Governments, consumers, companies, and tobacco addiction: the Spanish case (1880s to 1930s).

Nowadays governments in the developed world are restricting tobacco consumption and courts are acting against obacco companies. The impression is that only consumers are addicts and only companies are responsible for spreading tobacco consumption. However, governments are also dependent on tobacco and also responsible for encouraging its use. This article deals with the period when tobacco started to be a mass consumption product in many countries, mainly in the form of cigarettes. By that time, the tobacco industry was organised either under a fiscal monopoly or under a highly taxed competitive market. So to understand how smoking became an universally consumed product, it is necessary to review the role of governments in this process. This role became more evident when the state became involved in any or all of the stages of tobacco businesses (plantation, purchase, production and/or retailing), usually under a fiscal monopoly, as was the case of France, Italy, Japan and Spain. In these countries, the different governments adopted active policies to promote tobacco consumption, increasing both their own dependency on tobacco revenues and people's addiction to tobacco. Spain established a tobacco fiscal monopoly in 1637, being the first European nation to do so. 2 In 1887 the liberal Spanish government leased the management of the tobacco fiscal monopoly to a private company called Compafiia Arrendataria de Tabacos (CAT), which promoted and increased tobacco consumption. One could have predicted that the addiction and, especially the responsibility of Spanish government in making tobacco a basic consumption product, decreased when the management was transferred to this private company. However, this article shows that this was far from being the case. The Spanish government only privatised the management of the tobacco fiscal monopoly in order to increase consumption and revenues. The CAT had the capital to invest in the modernisation that Spanish tobacco industry needed to serve mass consumption with mass production techniques.