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I meant "niche" in the same sense as fishing is. About 2 per cent of Czechs are fishers. At least 15 times as many smoke. That said, I was too vague. There is

• s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Yeah, that was another thought I had. If profit it was somehow prevented all the way down to farmers and distribution, then I think use would be extremely niche. Few people would be interested in growing and manufacturing their own tobacco. That said, I think this speaks more to how profit is the engine of commerce, and otherwise we would all be subsistence farmers. In the never profitable case, it is interesting to think about native American use prior to the Colombian exchange. If Native American cultivation was a profitable activity is debatable, but not particularly interesting to me, so lets set that aside. My understanding is that it was used fairly heavily in a social setting. It seems reasonable that this would still have propagated rather quickly. It reminds me that smoking spread throughout Europe and the near east without TV, billboards, or hallmarks of modern advertising - and how deeply it imbedded itself in the cultures there. Similarly, I would argue that Alcohol predates advertising and predates currency itself.