I was watching a documentary about the european explorers meeting native americans, and it implied that the europeans were unfamiliar not just with the tobacco the natives smoked, but with the act of smoking anything.
That got me thinking… Has smoking anything other than tobacco or marijuana even been popular?
I know some people today smoke opium or crack. I’ve also noticed that headshops etc, sometimes sell various herbal mixtures. But as far as I know, none of these substances have ever become popular and socially acceptable. (Though I’m not sure what the status of opium was prior to modern drug laws).
Opium was smiled upon by the authorities in Victorian times, because it made people happy and docile, as opposed to alcohol, which provoked brawling and disorder.
The UCLA folk medicine archives mentions smoking catnip (for quinsy); coltsfoot (bronchitis); mullein leaves (for asthma, cattarh); horehound leaves (asthma); jimson weed (for asthma); marijuana (for headache); rabbit tobacco (for blindness); sheep sorrel (asthma); tea-of-everlasting-life / life-everlasting (for colds). There’s a lot more, but it’s hard to tell if most of the plants are smoked, or if the smoke from burning plants is just inhaled.
Based on the variety of things smoked in traditional folk medicine, I suspect that smoking things may pre-date tobacco, but as medicine rather that recreation or spiritual act. I don’t have any data to support that, though.
When I was in high school an E. Indian kid had a cigarette called a “bidi” (sp) that wasn’t clove cigs but something else that seemed to work fairly well if you were out of Marlboros.
Also, I used to smoke dried maple leaves when I was a kid. The only thing good about it was it felt like you were getting away with something you shouldn’t be doing.
Kinnikinnik (Algonquian for ‘item for mixing in’) is the leaves of Arctostaphylos uva-ursi mixed with other herbs such as the bark of Cornus stolonifera, and sometimes tobacco. It was the usual smoke of American Indians.
(I know it’s usually spelled “kinnikinnick,” but I prefer the alternate spelling kinnikinnik because that’s the longest single-word palindrome in the English language.)
I was in a bar once that rented out hookahs with some kind of flavored smokable that didn’t seem to be tobacco and certainly wasn’t anything illegal.
I think there’s an East African weed called Qat that enjoyed some popularity among American servicemen during the Somali incursion. Astonishingly, the vice did not follow them home in any major sort of way.
For a time recreational opium smoking was very popular in China. The Chinese got it to catch on in North America and France, and to a lesser extent Britain. (according to the Wiki, writers and journalists in London heavily sensationalized the iniquity of the opium dens there, but it wasn’t really as prevalent as they would have had the public believe)
