The First Anti-Smoking Campaign?: James VI of Scotland/I of England’s “A Counterblaste to Tobacco”

The First Anti-Smoking Campaign?: James VI of Scotland/I of England’s “A Counterblaste to Tobacco”

King James, who lived from 1566 to 1625, had a lot of surprisingly progressive views for his time. These ideas ranged from his successful peacemaking policy with Spain, to his less popular policy of religious tolerance and equality. However, one opinion James held that was centuries ahead of its time was that smoking was terrible for your health.

A philosopher-king who dedicated much of his free time to reading and writing, James was alarmed at the new trend of smoking tobacco imported from the colonies in America.

In 1604, he wrote the passionate ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, implying not only that it could kill you, but that it could lead to your eternal damnation. He wrote that smoking is “lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse”, or, hell.

While the idea that smoking will send you to hell is more questionable, James’ theory that smoking was dangerous to lungs would be proven more than three-hundred years later, when it was discovered that smoking increased your risk of developing lung cancer.

Sadly, James either changed his mind or wasn’t quite as principled as he was prescient, because by the end of his reign he had established a royal monopoly on the tobacco crop. This meant he would be sole profiteer of the substance he called “the stinking Suffumigation”.

(Pictured: James I by John de Critz, 1605)