Tobacco is the most widely used sacred plant in the Americas, and its commercial afterlife has made that almost invisible.
The ritual species is generally Nicotiana rustica, which carries several times the nicotine of the Nicotiana tabacum grown for cigarettes, and the ways it is taken are correspondingly unfamiliar. Across South America it is drunk as a syrup or a juice, taken as snuff, licked as a thick paste, applied to the eyes, and blown in smoke over a patient or an object. Johannes Wilbert documented doses and routes across the continent that would be dangerous to anyone unaccustomed to them, and which produce effects nothing like smoking: nausea, collapse, and states the tradition understands as death and return.
In South American shamanism tobacco is frequently the practitioner's primary plant rather than an accessory to another. The shaman is fed by tobacco, the spirits are fed by tobacco, and the smoke is the medium through which work is done.
In North America the role is different but no less central. Tobacco is the standard offering: placed before taking a plant, a stone or an animal, given when asking something of a person, buried, burned or left. It is what makes an exchange proper.
Its presence at the opening of a ceremony involving any other plant is close to universal in the Americas, which is why it belongs in this atlas ahead of almost everything else here.