Jean Nicot sent tobacco to the French court as a medicine, and the plant, the drug and the addiction carry his name
Tabac Bar in Camden holds a 4.7 from two hundred and seven people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is one of the better small bars in this district.
And the substance in the name is called what it is called because of a French ambassador.
Jean Nicot
He was the French ambassador to Portugal in the 1550s.
And he encountered tobacco, which had come to Europe from the Americas, and he was extremely enthusiastic about it – as a medicine.
He sent it to the French court. He recommended it for headaches, for ulcers, for a long list of complaints.
And it was taken up, with enthusiasm, by Catherine de’ Medici.
And so it is named after him
The genus is Nicotiana.
The alkaloid is nicotine.
Which means the most successfully addictive legal drug in human history, and the compound responsible, are both named after a diplomat who was recommending it for a sore head.
The Prat’s pharmacological desk regards this as the single most complete case in seven postcodes of the medicinal-origin story we have found everywhere else.
Nearly everything behind a good bar started as a treatment for something.
Gin and tonic was malaria prophylaxis. Vermouth is wormwood, for worms. Amaro was sold for cholera. Angostura was developed by an army surgeon. Coca-Cola was a patent medicine. Aqua vitae means the water of life and they meant it.
And tobacco was a headache remedy sent by an ambassador.
Why the plant makes it
Which is the thing nobody thinks about.
Nicotine is an insecticide.
The plant produces it to poison insects – it is a neurotoxin, it is extremely effective, and it was used as an agricultural pesticide for a long time before the modern synthetic ones arrived.
It happens, at the doses a human takes, to bind to receptors in our own nervous system in a way that is pleasant and enormously habit-forming.
The tobacco plant is not offering you anything. It is trying to kill a caterpillar, and we found the poison agreeable.
The chilli, again
Which is the same story and which we wrote at Ma Petite Jamaica.
Capsaicin exists to stop mammals eating the fruit. Birds cannot taste it and distribute the seeds.
A very large proportion of the things humans most enjoy are chemical warfare that we have decided to enjoy.
Verdict
Excellent bar, strong number, cheap.
Go, ask what to drink, and drink that.
What the court thought
King James I of England, who was not enthusiastic, wrote a pamphlet against it in 1604.
It is called A Counterblaste to Tobacco, it is extremely bad-tempered, and it is remarkably accurate.
He describes the habit as loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.
Which is, as a summary of the medical position four hundred years later, essentially correct.
He also raised the duty on it by around four thousand per cent – and then, when the revenue proved irresistible, quietly took the trade under royal control.
The Prat’s fiscal desk regards this as the earliest and most complete example in English history of a government denouncing a product and then living off it.
Staff Writer at The London Prat
A council leader complained that The London Prat was undermining institutional legitimacy. When asked what legitimacy was based on, he claimed satire had no right to question it.
Laugh sweet. Uncomfortable.