Last week's passage of a sweeping new bill designed to bring tobacco products, once and for all, under the US government's regulatory umbrella is destined to become law, under the auspices of a left-leaning, public-health-minded legislature and a phenomenally popular president (himself a struggling smoker/nonsmoker). Thus ends a 30-year struggle between the forces of reason and the forces of Big Tobacco, in which my home state of North Carolina has been firmly in the pocket.
For decades, using a crack squad of lobbyists, the congressional delegations of tobacco-producing states and millions and millions of dollars of political action committee money, Big Tobacco has fought this inevitable day. And even they knew it was inevitable.
North Carolina grows a lot of tobacco, and it used to grow a lot more. Back in the mists of time we produced more cigarettes than any other state and most other countries. At the heart of this nicotine empire was the ability to grow high-quality Brightleaf tobacco in the fertile soil of North Carolina's coastal plain and piedmont regions.
This big, lustrous leaf isn't an easy crop to grow. It's commonly known as a "13 month a year" crop, due to having to prep the next crop before the last one is fully harvested. It takes skill and equipment and brute labour to produce the high-quality leaf. In late August you can still drive down the back roads of even the most urbanised counties and see leaves lying forlornly on the side of the road where they've fallen from trucks on their way to or from the curing sheds. There's a whole tobacco growing culture that has been the backbone of North Carolina agriculture since colonial times. It's not hard to see why.
The reason is very simple: when a North Carolina farmer plants corn, soybeans or wheat, he can expect a return on his investment in the $200-300 per acre range for his efforts, after expenses are taken out. With a field of tobacco, a farmer can make around $5,000 an acre. Only marijuana has a higher cash-crop value per acre than tobacco. The profits from tobacco have built our roads, our schools, our great universities – Duke Univeristy, in Durham, is named for tobacco magnate JB Duke, who ran the American Tobacco Company.
The tobacco industry brought a lot of tax revenue to state coffers, as well. Add in the industrial development that tobacco processing and cigarette manufacturers have brought to the Carolina hinterlands, and you'll see why so many people here are so reluctant to let the crop most associated with NC agriculture get clobbered with legislation.
Of course, Big Tobacco isn't nearly as big as it used to be, and there are fewer and fewer farmers who grow it every year. As much as it was associated with agriculture here, historically, the number of people who can actually claim to be tobacco farmers is dwindling, making it harder and harder to prop up political support.
Those who try to use the "heritage" argument against regulation here are facing the legacy of their own pro-tobacco campaigns: for decades the right to grow tobacco was a jealously guarded and highly lucrative one. Whole families in rural Carolina lived off of a few sparse acres and the cheque they got from selling their rationed right to grow tobacco to better organised and equipped farmers.
Those payments put clothes on backs, food on tables and kids through college. But after the allotment system went the way of the eight-track player, those same families quickly moved on. Cheap, imported tobacco from the third world and decreased demand have lowered the price over the years and required all sorts of cleverly designed subsidies to keep even the best farmers in business. As cigarette factories closed and consolidated and became more mechanised, the number of tobacco workers likewise declined dramatically.
The writing has been on the wall for a while, and the number of voices in the centre of the state, where medicine and pharmaceuticals have become the major industry, have begun to erode the long-established tradition of NC as a tobacco state. The tobacco farmers themselves have known for a while that the gravy train of cigarette butts will inevitably end. Regulating nicotine as a drug, their worst nightmare, was also inevitable as the mounting medical evidence and public health concerns made the trite excuses employed by big tobacco – "trade secrets", "competitive advantages on the global marketplace", "freedom of personal choice" – sound more and more hollow to legislators and the general public. Tobacco Road will come to an end.
But the fact is, even with regulation by the food and drug administration, we won't see the end of tobacco in North Carolina. It will transform from an agricultural commodity to a highly taxed and regulated luxury good, but it will not fade altogether. Only out-right banning would eliminate the crop. Like silk, spices, coffee and chocolate, there will always be demand for high-quality product regardless of the regulation. And North Carolina's Brightleaf is among the best in the world.
In the meantime, farmers are investigating alternatives or preparing to ride out the coming storm and hope for the best. Some are even looking at going organic to ply the luxury trade, switching to exotic crops or even looking forward to the day when marijuana is legalised and commercialised – sources tell me that an acre of pot would make the average farmer $20,000 an acre, and be a lot less of a pain than growing tobacco.
But the hey-day of King Tobacco is a quickly receding memory, leaving behind only a legacy of public buildings, fine academic institutions ... and millions of graves of cancer victims.