This is the River Clyde in Glasgow.
250 years ago, this was one of Britain's great trading centres.
It was the hub of a huge empire
that stretched from the Caribbean to China...
..an empire founded on trade,
in which simple plants were transformed by human labour
to become hugely profitable global commodities.
The trade in sugar...
tobacco...
..opium...
and whisky
transformed our society, our bodies, and our minds.
Over the centuries, we've learned to love these products -
their smell, their taste, the effect they've had on us.
They've become increasingly guilty pleasures...
..which are still with us, still part of us.
Today, millions of us can't do without at least some of them.
So how did we become so hooked?
'The answer will take me on a journey across the world...'
Oh, my God! That's powerful.
'..and inside our minds and bodies too...'
Bye!
HE LAUGHS
Gosh, that's good, isn't it?!
'..in the pursuit of pleasure.'
My name is Brian Cox and I am not a smoker,
which is something of a miracle,
considering when I was growing up
in this very close on the streets of Dundee,
when I was a teenager, I was surrounded by tobacco.
It was everywhere,
it was after me, and in those days, everyone seemed to smoke,
my own family, my own close relationships.
We were like some kind of tobacco test-bed,
some sort of industrial demonstration
of all the different ways in which tobacco could be consumed.
I mean, I had relatives who smoked cigarettes, who smoked pipes,
who chewed tobacco and snorted snuff.
I mean, it went everywhere.
I mean, the bus... In the bus, it stank of smoke.
I mean, I could smell it, smell it all over my clothes...
Everywhere, particularly on the top floor of the buses,
which is where every kid wanted to sit.
And if I went to the local cinema, I mean, everybody smoked -
off-screen, of course, in the audience,
and if you could see what was on-screen through the smoky fug,
there they were. Bogart smoked, Bacall smoked...
I mean, cigarettes... Cigarettes were glamorous, cigarettes were...
They were a shorthand for sex.
I mean, cigarettes were what the movies allowed INSTEAD of sex.
Everywhere, ads for sophisticated cigarettes,
ads for manly cigarettes,
ads for cigarettes that were ladylike,
cigarettes that were cheap, posh, filtered, Black Cat, Turkish...
Black Cat, the cigarette for smokers suffering from bronchitis.
How did we get there
from a plant closely related to the potato?
And why don't I smoke?
THUNDERCLAP
FLIES BUZZ
THUNDERCLAP
RHYTHMIC CHANTING
On the 11th of October, 1492,
on a Caribbean island that no European had ever seen before,
Christopher Columbus carried out one of history's
most baffling and pointless transactions.
He and his landing party had met some natives
who were blissfully unaware
that Columbus had renamed their island San Salvador,
and had claimed it on behalf of the Spanish monarchy.
The natives gave Columbus beads, fruit and some dried leaves.
In return, Columbus gave them a pair of red hats.
The beads and the fruit needed no explanation.
The leaves were just confusing.
Columbus had them thrown overboard, and sailed on.
What the natives did with the red hats
is not recorded.
And it wasn't just the leaves.
Geography was confusing too.
Columbus thought he was here, or hereabouts,
near China.
Actually, he was here, on the other side of the world,
amongst the islands of the Caribbean,
near to his next discovery.
We should forgive Columbus for being bad at navigation.
After all, no-one else was any better.
Yet, when his ships arrived
at what we now know as the island of Cuba,
Columbus, still thinking he was near China,
sent two members of the crew ashore with letters for the Chinese Khan.
When they returned,
it was to report that the Great Khan was nowhere to be found,
but they had met several more natives on the road
with some more of those mysterious dried leaves,
and these natives had rolled the leaves into tubes,
lit them, sucked them,
inhaling the smoky fumes.
The two men had tried some and liked it.
It filled them with a sense of energy, wellbeing.
Tobacco, the natives called it.
At least, that's the word Columbus's men had heard.
The name stuck.
And so did the habit.
What Columbus's men had seen and smoked
was a kind of tobacco as domesticated as any dog.
It only survives as a pure strain through cultivation,
and archaeologists have traced its cultivation
all the way back to the highlands of Peru in 2000BC.
It's part of a plant family, the nightshades,
that includes deadly poisons, spicy peppers, chillies,
aubergines and potatoes.
From Peru, it had spread throughout the Northern and Southern Americas,
and crossed the sea to Cuba with the Native American tribe
that Columbus would have called the Caribs.
In common with all other Native Americans,
the Caribs believed that the gods had made tobacco
as the very first step in the creation of the whole world.
When people were given the plant, they were given a holy herb,
and they had to treat it in a way to communicate with the gods.
And the only people who understood this relationship were the shamans,
who consumed this stuff in vast quantities,
in order to get, we would now say, as high as possible,
in order to see through into the supernatural world, OK?
So, if you were ill, right, you'd go to the shaman,
the shaman would smoke up to... until his eyeballs fell out,
and then he'd tell you what your problem is,
and if it turned out to be, he said,
that a malevolent force has put something in your body
that's making you feel pain here,
he would blow tobacco around the area
and then suck up into his body the offending item,
and then the offending item would disappear in the shaman's body
because he's now got supernatural powers.
Smoking soon became common among the Spanish colonists.
They even smoked during Mass.
Their priest disapproved of what was clearly a vice,
and told them to stop.
The smokers replied that it was not in their power to do so.
There was something mysterious going on.
Tobacco had its hooks in them.
They were addicted, but to what?
300 years later, an Italian scientist
would extract what he described as tobacco's essential oil - nicotine.
But it's only recently that science has begun to understand its power.
What happens when we smoke?
You inhale this burning leaf,
which contains nicotine and other things,
into the lungs, into the blood, into the brain,
and then it really seems to target this part of the brain here,
this part of the brain we call the striatum,
and I'll just show you an image of this here
because it illustrates very well.
This is an image of the human brain showing dopamine,
where the dopamine receptors in the brain are.
Dopamine does what, exactly?
Dopamine is the get-up-and-go transmitter.
If you don't have any dopamine, then you can't move,
you have Parkinson's disease, you can be completely immobile,
and what nicotine does is promote the function of dopamine here,
so it gives people who perhaps don't have enough dopamine a little bit extra,
to keep them functioning and thinking and feeling optimally.
And I'll just show you this next image.
We've done our own research on this and we've shown that, basically,
when people are smoking, the more happy they are
is associated with having more dopamine,
and the ones who have less dopamine are less happy,
so I think dopamine is involved in keeping your sense of well-being, and you...
So it's like an anti-depressant in some kind of way?
It is, actually. Absolutely. It's interesting.
This image here shows that what smoking does
is actually block one of the enzymes in the brain
that some anti-depressants block too.
16th-century smokers didn't know
that nicotine was the source of tobacco's addictive power...
..didn't know that nicotine,
by increasing the amount of dopamine in their brains,
made their brains more efficient,
or that it amplified the pleasure they took in almost everything else.
The nature of tobacco's power was hidden from them...
..but impossible to ignore.
For instance, it clearly suppressed the appetite...
..a cure for the sin of gluttony.
For several people who studied it,
this power qualified it as a medicine.
One Spanish doctor declared tobacco to be a cure for
rottenness of the mouth and for them that are short of wind,
an effective cure for any illness of any internal organ,
for bad breath,
especially in children who have eaten too much meat,
for kidney stones, tapeworms,
wounds from poison arrows, and...
tiger bites.
Tobacco spread rapidly.
There were smokers in England by 1571.
Some of them were household names -
Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh.
They sold tobacco as well as smoking it.
Their only source of tobacco was Spanish suppliers
who had grown it in their New World plantations.
Fools paid for it.
Drake and Raleigh got theirs for free
by stealing it from Spanish ports and ships.
In 1602, more than 16,000 pounds of tobacco arrived in London.
The city was already smoking heavily.
Along the banks of the Thames,
amongst the pebbles, shells, bits of brick and tile,
fragments of broken clay pipes abound.
Amazing collection.
Proof positive.
People were smokers...big time!
This was the London in which James VI of Scotland arrived a year later.
As the nearest male relative of the dead Queen Bess,
he was about to become James I of England.
Two crowns, one mantelpiece,
and a throne room full of smokers.
People wondered what sort of a king he was going to be.
He was going to be a king who wanted London to smell better.
Well, it wasn't likely to have smelt nice in the first place,
what with horse dung, human dung, urine of different species, and sweaty bodies.
But these smells held no terror for James.
I mean, after all, Scottish life was no different.
No, what really got up his nose
was a smell of an altogether different kind.
James had arrived in London to find it addicted to tobacco.
Its narrow streets were full of smoking dens.
People smoked upstairs, downstairs, in m'lady's chamber...
James really hated smoke.
And he hated smokers even more.
Soon after coming to the throne,
James locked the most famous smoker in either kingdom
in the Tower of London.
The evidence that Walter Raleigh was plotting to dethrone the king
was less than flimsy.
The evidence that he smoked a pipe was very strong indeed.
And in 1604, James published an assault on smokers and smoking -
the Counterblast against Tobacco.
Why did he write the Counterblast?
Where did this stand against tobacco come from, do we know?
I suspect that it was not much more than he hated the smell of it.
The word "stink" appears 12 times in the Counterblast,
the word "smell" appears five times.
But there was no sign of this dissension
when he was King of Scotland, was there? Or was that...?
He never... There's no record of him
being particularly antagonistic towards tobacco.
Possibly, London may have been a much smokier place
than anywhere in Scotland, for one thing.
I think it might have come as a real shock to him
when he moved down from Edinburgh how much smoke was going on.
Foreign observers at the time commented at how amazed they are
at people smoking everywhere - in theatres, in the streets,
in the shops and in the bars.
You didn't have smoking like this, really, anywhere else in the world,
except possibly in Holland.
But England, by the end of the 16th century,
was almost uniquely associated with smoking.
Other nations used snuff, or used it medicinally,
or occasionally smoked,
but nobody was smoking pipes at the same rate as the English were.
James had declared war on tobacco.
He raised the duty on tobacco imports
from two pence to six shillings and ten pence a pound,
a truly astonishing increase of 4,000%.
But smoking continued to increase.
For the rest of his reign, tobacco dogged his footsteps.
For all his peaceable attitudes, he wanted an empire,
but he didn't want one acquired by conquest.
Conquest was a risky business.
And wherever he went, wherever he turned,
he found that the answer lay in that detested leaf.
In 1606, James was approached by representatives of The Virginia Company -
intrepid fellows who wanted a royal licence to start an American colony.
James granted the licence - after all, he had nothing to lose - and, in 1607,
the company's first contingent of colonists sailed up this river.
They needed a name,
and the company's policies on names was simple...
They called everything "James".
As soon as they landed, they set about building Jamesfort,
as protection against both natives and Spaniards.
This was the beginning of the British Empire,
the first colony in the New World...
..an ugly beginning.
The river's waters were undrinkably salty...
..food supplies were sketchy...
..the tribe on whose soil Jamesfort was built, the Powhatan,
proved unfriendly.
Jamesfort was a death-trap.
We dug down to the 17th-century level,
which is down about 20 inches below us,
and found where there are at least 34 people buried here,
all crowded in this corner of the fort,
and so we immediately suspected it's from 1607.
The first summer, more than half of the colonists died.
So this is from one year?
Yeah, this is from a couple of months.
Couple of months? Wow.
Worse was to come.
In the next two years, the colonists ate their dogs...
..they ate their horses...
..and then they ate their enemies.
They get really desperate.
They say that they dug up an Indian that had been buried three days
and ate him.
You know, pretty grotesque.
So what was the chink of light that made everything change?
Well, really, it was the tobacco
that really saved Jamestown, and that's acknowledged.
In one of our wells that we excavated, a quite early well,
we found several seeds of tobacco.
You can see it in there, it's just minuscule, and...
I have to take your word for it that there's a seed in here, is there?
Assume that it is. Oh, there it is!
I see it. God, it's so tiny.
So what we're saying here is that the whole British Empire
grew out of this seed? Of that tiny little seed.
That's phenomenal.
That's truly, truly phenomenal.
S it was tobacco that saved the first British colony on American soil,
tobacco of the same smoothly smokeable variety
that the Spanish had monopolised for over 100 years.
The first planting in Jamestown was in 1611,
the work of a colonist called John Rolfe.
He had almost certainly obtained the seeds whilst shipwrecked in Bermuda.
A mile to the west of the original Jamesfort,
the Americans have raised its ghost,
where they re-enact those days in which, year on year,
the amount of tobacco produced grew and grew and grew.
At Jamestown Settlement, the original strain is still grown.
It was milder than the Spanish weed, more pleasant to smoke...
COCK CROWS
..although these things are relative.
So, Sammy, have you tried it?
Yes! Is it good?
Very strong. Very strong.
How strong?
Stronger than a Marlboro.
I don't smoke, so I wouldn't know what that is.
On a scale to one to ten?
Ten.
In 1618, the colony sent 20,000 pounds of tobacco back to the mother country.
In 1622, the yield was 60,000 pounds.
By 1624, the words "Virginia" and "tobacco" were inseparable,
and they still are.
And James had faced the facts.
The profits from tobacco would give him the empire he had always wanted.
He took control of The Virginia Company.
He outlawed domestic production of tobacco, banned the Spanish product,
and made money hand over fist from sales and import duties.
James fell ill shortly afterwards,
but thanks to the most vigorously anti-smoking king
that the thrones of England and Scotland would ever see,
smoking tobacco was now an act of loyalty.
Every puff and every pipeful
increased England's power and imperial reach,
but the truth was inescapable.
James will have been horribly aware
as he took his final, smoke-free breaths
that he had done a deal with the devil.
But what had he done?
What would the future hold?
He had created a new world, an empire of addiction.
Within four years of his death,
Virginia was sending 1.5 million pounds of tobacco
back to the motherland each year.
It's 1772, 150 years since James' death.
His Stuart dynasty is history, ejected from the throne in 1688...
..but his deal with the devil is still monstrously profitable.
Tobacco is booming.
Some Britons still smoke pipes, but snuff is far more popular...
..and in some places, it's more popular than food.
Good morning, Robert. Good morning.
First question, why is there a Highlander outside your shop?
Well, a Highlander is an old-fashioned, traditional way
of indicating that the shop sold snuff, in particular Scottish snuff,
because there was a strong tradition of people taking snuff in Scotland.
Right. Why would that be?
Why did they take snuff in Scotland as opposed to anywhere else?
Well, I think there's a few reasons,
but one of the reasons is actually just the climate in Scotland,
the fact that Scotland is quite famous
for sort of strong winds and lots of rain,
and it's therefore quite difficult to actually smoke or keep something...
Harder to light up. Yeah.
My kind of memories of actually...
I always remember women in my family, my mother...
I found out recently my mother took snuff.
My mother started to take snuff after the war, which was kind of weird,
I never knew this, and it helped her with headaches.
Well, snuff was prescribed, was suggested to people
as a way of alleviating the problem they had with migraines. Really?
You know, tobacco in all sorts of forms has been given in the past
for medical conditions,
but certainly in terms of clearing the head and sort of dealing with headaches.
Perhaps you'd like to try some snuff?
I just happen to have here my Jock's Choice snuff,
which is an old Scottish recipe.
Jock's Choice? Jock's Choice.
Well, that's a bit obvious, isn't it?
Oh, right. Well, I'll give it a go.
OK.
So it's just a little pinch at a time? Just a pinch in your hand,
and that part of your hand is actually called your snuff box.
Here we go.
Oh!
And then we have a snuff handkerchief ready... Yeah.
Oh, dear! That's...
That's a little...more potent than I imagined!
Wow!
Gosh, that's good, isn't it? He'll be hooked on snuff now.
Yeah, I know, I've got to watch it. Yeah, I've got to watch it.
All the snuff being sniffed in 1772 was coming from Virginia...
..now just one of 13 British colonies in America.
The state is entirely given over to tobacco production.
Some of the estates are large, such as those of Thomas Jefferson,
one of America's founding fathers, who disapproves of slavery...
in theory.
But not in practice.
Some estates are small, but they depend as much as Jefferson's
on the labour of negro slaves.
And there's something else that Thomas Jefferson has in common
with those smaller, less substantial tobacco planters.
He shops here, or somewhere very like it.
Brian, welcome to British Virginia.
We are in front of the best surviving tobacco store in all of America.
This kind of structure was dotted all over the colony.
How many would there be of these?
I mean, this...this is... More than one, right?
There are hundreds.
There may have been 350, 400 of these,
from this part of Virginia going west.
Wow.
At these stores,
all of the requirements for life and tobacco farming
can be bought on credit.
Most of the planters are now so deeply in debt
that their tobacco for years to come
is promised to the owners of these stores, all of whom are Scots,
the so-called Tobacco Lords of Glasgow...
..sharks in frock coats and scarlet cloaks,
with rolled wigs, canes, hats laced with gold.
All they really care about is money.
They don't care about political interests,
they don't care about constitutional rights,
they don't fold down on one side or the other.
They're on their own side. So what happens?
So, by the time you get to 1775,
when the wheels really start coming off of the British Empire in America,
then it's the Scots merchants that are bearing the brunt of the abuse.
Would you say that would have contributed considerably to the Revolution?
I think it unquestionably contributed to the American Revolution.
A lot of Virginians felt that what the Scots represented
was an empire that wasn't working in their interests,
which is why Virginia actually, in 1776,
specifically kicks out every Scottish merchant in the colony.
Wow!
In 1776, the most militant colonists,
many of them tobacco planters from Virginia,
banded together and signed a Declaration of Independence for the 13 colonies.
The American War of Independence wasn't caused exclusively
by the mother country's greed for tobacco,
but it loomed very large.
And it proved central to the war itself.
The American colonists secured a loan from France to fund their war,
using their tobacco as a guarantee, and the British armies in Virginia,
realising that tobacco was now an important war resource,
took to attacking the tobacco itself.
Hundreds of acres,
thousands of barrels of fine Virginian tobacco, went up in smoke.
Peace came in 1783.
The American colonists had won and went,
as Americans always have and always will,
straight back to business.
British snuffers returned thankfully to the consumption of snuff,
and the tobacco lords went to court to try and recover
the debts that had helped start the war.
Many of them succeeded, but the sweet deal was history.
Over the next 20 years, their wealth gradually dissipated,
like the slowly clearing smoke of a fine, fat cigar.
It was far from being the last time that smoking and war crossed paths.
During the Napoleonic wars, British soldiers came across cigars,
tobacco leaves wrapped into a dense and aromatic tube,
and Papillotes - minced tobacco rolled up in maize leaves,
and smoked by Spanish peasants.
And during the Crimean wars, they met cigars again...
..and something else - small tubes of tobacco wrapped in paper.
By the middle of the 19th century,
the choices available to the would-be tobacco consumer
had multiplied enormously.
Every class consumed,
but did so in ways appropriate to their station in life.
The working classes, both men and women,
took snuff or smoked clay pipes.
Middle class men smoked briar pipes.
Men of the upper classes smoked cigars,
and women of both the middle and upper classes...
disapproved of a habit which society considered unfeminine.
It was absolutely not acceptable for women to smoke.
It really was totally improper,
because Queen Victoria, who everybody followed anyway, you know,
she didn't like anyone smoking in her presence, so...
But her husband smoked. Albert smoked.
Yes, and also, at one point,
Queen Victoria's said to have actually tried smoking... Oh, really?
..in the grounds of Balmoral, with one of the ladies in waiting, to ward off midges.
Of course, Edward VII was a notorious smoker.
He was! And the irony was,
he wasn't allowed to smoke anywhere near his mum.
This was a man who had to lie on his back in his bedroom in Balmoral
and blow smoke up the chimney, with a coal fire,
so his mother couldn't smell it, you know...
And he was nearly 60 then!
I know. Sad!
And then he had to wait till she'd died,
and the first appearance he makes in court, he comes out,
"I'm now the King, Mum's dead, the anti-smoker's gone,"
and he looks around and says,
"Gentlemen, you may smoke,"
and they go, "Thank God!"
And everybody went, "Right, OK, then, la-de-dah-de-dah!"
Everybody's all together now, all dancing around. Wonderful!
Smoking men in smoking rooms,
non-smoking ladies outside,
henpecked husbands nursing their cigars, stoking their pipes,
making sure they had an excuse to hide away from married life
as long as possible.
It's alien. It's completely different
to the sort of nicotine consumption I grew up with.
But the point is, I suppose, pipes and cigars -
well, you have to devote time to them.
They're practically a hobby.
In fact, they are a hobby.
But now, at about this time,
the cigarette arrives in the UK from France,
and it's not what you think.
It's not a little cigar.
It's small, light, finished in minutes.
Time for another.
Not just a hobby.
It's a habit.
CLOCK TICKS
I think the way to think about the cigarette
is as a nicotine delivery system,
and it's as though it's been optimised to delivering nicotine
in a way which makes it more rewarding and more addictive.
When a smoker inhales tobacco smoke into the lungs,
the nicotine passes to the brain very quickly,
so there is an association
between the behaviour of inhaling the tobacco smoke,
and the effect in the brain.
So these associations can be learned very quickly.
Also, when a smoker inhales tobacco,
there's an irritation in the mouth, the bronchi, the throat.
It's called the scratch, and, again,
the brain can associate that sensory irritation
with the effects of nicotine in the brain,
so the very habit of smoking a cigarette, the very process,
becomes a very rewarding, pleasurable process
and, indeed, the tobacco companies have manipulated the smoke.
For example, they make the smoke alkaline by adding ammonia
and, in doing so, when you inhale tobacco smoke into your lungs,
the nicotine transfers much more quickly into your bloodstream,
so it gets to your brain much more quickly.
So the cigarette delivered more nicotine more swiftly,
was more addictive than anything that had come before.
Now it was simply a question of making more of them.
In 1880, the Americans mechanised cigarette manufacture.
The British Company WD & HO Wills bought this new technology,
a machine that made 211 cigarettes a minute,
and by 1900, cigarettes had cornered more than 10%
of the British tobacco market.
With equal speed, cigarettes acquired critics.
Something about these little cylinders
was more troubling than any other form of tobacco consumption.
In both America and Britain,
Christian Temperance societies were absolutely certain
that smoking cigarettes was the first step
towards complete moral disintegration.
Nicotine ruined marriages, one pamphlet claimed.
Nicotine destroyed the capacity to love.
Smoking caused nervous depression and suicide.
Smoking caused a terrible condition
which the campaigners christened "cigarette face".
SCREAMING AND RETCHING Eww! Yuck!
Sometime in the early years of the 20th century,
a young Viennese man concluded that cigarette-smoking was indeed a vice,
that the benefits it offered were dubious,
and its effect on health entirely negative.
He was a heavy smoker, up to two packs a day,
but he threw his cigarettes into the Danube,
and he never smoked again.
And so it was that Adolf Hitler,
unlike the vast majority of soldiers who fought in World War One,
did not smoke in battle.
Cigarettes became part of the standard rations for soldiers.
The cigarette habit began to dominate.
The sensible British captain
bought extra packs of Woodbines for soldiers
on the night before the big push.
The Americans joined the war in 1917,
armed with Lucky Strikes and Camels.
In time, the temperance campaigners would be proved correct.
Cigarettes were very bad for the health,
but not as bad for the health as bombs or bullets.
When Hitler came to power in 1933,
German scientists already suspected that there was a connection
between cigarette-smoking and lung cancer.
Their investigations were revolutionary in their simplicity.
Simply by analysing the lifestyles of cancer victims,
the link between heavy smoking and lung cancer was made brutally clear.
Hitler adopted and adapted this new research
for his own ideological ends.
Years of political in-fighting
had made him an accomplished and theatrical speechmaker
with a taste for metaphor...
..and cancer now became his favourite metaphor of all.
Jews were a cancer in the body politic.
Hitler blamed them for Germany's loss of the First World War.
Bolshevism was a cancer in European culture.
He blamed communism for almost everything
that he didn't blame the Jews for.
As for cancer itself, Hitler saw it as a sign of bad citizenship,
moral weakness.
It was a German's duty to keep himself fit
for service to the state.
Jews, Bolshevism, cancer -
Hitler dedicated himself to eradication of all three.
The Nazis, of course, made no attempt to share their discoveries
about the causes of lung cancer.
Their research was merely medical.
It was also a military secret, one worth keeping.
Every cigarette smoked shortened the enemy soldier's lifespan.
The Allies' attitude to cigarettes was entirely different.
Tobacco was essential for morale.
All their leaders smoked.
Churchill and his cigars were inseparable.
Roosevelt smoked two packs of Camels a day.
Stalin smoked both pipes and cigarettes.
All Allied forces received cigarettes
as part of their daily ration.
Field Marshal Montgomery disapproved of both drinking and smoking,
but still made a point of being filmed handing out free cigarettes
to the men of his command.
During the war,
both the servicemen of the US and servicemen of the UK
were given cigarettes.
Now, that was to alleviate stress.
Would that be the case?
That's a fascinating question!
Soldiers were really...
Really thought that cigarettes were very, very helpful to them
and they almost all used them.
That immediate hit...increased clarity, probably also calming...
Cigarettes, nicotine, is the only drug we know
that actually improves performance but also reduces anxiety,
so I think there was a significant psychological benefit
to using cigarettes in wartime.
But, unfortunately, that created the tradition of smoking,
and it wasn't just the soldiers.
In fact, we discovered that that fed back into the women at home,
particularly those who were working in industry.
They also started smoking.
So the whole rise of smoking really came in the second war,
when it became not only acceptable to do it
but also seen as being helpful.
Cigarettes helped keep the home fires burning
and cross-hairs steady,
helped both combatants and non-combatants
to live with the ever-present fear of imminent destruction.
By the end of the war,
that fear had come remarkably close to making smokers of us all.
A survey of 1949 revealed that 39% of British women
and 81% of British men were smokers -
60% of the adult population.
To say nothing of the kids.
When did you start? Can you remember when you started?
Yeah, I can. I was becoming a regular smoker when I was seven.
Seven?! Seven.
Can you remember your first fag?
Can you remember the first moment
that you actually put it in your mouth?
Uh...
I can't remember the first one, I remember the first several.
THEY LAUGH
It was during the... God, was it during the war?
Just after the second war, just after the Second World War.
You'd find fag ends in the gutter. Oh, aye.
Some guy had flung them away. Dowpies, we called them. Aye.
Douts, we called them. You'd just go and pick up a dout and sort of...
If it was still lit, you were happy as a bee, you know.
Pass it round, and smoked it till the tobacco fell out
and you were left with a wee tiny bit of black paper.
You just sort of lay in the long grass at the back door...
No, it wasn't grass at the back door,
it was all worn away, hard earth...
Cinder! Earth and cinder.
Yeah!
Oot the washing green. Nothing green about it.
Hmm, happy days!
But even in those happy days,
there were a few places where you couldn't smoke...
..where it simply wasn't safe,
like the Dundee jute factories
where my parents and many of my relatives worked.
Smoking wasn't an option.
The jute was highly inflammable.
Every mill was a powder keg.
But also what wasn't an option was to be without...
I mean, life without some kind of tobacco.
So, whereas they would maybe smoke at home,
they'd take snuff at the mill.
In fact, all my relatives had some kind of tobacco habit.
Uncle Geordie chewed tobacco, Auntie Sarah took snuff,
and Auntie Susan smoked a wee Willy Woodbine, ken?
In 1950, the medical authorities in both Britain and America
published new studies of the long-term effects of cigarette smoking.
Neither report cited the research done by the Nazis in the 1930s...
but both came to the same unavoidable conclusion.
Which was this - smoking causes lung cancer.
The British Health Ministry advised the government
that what had been shown was not cause, but an association.
"Nothing need be done," they said.
And the British government took their advice, and did nothing.
I guess we have to wonder why.
But I think the answer's fairly simple.
The year before, the government had produced a report,
in which it admitted that for most people, cigarettes
"made good the inadequacies of life".
And that rings true.
After all, this was the Britain I grew up in,
a world of post-war austerity, in which cigarettes were still doing
what they had done during the war itself,
for my family as much as anyone else -
stress management, a mild but smelly anti-depressant.
But I still have questions.
How could nicotine have captured
as many as 60% of the British population?
And why did it never capture me?
Perhaps there are some answers hidden in my genes.
Hi, Brian, how's it going? I'm fine.
So I hear you're keen to have my sputum.
Yes, your sputum, that's how we're going to take your DNA
to test which genes you may have... All right.
..which may or may not pre-dispose you to nicotine addiction.
I'm taking this test for all the wrong reasons, to be honest.
It's been devised to help smokers learn what might be the best way to stop...
and I want to know why I've never started.
But perhaps it can tell me something about that too.
This test studies three groups of genes,
a total of seven genes in all.
One group affects the nicotine receptors in my brain,
the neurons that light up when nicotine is present,
how sensitive my brain is to the presence of nicotine...
Another group of genes controls how actively my brain responds
to rewards, to pleasure.
It's to do with that get-up-and-go chemical, dopamine.
If my brain makes too little dopamine,
cigarettes will make it make more,
and I will be more likely to be nicotine-dependent.
And the third group of genes
controls how quickly I break nicotine down in my body.
If I break it down fast, then I'll want another cigarette...
and quick.
If I break it down slowly, the next cigarette can wait.
It'll take some time for the test to tell me about myself.
But what about that smoking majority back in 1949?
Now, if we go back to the end of the Second World War,
we had something like 60% of people smoking,
so there must have been this huge kind of influx of smokers.
What would be the conditions for that?
Well, I think that's very interesting.
The genes which we're testing you for are pretty common,
so most people would have one or more of the genes
which make them likely to smoke.
So the general population is actually predisposed to smoke.
I'll have to wait for my test results,
but that's one mystery solved.
60% people smoked in 1949
because most of us have the genes for nicotine dependency.
As the '50s progressed,
scientists moved beyond the lifestyle analysis
that had shown an association between smoking and lung cancer.
Every so often, news of their progress
reached the front pages of the national press,
and in 1962, a new report announced the definite demonstration
of a causal link between smoking and carcinogenesis.
NEWSREEL: 'Today, the Royal College of Physicians
'published their report on smoking and lung cancer.
'They say conclusively and authoritatively
'that cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer,
'causes bronchitis and contributes to coronary heart disease.'
It was the by-products of smoking tobacco that killed -
tars, carbon monoxide, cyanide, assorted carcinogens.
Further research revealed that all forms of tobacco consumption
came with associated cancer risks.
But cigarettes were the most lethal by far.
Smoking became a paler, more guilty pleasure.
It began a 50-year retreat from the public eye,
with bans on ads in cinemas, on TV, eventually in print.
And in 2006, at last it began to retreat from public spaces too.
Stewart, tell me the sort of process you had to go through
to really achieve your goal, because - correct me if I'm wrong -
but this was the first time this had happened.
I mean, there was no smoking legislation in England, it was...
You sort of started the ball rolling...
Yeah, there was certainly no smoking legislation of any sort
throughout the UK. I was very keen to do it.
I was elected in 2003,
and the press here thought that it was the craziest thing, that it would never happen.
Scotland was a society where smoking was normal,
the mere idea that you couldn't smoke in a pub
was seen as completely bizarre and would never happen and, in fact,
the very first interview that I did about it at the time,
the first question I ever got on the ban was,
"So you're not interested in a political career, then?"
Because the assumption was that this would be so unpopular,
you wouldn't be re-elected, it'd be very unlikely to get passed,
and just the nature of people in Scotland
was that they wouldn't obey such a daft law.
There was no need for nerves.
Astonishingly, the ban took.
But then, perhaps, we shouldn't all have been so surprised.
Everybody now knows how damaging tobacco is.
The list of serious or fatal illnesses that it causes
is terrifyingly long.
In 1992, an analysis of mortality in the developed world
concluded that almost 20% of deaths could be attributed
to the ill-effects of active or passive smoking.
So the ban did Stewart's political career no harm at all.
England followed suit a year later.
Smokers, of course, are still quite visible,
almost more visible than before -
on street corners, outside receptions, in goods-ins,
huddled together in the rain and wind.
I mean, it's hardly glamorous.
A very far cry indeed from the days
when publicity pictures for people in my profession
included cigarettes as a standard accessory.
Once, we thought that tobacco was a medicine.
Now we know that it's a killer.
But nicotine itself is not the fatal agent.
It increases blood pressure, but is otherwise relatively innocent.
And the final irony, it may even be useable as a medicine
to treat the troubling diseases of old age.
Professor Paul Newhouse came to meet me
where Britain's long love affair with a fatal leaf began.
So there's two possible ways that nicotine might be helpful.
It seems to stimulate parts of the brain that need to be more active,
and maybe even shut down other parts that don't need to be active.
And what we think it's doing is making the brain more efficient.
So you don't need to have activity in all these different areas
to get what it is you're trying to do.
So that's one way that we think nicotine works.
The other possible way is more longer term.
And we think that nicotine may actually have
what we call neuro-protective effects.
It may actually protect nerve cells from degenerating
in things like Alzheimer's disease, or early pre-Alzheimer's disease.
And so nicotine may be able to be helpful
in kind of two directions at once.
What we're hoping for is that it improves symptoms,
it delays the onset, perhaps, of more severe symptoms,
and it maybe pushes back the whole disease process.
But you're not suggesting I should start smoking? No.
Good drug, bad delivery system.
Sadly, that was how my parents, and yours, likely enough,
took their nicotine - by cigarette.
Cigarettes never tempted me,
and I'm still wondering why.
The results of my genetic test have arrived.
But they might as well be written in Greek.
So I've got the...the report.
Of course I don't understand a word of it.
You're going to have to explain it to me.
Well, it's really interesting.
Out of these seven different genes,
you've only got three which are linked to smoking
and that's really very unusual.
Really? I reckon...
It's difficult to know exactly what the odds are,
but I reckon between one in 1,000 and one in 10,000 chance
of having this particular combination of genes.
Wow. So I'm unusual, then, am I?
You're special!
I'm special! Oh, good God.
So I don't smoke because I'm one of the lucky few
who don't have the genes for nicotine dependence.
But what my parents gave me was the experience of passive smoking,
which I came to hate.
I can't blame them for smoking.
They were surrounded by a smoking majority.
They lived through two world wars and the Great Depression...
..the sort of stressful times that have always boded well
for cigarette sales.
For 400 or 500 hundred years, we magnified our pleasures,
dosed our nerves and fears with nicotine...
..a mildly psychogenic drug
that made the grind of daily life supportable.
We weren't to know, of course, that the ways that we took it
were all toxic, cancer-causing, life-threatening,
and we had no real idea of the role that nicotine was playing
inside our bodies and our brains.
And now that we do, you know,
I think I understand my family a little bit better,
particularly my mother.
My mother, when she smoked, always had a beatific look on her face,
as if she was at one with the world, at peace.
It gave her a sense of well-being.
And remember our friend, Sir Walter Raleigh,
when we left him in the Tower of London a while ago?
King James had him executed in 1618.
Raleigh smoked his pipe on the way to the axe man's block,
and after his death, the pipe case was found,
and inscribed on it was a little Latin motto.
Translated, it read, "My companion in that most wretched time."
Now, I believe that's a phrase that almost any smoker will understand.
Turned out nice again!
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