Summary:
On October 15, 1492, Christopher Columbus was offered dried tobacco leaves as a gift from the American Indians that he encountered.
Soon after, sailors brought tobacco back to Europe, and the plant was being grown all over Europe.
The major reason for tobacco's growing popularity in Europe was its supposed healing properties. Europeans believed that tobacco could cure almost anything, from bad breath to cancer! (How ironic)

Tobacco in the form of leaf, snuff, chew, smoking tobacco, cigars, and factory-made cigarettes has often been called the United States' oldest industry. Since its introduction to Europeans by American Indians, no other agricultural crop has been more thoroughly entwined with the history of the United States than the growing, processing, and manufacturing of tobacco. In addition, no one product has enjoyed deeper ties to the colonization of the New World and to the expansion of international trade between the New World and Europe, Asia, and the Middle East over the last four centuries. The prospect of farming tobacco and selling it to England brought the earliest British colonists to Virginia and Maryland.

The arrival of Europeans in the New World introduced themto tobacco, and by the early seventeenth century commercial tobacco became a driving force of colonization in North America and the Caribbean. The Jamestown colony in Virginia owed its very survival to tobacco. A cash crop requiring very intensive labor from planting to harvesting to curing, its cultivation created a demand for conscripted labor, first in the form of indentured European servants on family farms and soon afterward in the form of African slave labor on large landholdings. Two types of tobacco leaf were grown, principally for pipe smoking and, later on, snuff. They were both dark varieties: the more expensive leaf grown in Virginia and the stronger, cheaper orinoco leaf grown in Maryland. In England, demand for tobacco rapidly grew and by 1628 the Chesapeake colonies exported 370,000 pounds annually to England, procuring substantial tax revenues for the state, which overcame early Crown hostility to tobacco cultivation and consumption. Tobacco farming spread quickly to North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia. In 1700 exports of raw leaf from the British Chesapeake colonies reached 37 million pounds and by the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 upward of 100 million pounds. At the end of the eighteenth century, the main producers of tobacco were the United States, Brazil, and Cuba. The tobacco industry did have a small decline after the American Revolution but it still made large amounts of profit.