Why Do Humans Smoke an Insecticide?

From 1915 until 1992, American stores sold nicotine to gardeners as a bug killer. Tobacco makes it for the same job, sending it up from the roots to poison the insects that chew its leaves. People have gone out of their way to get this plant for about 12,300 years, and today some 1.2 billion of us use it. What you'll find in this video: In 2004, Ian Baldwin's lab switched off more than 95 percent of the nicotine in coyote tobacco. Tobacco hornworms grew faster on those plants and chose them over normal ones. Before the Wishbone seeds turned up in Utah, the oldest trace of people using tobacco was nicotine in a pipe from Alabama about 3,300 years old. In Washington State, 8 of 12 old stone pipes and pipe fragments still held nicotine, and one pipe about 1,430 years old held a local kind of tobacco. King James I of England called smoking dangerous to the lungs in 1604. By July 1612, John Rolfe was growing the milder Nicotiana tabacum in Virginia from seeds that came from Trinidad and Caracas, because nobody in England would pay much for the harsh local kind. Virginia sent 20,000 pounds of tobacco to England in 1617, and by 1700 it was shipping about 22 million pounds a year. By law, a Church of England minister in the colony earned 16,000 pounds of tobacco a year as his salary. James Bonsack's cigarette machine, patented in 1881, rolled more than 133 cigarettes a minute, about what a skilled worker managed by hand in an hour. In January 1954 the tobacco companies ran a full-page ad in 448 newspapers, reaching an estimated 43 million Americans, saying they believed their products were not injurious to health. In 1965, 42.4 percent of American adults smoked cigarettes. By 2023 it was about 11 percent. What do you think people a hundred years from now will find as strange as almost twelve cigarettes a day? Leave your guess in the comments. If the video was worth your time, a like helps other people find it, and you can subscribe so the next one reaches you. 0:00 Duck bones and tobacco seeds 1:40 Why tobacco makes nicotine 4:48 Wishbone and the oldest pipes 7:19 Where cigarette tobacco came from 8:38 Europe meets the leaf 10:51 Paid in tobacco 12:52 133 cigarettes a minute 14:04 The evidence on lung cancer 16:45 Why it held on so long Everything in this video comes from open sources. Treat it as a starting point rather than the final word. Figures get revised and studies get challenged, and we make mistakes like anyone else. Always check the facts for yourself before you rely on them or pass them on. #tobacco #smoking #why