The earliest company producing rolling papers was Pay-Pay, formed in Spain in 1703. The known history of cigarette rolling papers can be said to begin with Alexandro Rizlette de Cramptone Lacroix, the progenitor of the Lacroix family which was eventually to create and, for centuries, control the RizLa+ rolling papers company. The story goes that the Frenchman Lacroix, in the year 1532, traded a bottle of Champagne for rolling papers that French soldiers were carrying back with them from Spain. He then copied that paper (just like the French does to this very day). Rolling Papers were invented in Spain, not France. The French didn’t trade tobacco with the new world until a lifetime after the Spanish already were.
Many think that the joint was first used in Mexico about 1856. It was a pharmacist at the University of Guadalajara who first mentioned that laborers were mixing cannabis with tobacco in their cigarettes.