Solanaceae
Nicotiana tabacum
Tobacco
- Part used
- leaf
- Native range
- A cultigen of South American origin, probably a hybrid; not known in the wild
- Morphology
- A tall sticky annual to two metres with very large soft leaves and pink trumpet flowers. Every part is coated in glandular hairs.
What is in it
Evidence
No supported medicinal use. Nicotine has legitimate pharmaceutical use in smoking cessation, which is a statement about the isolated compound delivered at a controlled dose.
Safety
The most lethal plant in this collection by an enormous margin. Tobacco smoking kills on the order of eight million people a year worldwide. Nicotine itself is acutely toxic — green tobacco sickness from handling wet leaves is an occupational illness of harvest workers, and ingestion of leaf or of concentrated liquid nicotine can be fatal, particularly in children.
Interactions: Smoking induces CYP1A2, lowering levels of clozapine, olanzapine, theophylline and others — a clinically important and frequently missed effect on cessation
Regulatory: Heavily regulated as a consumer product. Not a permitted medicine ingredient.
Historical use
Used ceremonially and medicinally across the Americas for millennia — as offering, as a shamanic plant in Amazonian practice, and in a great many ritual contexts distinct from recreational smoking. Carried to Europe in the sixteenth century and promoted there, initially, as a medicine for almost everything.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
What it is taken for, and who says so
Not sold as a remedy. It is used ceremonially across the Americas, and it remains the leading preventable cause of death worldwide.
Recorded because it is what people believe, not because it is what the plant does. Whether any of it holds up is the Evidence section above, and the two frequently disagree. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the plant doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Worth knowing
Tobacco belongs in any honest materia medica, and it settles an argument this section keeps having.
It has a genuine, ancient, ceremonial and medicinal record across the Americas. It was promoted in sixteenth-century Europe as a panacea, with serious physicians writing at length in its favour. It is a natural plant remedy with a documented traditional pedigree stretching back thousands of years.
It also kills around eight million people a year.
Any framework in which "traditional" or "natural" carries an implication of safety has to account for that, and none of them can. The Amazonian ceremonial use of tobacco and the industrial cigarette are not the same practice — but they are unambiguously the same plant.
One thing worth knowing clinically: smoking induces the enzyme that clears clozapine and olanzapine. A patient stabilised on either who stops smoking can move into toxicity within days without changing their dose.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.