(From a collection of essays “This Is Why The Aliens Don’t Visit”)

Imagine there’s a global black out. You fall off your bike, knock your head and when you wake up you reach for your smokes……but they’re not there?

Have you ever seen the film YESTERDAY? The main character, Jack Malik falls from his bike during a global blackout and bumps his head. When he awakes, the Beatles don’t exist. Nor do Oasis, Harry Potter, Coke or cigarettes. Some of us might get by without Harry Potter, but I wondered what people would do instead of smoking. Could talking become the new smoking?

“I’m just popping outside for a talk; do you want to join me?”

“OK, but just a short one as I’m trying to give up.”

Imagine sitting on a flight and the announcement comes over the public address system “Talking on this flight is strictly prohibited. Speech alarms have been fitted inside the toilets on this aircraft.

Australian pubs would, by law, have to provide external talking areas. Talking would not be allowed to be advertised on electronic or print media. Chain talkers would be able to buy masking tape patches to wear over their mouths and nicotine gum would be replaced by hush lozenges. I can imagine a couple laying back in their bed and having a chat after sex or a young teenager caught talking by his father; “Dad caught me talking and made me eat the entire dictionary.”
It’s a strange construct I know, perhaps more so than a world without The Beatles, but a world without smoking wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it? 

It was of course Christopher Columbus who were among the first Europeans to encounter tobacco in their travels to the Americas. According to The History of Tobacco, its first cultivation dates back to 6000 BCE, however it is not until around 1 BCE that indigenous Americans began smoking and using tobacco. I’m not sure what they did between 6000 BCE and 1 BCE; it seems an extraordinary long time between smokes. One can only imagine that the very ancient peoples of the Americas never stood downwind from a tobacco plant fire.


Tobacco’s journey from 1 BCE to the Malboro Man takes a long time to light up also. It takes another 1600 years until Columbus is introduced to it and brings home the first tobacco seeds and leaves. One of his crew members, Rodrigo de Jerez is locked up for smoking because he is beleived to be possessed by the devil. It makes one wonder if he was in fact smoking something else with his tobacco. 


In 1608 Japan bans smoking due to fears it may start fires begs the question, where were Japanese people smoking? Haystacks? Regardless of this ban, in Europe by 1614 there are 7,000 tobacco shops in England selling Virginian tobacco. In 1633 in Turkey, the death penalty is imposed for smoking which is kind of wasteful as the result of long-term smoking is an inevitable death penalty anyway. 


In 1924, Philip Morris introduced Marlboro as a cigarette for women, as “mild as May”. The great irony is that Marlboro would, by the late 1960s and 1970s, become synonymous with masculinity. 

The terrible health issues associated with smoking have been wafting over the heads of society for some time. Back in 1600, Chinese philosopher Fang Yizhi indicated that smoking for a long period “scorches the lung”. As discussed earlier in this article, it was certainly very dangerous to smoke in Turkey. 

Dr John Hill of England, in 1761, conducted the first study of tobacco, warning snuff users they risked nasal cancer and, on the continent, in Germany, pipe smokers were warned of the risk of lip cancer. It wasn’t until the 1930s that American doctors began linking tobacco use to lung cancer; many of them sitting behind desks with ash trays front and centre no doubt. And of course there’s the unoriginal story about how cigarettes caused the death of my grandfather – he was struck by a bus going to the shop to buy a packet. 

According to the WHO more than 8 million people die prematurely each year from tobacco use. Across the globe one in four adults smoke tobacco, particularly in South-East Asia, the Pacific Islands, and parts of Europe. While the lowest rates for adults smoking are in places like Peru (7.1%) Uganda (7.5%), Tanzania (9.35), New Zealand (12.2%), and, inspite of the risk of fire, Japan (19.2%). Changes in rules over the centuries now sees Turkey (30.5%) among one of the highest rates. *

In terms of dollars spent, some $872.2bn is generated by the cigarette industry, while the global economic cost of the impact on human health is $2 trillion per year – $242 for every person on the planet. 

It’s difficult to imagine, in my topsy-turvy world a speechless Columbus arriving in Americas and discovering the first evidence of language, discovering the indigenous peoples speaking a raft of languages that he would deliver to Queen Isabella. But you do wonder if the world would have been a better place if smoking didn’t exist and Columbus had returned from the Americas with a Thesaurus. 

*2023 data