The colonizers relied on tobacco as a profit-making commodity, which the Indigenous peoples had invented and used only sparingly for ceremonial and medicinal purposes. Within a few years of exporting tobacco to Europe, a burgeoning addicted market flourished, making tobacco a lucrative industrial monocrop for Virginia planters. They had come in search of gold but grew wealthy off a toxic and addictive drug, the beginning of European and later US drug trafficking mixed with wars in Asia.
