Right Relation to Tobacco: De-commercialization and Reverence

The much-maligned plant tobacco has been exploited to kill more people than any other plant, with yearly tobacco deaths exceeding eight million globally, or in ten years killing more people than in World War II. Tobacco counts among the poisons of the world, like opium, those plants made into alcohol, coca, and other drugs that have been extracted and impelled into addictive economies based on dependency. Yet, for indigenous peoples with many millennia of relationship with tobacco, the herb is regarded as a sacrament, a reminder of humility, a source of connection with communities beyond oneself. Juxtaposing traditional versus colonial tobacco use, I locate biocultural mechanisms which have led to such divergent human and ecological impacts of collaborating with versus instrumentalizing this plant. Sharing my personal history with tobacco as both a tobacco control researcher and a student of indigenous tobacco ways, I explore how tobacco can be understood as a metonymic plant for critical plant studies and human relations with the wider plant world through invoking the hermeneutic aspect of the medical and alchemical pharmakon. I interpret the pharmakon as a general framework for investigating onto-ethical-epistemological vegetalities.