Tobacco as a Medication?

Used since the dawn of mankind to treat different ailments, this plant has expanded its usefulness as a medication all around the globe

From the moment God Bayahamaco, according to Taino mythology, put tobacco in the hands of men, the plant has been used in many forms around the world, even as a medication –one of its commonest applications.

Since time immemorial, the plant has been used by a number of civilizations to treat a multitude of diseases, just like American Indians did. In addition to smoking tobacco, those Indians also eat, chew, inhale, lick and drink tobacco.

Thus, we find that Brazil’s Aracunas consume tobacco as part of their daily diet, while the Colombian Huitotos mix cassava juice and tobacco juice for a drink, or they simply lick it in a preparation of water and ash to make mate. Kogi, Ika and Sanka Indians make a concentrated paste they put on their teeth and gums to soothe pains in those areas.

However, this is nothing new because Aztecs used to blend tobacco leaves with lime to treat tumors, believed it was an efficient antidote against the bites of poisonous snakes, and pregnant women used to put leaves on their breasts to protect their offspring from getting ill.

Mayans used tobacco leaves to heal their wounds, a tradition that was eventually passed on to the European conquistadors. Even back in the 16th century, Pope Gregorio XIII was cured thanks to the application of the miraculous leaves.

Since then, tobacco has been applied in the Old World to cure scabies, toothaches, headaches and to make wounds heal, or just as a treatment against typhus, a very common disease in that part of the world.

A number of treaties and research studies were conducted from the 16th century on about this plant, like the one authored by Seville’s Nicolas Monardes in 1512, whose book, depicting the “huge virtues and miraculous effects of the tobacco shrub,” is penciled in as the first work ever published on the plant.

Its fame reached out to the European courts when Jean Nicot took the leaf to Portugal and France in the 16th century and presented it to Queen Catalina de Medici, who started consuming ground tobacco in an effort to heal her splitting headaches.

Yet it was Jose Nicotin, the French King’s ambassador to Portugal, who actually launched tobacco to stardom as a medicinal plant. Egged on by sheer curiosity, he made experimental use of tobacco to treat cancer, using the plant’s juice and a paste made of it for application on all kinds of ulcers, wounds, swellings and fistulas with amazing results.

That marked the entry of tobacco into Europe’s drug-making industry and other manufacturing sectors, like paints, cosmetics, pills, powders, syrups, rinses, ointments and other products that served to cure such ailments as constipations, skin rashes, broken bones, epilepsy, asthma and the plague.

Its medical uses became so widespread that even in 1635 a Paris bylaw banned anybody other than druggists to sell tobacco.

According to Cuba’s botanical sage Juan Tomas Roig, tobacco “is a narcotic, a laxative and an antiparasitic medication. It’s commonly used as an insecticide. Nicotine is its active component and is used to treat tetanus and bladder palsy in dosages of 1 to 10 drops. It can also be used in injections.”

Even today, Cimarron Tobacco (Nicotiana glauca Graham), a wild plant that grows along the coastlines, is used as a medication by Cuban peasants. They utilize the leaves to soothe hemorrhoids, apply it as cataplasm to cure rheumatic pains, and smear it in saliva to heal sores, swellings and burns.

“Tobacco’s medicinal uses were widely known in pre-Hispanic America, as old Mayan and Aztec codes have shown.”