Who says history books are boring? Syphilis would go on to infect a veritable who's who of Europe, from Baudelaire to Gauguin to Nietzsche, not to mention numerous family members of the famously infertile Tudor and Valois families, meaning that syphilis may be responsible for many of those miserably boring dynastic power struggles of post-Columbus Europe. Anyway, nothing against syphilis, but it pales in comparison to the devastation wrought by old world diseases arriving in the new world, but the new world did have one gift for the old world that was pretty destructive. Tobacco. Oh, it's time for the open letter, and there's been a costume change? That doesn't bode well. An open letter to tobacco.