he 19th century French auteur Alexandre Dumas of Count of Monte Cristo fame smoked pot. A lot of it. But Dumas’s enigmatic hero, Edmund Dantès’s taste in tobacco was suitably recherché: he smoked cigars. The story of his doomed romance with Mercedes is a favourite with Cuban torcedors (rollers), and the cigar, one of the world’s largest selling brands, is named after Dantès. So popular is the novel that it is still read out in
