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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9809698" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading King James I of England's 1604 treatise, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco" target="_blank">A Counterblaste to Tobacco</a>, and found it quite entertaining.This is the second publication of King James that I've read through, <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/what-are-you-reading-in-2024.701874/post-9294720" target="_blank">having previously</a> partaken of the Basilikon Doron. But unlike that work, which was meant for his son and not intended for publication, this was (I'm given to understand) a pamphlet that was always meant to be read by the public at large.As the Wikipedia page notes, this was one of the first anti-smoking publications; perhaps even more surprisingly, it presents a lot of the same messages that we'd see in the latter half of the twentieth century, citing things such as public health, foul odors, and decries spurious ideas that smoking could be beneficial. More impressively, the health concerns actually talk about addiction (albeit without ever using that word), bemoaning those who "lust" after tobacco the way a lush does for alcohol.Of course, this being from the early seventeenth century, it's not all forward-thinking, as there's also a section which asserts that no habit borne of the Indians (smoking having only come to Europe roughly a century before, having been brought by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_de_Jerez" target="_blank">Rodrigo de Jerez</a> when Columbus returned from his initial voyage across the Atlantic), a people who "denie [sic] God and adore the Devill [sic]", could be a boon to the pious people of England.It's notable that for all his disapproval, James didn't see fit to make tobacco contraband, insisting that "there some sorts of abuses in Commonwealths, that though they be of so base and contemptible a condition, [...] are too low for the Law to looke on." Instead, he issued a fairly heavy tax on the stuff, the brief proclamation of which I also read.Of course, as the Wikipedia page notes, James would change his mind twenty years later, when he realized how much money there was to be made from the stuff (since his pamphlet apparently failed to shame people out of wanting the stuff). As they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.</blockquote>

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