Here is the full text of it and some parts truly are a blaste to read. King James would make a fine argumentative comment section dweller, I think. As he mentions, at the time the smoking or other types of ingestions of tobacco were a relative novelty, so, how widespread and accesible was it to warrant this kind of reaction? And was King James VI alone in his outrage (esentially mentioning health risks as well, when he talks about the "black Soote" that was found after death in smokers)? Did his distaste for tobacco and distaste for Sir Walter Raleigh mix well? Raleigh did popularize smoking and was beheaded on James's order, although much later after the anti-smoking treatise was written.
As a follow-up, I have read that lung cancer was extremely rare prior to the twentieth century. In light of the King's observation on the state of dead smokers' lungs (in 1604), is the infrequency of lung cancer definitively known, or is it a case of the medical profession not recognizing it for a long time?
James was not the first anti-tobacco writer to publish in English. In 1602, an author anonymously published a book called "Work for Chimny-Sweepers" in which he describes "the pernicious use of tobacco." Luckily, there is a version available online here. There is also a pamphlet published later in 1602 defending the consumption of tobacco called "A Defense of Tobacco" found here. I would also recommend checking out Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures as it is probably the best introduction to a cultural history of early tobacco consumption, though mainly in the Iberian Atlantic.
So, one of the first things to consider is on the title page of the "Work for Chimny-Sweepers", which is the following:
Better be chokt with English hemp
than poisoned with Indian tobacco.
So here we can see that the author has a natural hostility to tobacco because it was associated with Native Americans. Now, despite the difficulties of the colony at Roanoke, there was no hard British opinion of the Native Americans as savage and evil at this time (in fact the “Black Myth” of Spanish savagery was an argument used by colonizers that they were better suited than the Spanish to possess the lands of the new world – Tomlins, Freedom Bound). However, the idea of tobacco as foreign still carried weight for our anti-tobacco writer.
The other major group involved with tobacco was the Spanish. In 1602, the Spanish were the largest producers of tobacco that could be transported to Europe, and would be a major supplier for the English. However, the English were still in the midst of a war against the Spanish, and fervent anti-Spanish sentiment was rampant in England. Between the Elizabethan privateers, the Spanish landing in Ireland in 1601, and the general history of warfare over the past two decades, almost anything associated with Spain was viewed in a negative light (Doran, England and Europe, 1485-1603; Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering). That did not stop the consumption of tobacco on the popular level, but it does help explain some of the negative associations. The author of “Work for Chimny-Sweepers” writes in the introduction to talk about how “smokey gallants, who having long time glutted themselves with the fond fopperies and fashions of our neighbor Countries…” He draws the associations between foreignness and consumption of tobacco.
Also – the first English work I can find published on tobacco was by Anthony Chute, an obscure “cabin boy” who discovered tobacco in his voyages to Portugal in 1589. His work on tobacco, which can be found here was published in 1595 in the style of the naturalists that had written on the subject in Iberia. A hated rival of Chute despised tobacco and ridiculed Chute for his “indulgence in [that] posset curd” (ODNB, “Anthony Chute,” by Sidney Lee, rev. Matthew Steggle; Kupperman, American in European Consciousness)
Lastly, a word on consumption. Tobacco at this early stage was not in the broken or cut up ways many of us imagine. The rolls were more like cigars, in that they were full leaves of tobacco rolled up – and for cheap tobacco, without removing the stems – and stored in barrels for shipment across the ocean. The puffs of smoke were considered noxious by many, which helps explain James’ dislike of the crop (Walsh, Honor, Pleasure, and Profit). Also recall how people thought of medicine and illness at this time. The body was composed of humors and fumes – in this case tobacco - could upset the internal balance causing illness. So it wasn’t necessarily the illness that we think of that James was describing. Instead he was talking about the inhilation of smoke and fumes that would cause illness and “the black soote” (Harrison, Disease and the Modern World). Also worth looking at is a report in 1601 of the death of a sailor from tobacco.
“One Jackson, who frequented Little Britain Street, has died suddenly, and being opened, it was judged by the surgeon that it was from the smoke of tobacco, which he took unsatiably” Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1601-1603, p. 136 (December 29, 1601).