From Chapter 3:
It is uncertain when licences were first issued for the sale of tobacco. Probably they were issued in London some time before it was considered necessary to license dealers in other parts of the country. Among the Municipal Records of Exeter is the following note: "358. Whitehall, 31 August 1633. The Lords of the Council to the Chamber. 'Whereas his Ma^tie to prevent the excesse of the use of tobacco, and to set an order to those that regrate and sell or utter it by retayle, who observe noe reasonable rates or prizes [prices], nor take care that it be wholsome for men's bodyes that shall use it,' has caused letters to be sent to the chief Officers of Citties and towns requiring them to certify 'in what places it might be fitt to suffer ye retayleing of tobacco and how many be licenced in each of those places to use trade'; and the City of Exeter having made a return the Lords sent a list of those which are to be licensed, and order that no others be permitted to sell."

From Chapter 5:
The belief in the prophylactic power of tobacco was, however, very generally held. When Mr. Samuel Pepys on June 7, 1665, for the first time saw several houses marked with the ominous red cross, and the words "Lord, have mercy upon us" chalked upon the doors, he felt so ill at ease that he was obliged to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew. There is nothing to show that Pepys even smoked, which considering his proficiency in the arts of good-fellowship, is perhaps a little surprising. Defoe, in his fictitious but graphic "Journal of the Plague Year in London," says that the sexton of one of the London parishes, who personally handled a large number of the victims, never had the distemper at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and was sexton of the parish to the time of his death. This man, according to Defoe, "never used any preservative against the infection other than holding garlic and rue in his mouth, and smoking tobacco."