The dried leaf of a New World plant, smoked or chewed for the addictive drug nicotine, tobacco became one of the first truly global commodities and the founding cash crop of English America. It bound colonial Virginia to enslaved labor, then, refined into the mass-produced cigarette, caused the deadliest consumer-product epidemic in history — a death toll the industry spent decades denying.
A pleasure plant became the largest avoidable killer of the modern age. Tobacco spread around the world faster than almost anything before it, made colonial Virginia rich on the backs of enslaved people, and then, packed into cheap cigarettes, killed more than 100 million people in the twentieth century and still kills millions each year. For decades the companies that sold it knew the science and paid to hide it. Few ordinary habits have been so deliberately defended against the truth.