In 1493 AD, Rodrigo de Jerez, a shipmate of Christopher Columbus and Europe's first smoker, also became Europe's first target of anti-smoking sentiment.
Upon bringing his habit back to Spain, he was imprisoned by the Inquisition for roughly five years. The rest of Spain largely ignored his plight and, in a move that confounds DARE officers over 500 years later, began regularly lighting up before the end of the century.
As smoking spread, the rest of the Old World found it just as hard to beat the habit, despite a Papal injunction against it in 1600 along with some harsh words from King James I of England. Not to be outdone, Czar Michael Feodorovich of Russia punished smokers with (occasionally fatal) flogging, while India, Turkey and Persia skipped the lash and went straight for execution.
Given the ability of smoking to flourish in the face of such draconian measures, it might seem odd that, centuries later, many countries are having much better luck with fines, taxes and subway-sized photos of the prematurely wrinkled.
However, the steady decline of smokers among the general population in most western countries suggests the average person would rather be clamped in leg irons than made to look at recent photos of Nick Nolte.
The news is less positive in countries like China and India, where smoking rates have risen dramatically during the same period. The upshot is that the United States already has a stockpile of celebrity anti-smoking posters for every phase that Bollywood will hit in the next few decades.
Some of these countries are also experimenting with new versions of older tactics. Known as a global leader in other macabre practices, like caning, Singapore's government requires that all packs of cigarettes carry graphic images of diseased lungs and other organs, a strategy that may backfire with horror movie buffs and the generally morbid.
Alhough many individual bans are controversial, those who favor turning back the bulk of these regulations are dwindling in number. The basis for most of these anti-smoking laws is practical, scientifically sound and so frequently restated that public service announcements could simply feature U.S. Surgeon General Steven Galson hard at work jabbing underage smokers in the eye with a stick.
Even though few would mourn the fall of the tobacco industry or wax nostalgically about once passing a blackened, petrified lung around their fifth-grade classroom, voters and lawmakers will someday have to consider how far they intend to push restrictions on smoking.
Upon passing one of the world's toughest national bans several years ago, Ireland's prime minister envisioned a world where future generations will never know what it was like to work in an enclosed, smoke-filled environment.""
A loftier dream - and one better suited to the country that brought us leprechauns and banshees - would be the distant but implied goal of eventually phasing out the habit entirely. However, there might be danger in completely removing it from the public consciousness.
Just as those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, a society gone cold turkey is likely to be irritable, wired on six cups of black coffee and prime for a relapse.
At the very least, the United States might want to grant it the same regretful cultural significance as the Civil War or other unglamorous parts of the national heritage.
Some day in the distant future, elementary school students might be able to take field trips to historical smoking re-enactment sites, where part-time actors huddle around office water coolers or inside the bathroom of a Greyhound bus, pressing hollow paper cylinders to their lips and making a big show of coughing grotesquely.
""I bet you kids have never seen authentic Camel Cash,"" one of the re-enactors will say, passing around a faded stack of coupons.
The class will stare back, unenthused until he adjusts the dial on his voice box and continues in a robotic monotone, ""Now who wants to hold a tracheotomy ring?""
Having a case of the nic-fits? E-mail Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
