Definitely. From the very beginning, in fact. Literally, one of the very first things the Spanish wrote about when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas was that the natives smoked this thing they called tabaco and within weeks, there were a couple of Spanish sailors who couldn't stop smoking it.
More directly, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, who spent eight years in Hispaniola from 1514-1523, was probably the first to call it a "vice" by name. He was an early historian of the New World, and wrote in his second history book, Cronica de las Indias (Chronicle of the Indians), published in 1547:
"The Indians of this Island, among other vices, have a very bad one, which is that of taking smoke, which they call tabaco, in order to lose consciousness, and they do this with a certain herb..."
(Source. Note that, originally, tabaco referred to a rolled cigar/cigarette itself, and not necessarily directly to the dried plant inside it, hence Oviedo's wording.)
Another early critic was the Scottish doctor Eleazor Duncon, who wrote a letter in 1606 that was recently rediscovered in the archives of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. In the letter, Duncon wrote that tobacco "is so hurtful and dangerous to youth that it might have the pernicious nation expressed in the name, and that it were as well known by the name of Youths-bane as by the name of tobacco". In other words, Duncon observed young people indulging in the habit of tobacco-smoking habitually, which he found harmful and difficult for the users to quit.
Back in America, perhaps the first physician to describe tobacco as a harmful vice in detail was Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was a Founding Father and served as the Surgeon-General of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He described smoking tobacco in negative terms, giving four specific reasons why:
"1. One of the usual effects of smoking and chewing is thirst...A desire of course is excited for strong drinks, and these, when taken between meals, soon lead to intemperance and drunkenness...
"2. The use of Tobacco, more especially in smoking, disposes to idleness, and idleness has been considered as the root of all evil...
"3. The use of Tobacco is necessarily connected with the neglect of cleanliness...
"4. Tobacco, more especially when used in smoking, is generally offensive to those people who do not use it. To smoke in company, under such circumstances, is a breach of good manners; now, manners have an influence upon morals..."
The "idleness" that tobacco use was said to cause was often pointed to when calling the habit a vice back in the 1700s and 1800s. Particularly, minority groups in America, such as African slaves or Dutch settlers in New York, were belittled as "lazy" and "idle" because of their taste for smoking and drinking. An old Dutch New York joke that was later on printed in the February 10, 1849, edition of the Poughkeepsie Journal, described the Dutch habit of smoking in sarcastic terms:
"Two Dutchmen, living opposite each other, who had been for many years in the habit of smoking by their door side in silence, at length broke forth in the following dialogue.
"'What sort of wedder you tink it will be today, neighbor?'
"The other, after two or three hasty puffs, replied, 'Well, I don't know. What sort of wedder do you tink it will be?'
"The first, somewhat nettled, said, 'I tink it will be wedder as you tink it will be."
"The other acquiesced, 'Well, I tink so, too.'"
Clearly, by the time the temperance/prohibition movement had come around, tobacco was seen by at least one segment of society as having a negative effect on its habitual users. The temperance movement not only discouraged the use of alcohol, but also the use of tobacco, because they thought it encouraged drinking, just as Dr. Benjamin Rush had observed earlier.
Tobacco was first linked to cancer in the 1940s and 1950s, so by that time, the habit of smoking, and tobacco use in general, had been considered a vice and/or harmful for many, many years.
If it’s alright I’d like to stick to European perceptions of tobacco in from the 17th to about the mid-18th centuries, as “Finest Virginia,” “Best Virginia,” and “neat Tobacco” were being snatched off of the shelves of “Clowdie Tobacco-shops” in London just about as quickly as vendors could stock it. I’ll leave the period between here and Don Draper going to war against widespread acceptance of smoking’s deadly drawbacks to others.
Know, puppy, I’m an English pipe,
Deem’d worthy of each Briton’s gripe,
Who, with my cloud-compelling aid,
Help our plantations and our trade.
Whether the consumption of the tobacco being shipped over to England from its North American colonies constituted a threat to English values, a boon to English empire, or both, was absolutely a conversation that was being had as tobacco shops popped up across England. In 1640, about a million pounds of tobacco had crossed the Atlantic. Sixty years later, that number swells to 28 million pounds.
The earliest advocates for English importation of tobacco spoke of the growing danger of foreign control of the crop. England was pitted against Catholic rivals and the continued use of tobacco was one way in which the island’s populace could help to grow their nation’s economy. Proponents of tobacco like Edward Bennett and Thomas Mun were concerned with the importation of numerous crops, tobacco among them, from “strangers” and wrote that it would serve England to entice New World planters to sow fields with tobacco. Advertisements for London tobacco shops often showed images of English explorers contending with the native inhabitants of North America and overcoming them, either physically or through intellectual prowess (negotiations). The focus on trade goods from North America served to show that the English were not only earning an upper-hand in Transatlantic conquest, but were doing so in a commercial manner, rather than the militaristic domination displayed by New World imperial aspirants like the Spanish. Smoking tobacco would not only help to grow the English economy, but help England dominate the New World (and its inhabitants).
There was, of course, no thought given to the cardiovascular pitfalls or carcinogenic properties of inhaling burning tobacco. On the contrary, the health benefits of tobacco were regularly extolled. The types of maladies smoking was said to guard against are likely easy to guess for any ex-smoker or poor soul who has dealt with a smoker in the process of quitting: hunger, headaches, stomach issues, etc. That’s not to say continuous smoking shielded one against withdrawal, but that tobacco was understood by some to be a critical element in sustaining life and aiding longevity. In addition to common withdrawal symptoms, tobacco was said to cure asthma, rheumatism, chills, fever, convulsions, and childbirth pains. Some went so far as to describe the plant as “divine” or “sovereign.” It certainly wasn’t only English physicians assigning tobacco the status of panacea. Early modern medical authorities across Europe wrote on tobacco’s pharmaceutical properties. Fifty years before the founding of Jamestown (in 1607), André Thevet claimed it would expel “moisture in the head.” In fact, nicotine gets its name from one of the most prominent defenders of its medical properties, the French physician Jean Nicot. Summing up the body of medical literature for English readers, Thomas Harriot wrote that Indians inhaled smoke from pipes made of clay:
[…]in to theyr stomacke and head: from whence it purgeth superfluous fleame and other gross humors, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body: by which means the use thereof not only preserveth the body from obstructions, but also (if any be, so that they have not beene of too long continuance) in short time breaketh them: whereby theyr bodies are notably preserved in health, and know not many grievous diseases, wherewithall we in England are oftentimes afflicted.
Beyond the health benefits, the ability of smoking to impart a sense of calm and pleasure aided in its incredible popularity. This feeling of euphoria, coupled with the transgressive nature of smoking, meant that consumers would continuously return to those cloudy tobacco shops. Tobacco vendors absolutely played upon this defiant aspect of social smoking. In addition to touting the fact that their product was the finest or best, London merchants were sure to highlight a direct connection between what they were selling and its colonial source. Their advertisements would often include images of ships anchored on the horizon of strange new shores where natives and English merchants were huddled in negotiations over the very plant that sat on the shelves of their shops. Tobacco was an exotic product, associated with sensuality and otherness that was impossible for many to resist.
If my very subtle Motley Crüe reference flew past you, let’s add to the discussion of whether to smoke or not to smoke some pulpit pounding polemicists. In 1604, roughly 40 years after the crop’s introduction to England via Spanish ships and English privateering efforts, King James I wrote his not-so-anonymous Counterblaste to Tobacco. In it, he asked his countrymen:
[…]shall we, I say, without blushing, abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God? Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill, as they doe?
In other words: “Are we really going to debase ourselves for this plant? Why don’t I just walk around with my [expletive deleted] hanging out like those savages and tell God to stick it where the sun don’t shine? Oh, and also I’m no Spanish slave-dog; are you?”
By 1622, it was clear to James that tobacco was bringing extraordinary amounts of money into English coffers. Nonetheless, he wanted Virginia planters to refocus their efforts on breeding silk-worms and establishing vineyards. Tobacco, he said, was the cause of not only “much unnecessary expense,” but “many disorders and inconveniences.”
Early critics of tobacco certainly did not pull their punches and echoed much of what James had to say. Just as certain writers expressed the idea that English tobacco trade helped to establish dominance over the New World, others denounced the plant as a vice that would ensnare the English, just as it had ensnared Indians and Africans. In 1750, Thomas Short warned that, “Multitudes have sold one another into perpetual Slavery for a Trifle of it; and these not only Strangers or Captives, but their own Countrymen, yea their own Relations[…]” Tobacco was a heathen drug to these critics, and heathen reliance on it constrained Indians and Africans to tobacco fields. This line of thinking served another purpose. As Catherine Molineux writes: “The comforting idea that Africans’ enslavement arose from something other than British aggression may have been a variant of the frequently articulated idea that Africans were already slaves in their own countries before being brought under British supervision.” These types of opinions were informed by the similarity of the effects of tobacco (according to English denouncers) to the behavior of pagans in a state of trance, victims of demonic possession, or witches in dialogue with devils. None of this stopped tobacco from being a wildly popular product in early modern England, of course. Just like the Surgeon General’s health warning and the knowledge that cigarettes will in fact kill me won’t stop me from lighting one up after posting this.^I’m ^being ^pithy. ^Don’t ^equate ^modern ^medical ^knowledge ^to ^anything ^I’ve ^said ^here.
So, with regards to it’s early introduction to England, yes…smoking was often seen as a vice. However, this did not stop it from being a wildly popular product. There are another ~350 years between James I’s damnation of tobacco and just how horrible smoking is though, so hopefully you get someone to fill you in on those years.
Further Reading:
Russel R. Menard, “The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617-1730: An Interpretation,” Research in Economic History, 5 (1980), 109-77.
Mancall, Peter C. "Tales Tobacco Told in Sixteenth-Century Europe." Environmental History 9, no. 4 (2004): 648-78.
Romaniello, Matthew P. "Through the Filter of Tobacco: The Limits of Global Trade in the Early Modern World." Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007): 914-37.
Catherine Molineux. "Pleasures of the Smoke: "Black Virginians" in Georgian London's Tobacco Shops." The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 64, no. 2 (2007): 327-76.
Ziser, Michael. "Sovereign Remedies: Natural Authority and the "Counterblaste to Tobacco"." The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 62, no. 4 (2005): 719-44.