"Who Will Rid Us of This Pestilent Industry?" Tobacco: Mother of Narcotics & suavely packaged death

Nicotine is one of the most powerfully addictive substances known to science.

- By KKS PERERA

Long before modern neuroscience explained how drugs hijack the brain's reward systems, tobacco users directly experienced addiction's compulsive nature, the difficulty quitting despite wanting to, physical withdrawal symptoms, and psychological cravings. This made tobacco humanity's first systematic encounter with understanding chemical addiction.

As governments began restricting other drugs in the 19th and 20th centuries, they drew on tobacco to explain addiction mechanisms. Simultaneously, the tobacco industry's strategies and aggressive marketing, product design to maximise addiction, and denial of health risks, became the blueprint for understanding how commercial interests exploit addictive substances. In this sense, tobacco established both the scientific template for comprehending addiction and the commercial playbook for perpetuating it.

Tobacco kills approximately 22,000 Sri Lankans every year. A death toll that rivals many infectious diseases yet attracts insufficient political attention. Eighty percent of global tobacco-related deaths occur in developing nations like ours, and this proportion continues to rise alarmingly. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned as far back as 2008 that tobacco could claim one billion lives by 2100. Sri Lanka's Health Ministry under every government continued to prioritise the legality of cigarette sales over public health, citing smoker autonomy; a capitulation to commercial interests that demands urgent reversal.

During the twentieth century alone, tobaccorelated deaths exceeded 100 million globally, with 80 million in developing countries. Today, tobacco kills one person every 18 seconds, and annual mortality continues to rise by 4.9 percent. These are not abstract statistics, they represent families shattered, breadwinners lost, and households plunged into poverty by a preventable epidemic.