At the end of the 16th century tobacco was introduced into Morocco from West Africa, setting off a debate on the religious and legal status of smoking. Social and intellectual historians of the Middle East such as Rudi Matthee, James Grehan, Lutz Berger and ‘Abd al-Aziz ‘Abdallah Batran have discussed the numerous treatises for and against smoking written by scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries both in terms of the history of consumption in the Middle East and in terms of the response of the Islamic legal tradition to a previously unknown drug. In this paper I return to the smoking debates with the aim of exploring how the many 17th century participants who debated the issue drew on medical knowledge in their construction of both the human body and human consciousness. While the debate on smoking raged around the Islamic Mediterranean, I focus on Moroccan authors from the 17th century, while referring to later additions to the debate as well. I draw both on published accounts, such as those of the rebel Ibn Abi Mahalli (d. 1022/1613) from his Rihla, in which he included a long defense of smoking, drawing in his turn on the work of famed scholar of West Africa, Ahmad Baba al-Tinbukti (d. 1036/1623), as well as on works still in manuscript, such as the treatises of ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad al-Fasi (d. 1036/1626-27) and Muhammad al-‘Arabi b. Yusuf al-Fasi (d. 1052/1641-42). I describe how these authors drew both on the definitions of intoxication, inebriation, and anesthesia laid out both by physicians and the Maliki legal scholar al-Qarafi (d. 684/1285). I conclude by showing how they both debated ways in which consciousness could be altered and also offered us a window onto how Muslim scholars employed medicine as an authoritative discourse within Islamic jurisprudence and sought to discipline the body and its appetites.