SOURCE: “Economic Interests and the Vindication of Deviance: Tobacco in Seventeenth Century Europe,” in The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 1979, pp. 171-82.

In the following essay, Best demonstrates how in the seventeenth century “powerful persons and agencies” who had a political and economic stake in the tobacco trade between Europe and America succeeded in transforming tobacco into an acceptable product despite the persistence of social disapproval.

Sociologists who analyze the invention of deviant labels typically emphasize the importance of differences in morality. They argue that new deviant labels are created when reform movements (or moral crusades) point out the existence of previously unnoticed moral failings; the reformers (or moral entrepreneurs) lead others to define some behavior as indecent, disgusting, or immoral. Such explanations are particularly common for laws against drugs and other “crimes without victims.” Whereas laws against theft and other crimes with victims can be seen as...