Great 'natural' imports ... ?

TOBACCO: When Sir Walter Raleigh brought tobacco from America to England, it was deemed to be a wonder drug.  But several centuries later tobacco is the cause of lung cancer and multi-million $ in health care.  


"In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh helped found the infamous settlement on Roanoke Island in Virginia. Although this colony was short-lived and no one quite knows for sure what happened to its residents, Roanoke did leave at least one lasting legacy that continues to influence our lives to day. It was at Roanoke that Europeans first had experience with tobacco. Thus, our multi-billion dollar cigarette industry (and its effect on the general health) is the direct product of the efforts of those early settlers on Roanoke Island to popularize the drug in Europe. http://socyberty.com/history/how-sir-walter-raleigh-helped-introduce-tobacco-to-europeans/#ixzz20ynzQ1AV

POTATO: And Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with importing the potato. Another wonder produce that helped to improve people's diets, until in 1845 there was a potato blight that changed teh face of Ireland forever.

"During the summer of 1845, a "blight of unusual character" devastated Ireland's potato crop, the basic staple in the Irish diet. A few days after potatoes were dug from the ground, they began to turn into a slimy, decaying, blackish "mass of rottenness." Expert panels convened to investigate the blight's cause suggested that it was the result of "static electricity" or the smoke that billowed from railroad locomotives or the "mortiferous vapours" rising from underground volcanoes. In fact, the cause was a fungus that had traveled from Mexico to Ireland.

"Famine fever"--cholera, dysentery, scurvy, typhus, and infestations of lice--soon spread through the Irish countryside. Observers reported seeing children crying with pain and looking "like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones." Masses of bodies were buried without coffins, a few inches below the soil.

Over the next ten years, more than 750,000 Irish died and another 2 million left their homeland for Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Within five years, the Irish population was reduced by a quarter.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/irish_potato_famine.cfm/

MORPHINE & OPIUM: Although used for millennia, Opium and morphine did not become problems until the 19th century in England and in China. Initially it was used as medication, but abuse soon caught on. Today, of course along with cocaine, these drugs are the root cause of a lot of crime in most Western countries.
http://wiredintorecovery.org/articles/entry/8932/historical-perspectives-opium-morphine-and-heroin/

TEA: When English merchants brought tea from China to England in the latter part of the 17th Century, it slowly grew to be such a great drink that housewives did not trust their maids to look after the cupboard where it was stored but rather kept the key themselves. Sadly, along with silk and porcelain, England found that the trade balance was impossible to sustain as the Chinese apparently desired nothing in return apart from silver.  This led to the infamous Opium Wars and the quasi-colonialisation of China and the 'century of humiliation'.
http://chindia-alert.org/why-is-chindia-a-big-deal/ and http://chindia-alert.org/historical-perspectives/china-20c-timeline/

Once again we see the Law of Unintended Consequences at play.