When it comes time to crunch the numbers, there's no plant that's been more devastating than tobacco. Swedish says it's been around for a long time — around 8,000 years. It was medicinal and religious, until Columbus came along and — just as he ruined so many other things — he totally ruined tobacco.

The news that it's bad for you isn't anything new. At the same time 17th century scientists were writing about the consequences of smoking and the addictive qualities, young US states were banning it in public places and in 1604, England's James I wrote (via WHO), "Smoking is a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless." Not long after, capitalism was getting into full swing. Pierre Lorillard founded his cigar- and snuff-making company in 1760, and the world didn't look back. By 1901, more than 3.5 billion cigarettes hit the streets in the U.S. alone.

In 2021, the CDC called smoking "the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States." They estimated about 14% of the population still smoked, and that 480,000 of those people would die each year. Look at the global picture, and the World Health Organization says that jumps to 7 million smokers who die annually, and another 1.2 million people who die from exposure to secondhand smoke.

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