ritual practices in North and South America well before it began to be cultivated, during...