If he knew..

[Eruanna]

Now, doesn't that just douse your interest in drink.

Well, I never was very fond of beer. But douse my interest in a nice drop of Australian red? Never

I just wanted to add something to the debate about tobacco or 'weed'. I knew that I had read something, somewhere, about Tolkien and his attitude to drugs. After digging around in my various bits and pieces I came up with an article on Tolkien that I cut from a Sunday paper just before the FotR was released:

' Some conjectured about the hobbits' taste for 'pipe-weed'; Tolkien was outraged by suggestions he had written the books under the influence of drugs; ."He would fizz with fury because, to him, drugs were abhorrent." His assistant Joy Hill recalled. "He would be hard pressed to take an aspirin. "

If that was the case then he would hardly have intended pipe-weed to be anything other than tobacco.