Talk:Tobacco in the United States

I was looking for information about Tobacco in the United States hoping to find a history up to modern times as well as information of growing, cultivation, climate and states where it is grown as a cash crop. Additional information about the plant itself and the specific north american varieties of tobacco would be rather relevant too. Information about the economic impact as a result of the recent end of Federal subsidies on Tobacco farming would be nice. Instead I see anti-smoking information about one of the potential end uses of the crop that is already very well covered in other articles with correctly labeled categories. This article seems to contain only information that is more directly related to smoking than Tobacco itself.

Future direction of article

 * 1) So...I'm not really sure I understand the intended use for this article. Right now it looks like either a WP:Category page or an over-enthusiastic disambiguation page to me.  Do you want this to be an overview article, with summary paragraphs of other topics that link to full articles?  (e.g. history, culture, bans, taxation)  Or is it just going to remain as a list of pages?  Because if it's just gonna stay as a list then I think this needs to be redone as a disambiguation page with some cleanup to remove links that are too specific.  Thoughts?
 * 2) Also, I saw on History of commercial tobacco in the United States that a Main article: link was added that points to Tobacco in the United States. My understanding of Template:Main is that you use it when you're writing a summary and you want to link to the sub-article that describes it in more detail.  In this case, the usage is backwards... it's linking from an amazingly detailed sub-article to an overview list.  Should it really be there?

I see the article creator has been around Wikipedia a lot longer than I have, so I hope to get some feedback from him first to see what he thinks about these issues.

Joren (talk) 09:51, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * I created the article when I was tidying up Category:Tobacco. I am no expert on the subject so I threw a bunch of links up hoping another editor would run with it. It seems that the maint template did not attract any editors. This article highlights one of the common failings of WP where an article is created on a very specific topic but there are is no overview article linking all those specific topics. Tobacco in New Zealand is an example of where this article should. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 19:21, 20 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the reply! I see what you mean about wanting an overview article; I think the summary-paragraph approach might be the best model to follow here.  I particularly like having a place where users can see what the major companies are, what the major legislation is, etc; i.e. have an overview with enough information to paint a general picture while leaving the pixels to the sub-articles, know what I mean?  I don't have any expertise either, unfortunately... if I get inspired and have a chunk of time I'll see what I can do.Joren (talk) 04:22, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Article is useful. Thanks for discussion about the history of the article. In my opinion this is best place for the child labor in the tobacco fields in the USA. . Watti Renew (talk) 11:44, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Map
The map at File:Cigarette Tax Per State.png needs addingand explaining. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 05:39, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Jan 2019 removal
I've taken out two sentences which i cannot make sense of for that reason. The first defined tobacco as a natural plant ~ what would an unnatural plant be? ~ and talked about "Indian Doctors of The United States", which parses, but doesn't seem to carry any specific or exact or clear meaning. The second was rather nebulous and any information in it belongs elsewhere in the article. Happy days, LindsayHello 12:26, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

What Happened to the History in the History Section?
There is coverage of the tobacco industry and some of its milestones from the 1620s to the 1690s, and then the next section is about 2016 or 2009. What happened to any mention of the 1700s, 1800s or 1900s? It seems that was most significant in what happened to the tobacco industry happened during that missing span of time... Stevenmitchell (talk) 08:43, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Number of deaths
From the article: "Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, accounting for approximately 443,000 deaths." But when you click the link to the CDC page, it says 480,000 deaths. So which is it -- 443 or 448? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.163.124.210 (talk) 03:06, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

duplication re Colonial America
To avoid overlap I moved the colonial material to the existing article on Tobacco in the American colonies Rjensen (talk) 11:47, 29 July 2023 (UTC)