Right Relation with Tobacco: Decommercialization and Reverence

The much-maligned tobacco plant has been exploited to kill more people than any other plant, with yearly tobacco deaths exceeding eight million globally. Yet, for Indigenous peoples with many millennia of relationship with tobacco, the herb is regarded as a sacrament, a reminder of humility, a source of connection with ecological and spiritual communities beyond oneself. Juxtaposing traditional versus colonial tobacco use, I locate biocultural mechanisms that have led to such divergent human and ecological impacts of collaborating with versus instrumentalizing this plant. Sharing my personal history with tobacco as both a tobacco control researcher and a student of Indigenous tobacco ways, I explore how tobacco can be understood as a metonymic plant for both critical plant studies and human relations with the wider plant world through invoking the hermeneutic aspect of the medical and alchemical pharmakon.