The success of tobacco in crossing cultures is one of the most intriguing aspects of the sixteenth-century European encounter with the Amerindian world. Analytically, what occurred largely supports Sahlins' model. To understand why tobacco was so successful we need to explore the European cultural context of the sixteenth century as well as the paths of cultural transmission.
One part of this cultural context involved the use of narcotics. According to historians such as Piero Camporesi and Carlo Ginzburg, the urban and rural poor lived in a world where what we would now call hallucinatory or ecstatic experiences were common. These experiences can be conveniently divided into two kinds: those which were induced by the regimen of poverty and those principally associated with witchcraft. Hallucinations were, as Camporesi points out, a byproduct of a world of subsistence. The worst off in society did not actively search out hallucinatory experiences, but became victims of them through the lack of adequate and frequent nourishment; through eating either contaminated food or bread made with grains spoiled by fungi that were themselves hallucinatory -- ergot, for example; or by mixing together various plants as food substitutes. Camporesi is persuasive on this point. Certainly, prescriptions for how to deal with famine were not uncommon. Hugh Platt wrote one such pamphlet in 1596 urging his readers to consider the following possibilities when faced with nothing edible to eat: try, he wrote, eating fresh turf or a clod of earth, sucking one's blood, drinking one's urine, or eating wheat-straw bread. The importance of suppressing hunger was one of tobacco's main attributes and was repeated frequently in the medical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Witchcraft, and the witch's sabbath, were undoubtedly associated with hallucinatory plants. Ergot, according to Ginzburg, is one possibility, but other writers have suggested plants of the solanaceous family -- that is deadly nightshade, henbane, mandrake and especially datura or thorn apple -- and cannabis. Despite the paucity of the evidence, the impression of European culture as being punctuated by hallucinatory experiences can be sustained, but only if it is understood as being a phenomenon of a particular social class, or of folk culture, and not institutionalized. One hypothesis hinted at by Ginzburg, and worth following up, is that the matrix of mind-altering substances in Europe belonged to what Ginzburg calls female medicine, or to what Camporesi refers to as the medicine of the poor.
If one accepts the hunger/mild-hallucination pairing as representing certain aspects of European society and culture, then it can be argued that the possibilities existed here for the incorporation or acceptance of some non-food substance that suppressed hunger, without inducing violent mind-altering effects. The four solanaceous plants would not have served this purpose since, whatever their influence on appetite, their hallucinations were violent and thus counter-productive -- hence their use in witchcraft. It is likely, therefore, that there was a cultural wisdom about psychotropic plants, and that this wisdom was concentrated in the folklore of urban and rural populations. Much more research is needed in this area, but enough has already been done to portray sixteenth-century Europeans as inhabiting a very complex cultural space where mind-altering substances and their experiences played a significant role.
Those Europeans who set out to chart the resources of the New World were certainly not searching for hallucinogenic plants and experiences. Yet it would not be stretching the imagination too far to suggest that those they employed, sailors in particular, had some acquaintance with hallucinogenic preparations. We know, by what was said of them, that sailors did return to Europe with tobacco and it is not inconceivable that their first few puffs produced an experience that was not entirely unfamiliar and one that was entirely pleasing.
Plant investigators, Hernandez among them, by contrast, were primarily interested in plants that would feature in a healing therapy. In the sixteenth century, there were relatively few curative agents which were capable of treating a large array of diseases. Specific remedies were of limited use, and there was a widely held belief in the existence of a universal panacea, among both Galenists and Paracelsians. The roots of this belief extend far back into European history but were rekindled by the renaissance of classical medicine in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Galenists held firmly that panaceas were organic, since herbal substances were considered more natural than inorganic types. Followers of Paracelsus, however, contended that the most efficacious remedies were inorganic, indeed mineral -- in the treatment of syphilis, for example, Galenists prescribed guaiacum or sassafras, while Paracelsians advocated mercury For Galenists, at least, the cornucopia of New World flora promised to yield a panacea of greater efficacy than so far uncovered in the Old World.
It was into this context that the plants of the New World vied for assimilation, and it was this bundle of assigned meanings that determined the fate of the exotic substances. One of the first to get attention was tobacco, a plant of the solanaceous family which includes the psychotropic plants mentioned above as well as the potato and the chilli pepper. Following the accounts of tobacco that were published, or available in manuscript form, in Europe between Amerigo Vespucci's description of tobacco-chewing witnessed in 1499 (but not published until 1505), and the 1570s, it is clear that tobacco was becoming accepted as a herbal therapy capable of curing an increasingly large number of ailments. Under the scrutiny of a host of European botanists, physicians, churchmen and bureaucrats, who either grew tobacco in their gardens, tried it themselves, read about it in the Spanish accounts of the New World or spread the gospel about it, tobacco picked up one accolade after another.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)