Despite Pressures, Tobacco Remains an Anchor of the American South : Economy: Sentiment against smoking is strong even in areas where the crop is grown. But financial realities keep the plant a hero, not a villain.

Even in the South, where it’s home grown, tobacco feels the tightening noose of America’s disapproval.

“No Smoking” ordinances pass in North Carolina cities built by cigarettes and in Jacksonville, Fla., a cigar-making center. Legislators reserve fervent rhetoric for tobacco tax debates. Growers bridle at the finger-pointing, and smokers feel like “second-class citizens.”

Nonetheless, folks in the tobacco belt cite three main reasons why they are not even thinking about giving in to the pressure all around--history, a market abroad that increases as U.S. consumption shrinks and, most of all, one significant figure: about $3,500 an acre.

In the war between Southern anti-smoking forces and the tobacco industry, there may be more noise from the battlefield these days, but both sides seem to be winning.

“Sure, it kind of gets on everybody’s nerves,” grower Jack Turner said of the criticism, which is rooted in decades of research linking smoking with lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses. One federal estimate puts the health cost of smoking at $52 billion a year.

Turner stood in a sloping field near Athens, Ky., where three crews loaded green tobacco leaves, his latest crop, for barns where they’d cure to the color of toast. Turner grew his first crop at 19; he’s 56 now. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather grew burley tobacco, and his son works with him now.

“You feel bad that some people’ll tell you it’ll hurt you,” he said, noting that even preachers get in on the act. “They preach against alcohol and sin of all kinds. If they preach against smoking, that’s their job.”

But it’s in excess--not in merely drinking or smoking--that danger lies, Turner said. “Anything you do too much of’ll kill you. The Bible tells you--I don’t know the exact words of the quote, but it’s about self-indulgence.”

His response is like that of many others in the Tobacco Belt: It’s a legal crop that provides thousands of jobs, and smoking is a matter of free choice. Besides all that, Nicotiana tabacum, which saved the Virginia colony from economic ruin four centuries ago, is a money-maker.

On average, a tobacco farmer grosses more than $3,500 an acre, said Walker Merryman of the Tobacco Institute, the industry group in Washington. By contrast, he said, an acre of peanuts brings $677, corn $261, wheat $125.

Some $14.5 billion in wages and benefits are paid to the 701,000 people directly involved in growing, manufacturing and supplying tobacco products, according to the institute. Most production is in the Southeast, with North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky the top producers.

While criticism from anti-smoking groups “is bound to get to you after a while,” said James L. Jones, an agronomist with Virginia Tech’s cooperative extension service, few farmers are switching crops. “It’s a way of life and the way they make their living. I don’t think they consider themselves out to do in society.”

Hard times in the farm economy have made many feel they have no choice but to keep growing tobacco. Sandra Copeland, who raises the leaf as a sideline to her family’s dairy business in White County, Tenn., said she may increase her tobacco acreage next year.

“Now, with the milk market, tobacco is not supplemental--it’s mandatory,” she said.

Indeed, those in tobacco country who forget the crop’s entrenched position in the economy do so at their peril.

“I did not feel like what we were doing would hurt tobacco farmers,” said Emily Manning, a school board member in Duplin County, North Carolina’s seventh-ranking tobacco-producing county, with 19.6 million pounds last year.

She was speaking of her proposal that teachers and students be prohibited from smoking in school buildings. Approved by the board in July, the proposal lasted a month as resentful tobacco farmers quickly threatened to retaliate by killing a $30-million school bond issue. The board retreated, allowing school employees to smoke.

Manning was surprised by the backlash, but for farmer Steve Grady, the board was “turning its back on tobacco” despite the taxes growers pay and the crop’s place in the local economy.

“I agree kids shouldn’t smoke and should be educated to the hazards of it,” said Grady. “But for the county government to tell adults what to do is another thing. . . . It made me ill that they don’t know what feeds them.”

Timothy Mann, president of the cigar maker Jno. H. Swisher & Sons Inc., made a similar argument in a letter to Jacksonville, Fla., Mayor Ed Austin, complaining about a new smoking ban in city buildings.

“Jacksonville is the home of our company, the world’s largest cigar company,” he wrote. “We believe the city should be supportive of its hometown industries.”

But in an indication of the growing political clout of the tobacco industry’s opponents, even in its home region, the mayor’s office said no change is contemplated.

“The South is moving in the right direction,” said Cliff Douglas of the American Lung Assn., which lobbies for anti-smoking measures. He noted that a “watershed” 1989 ordinance restricting smoking in public areas survived a repeal referendum in Greensboro, N.C., “right in the heart of tobacco country.”

“I think things have picked up quite a bit down there,” agreed Peter Fisher, of the Tobacco-Free America Legislative Clearinghouse in Washington, D.C.

Laws like Greensboro’s and a public-smoking statute passed last year in Virginia can be cited to help lobbying efforts in other regions, Fisher said: “We’d say, ‘Look, if they can do it down there. . . . “‘

In the last decade, public smoking restrictions also have been approved in Charlotte, Wilmington and Chapel Hill, N.C. Raleigh, the state capital, recently put new restrictions on vending machines in an attempt to curb smoking by minors.

Restrictions also passed in at least seven Alabama localities, seven in Georgia, four in Louisiana, six in South Carolina, two in Tennessee and 23 in Virginia. That’s only a fraction of the 500 or so enacted around the nation, but “it’s a start,” said Fisher.

“When people are confronted with the facts, people are receptive to the message in the South,” he said.

For years, North Carolina’s cigarette tax was the nation’s lowest, at 2 cents a pack. Last year, state lawmakers increased it to 5 cents a pack.

After the Virginia General Assembly passed its 1990 Clean Indoor Air Act that banished smoking from most public places, lawsuits quickly pressed for tough enforcement.

In Kentucky, legislator Anne Northrup has drafted two bills for the 1992 General Assembly session: One would tax tobacco to pay for research into alternative crops for farmers, and the other would raise the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18.

Northrup does not expect the bills to pass. “The purpose is to raise the issue,” she said. “What are we doing to prepare for the day . . . when there will not be the demand for Kentucky tobacco that we have today?”

In South Carolina’s Legislature, several attempts in recent sessions to increase the state tax on cigarettes have been turned back.

Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr., speaking generally of anti-tobacco efforts, has said, “Those people who would try to pull a leg off the stool will soon find the stool is going to fall.”

But Michael Jarrett, who heads the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, said 4,000 South Carolinians die each year of smoking-related diseases and estimated the cost of treating the diseases equals the economic impact of growing tobacco.

“Tobacco is big business. But it’s a business we can’t afford,” he said.

Both South and North Carolina are participating in new education efforts to stop smoking, the latter receiving $8.5 million and the former $5.5 million in federal funds.

South Carolina, however, also is one of five states in tobacco country (there are 20 nationwide) that have some form of “smokers’ rights” law, joining Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia. And smokers’ rights bills that failed in the Georgia Legislature last year are expected to be re-introduced this year.

The Tobacco Institute’s Merryman acknowledges that cigarette purchases in the United States have declined “slowly and steadily” in recent years. From a peak of 133 packs in 1978, U.S. per capita consumption fell to 104 packs in the latest survey, for 1986, he said.

Though consumption rates for Southern states also declined, the rates for all states in the region except Mississippi (101.8) remained above the national average; about one-third of Southern adults still smoke, compared to a national average of 28%.

But the industry has vastly increased cigarette and raw tobacco sales overseas, from almost $1.8 billion in 1980 to almost $5.7 billion in 1990. Farmers quickly quote the export boom figures when asked about anti-smoking critics and declines in domestic smoking.

“One thing we really have to do is continue to reassure individuals in the industry, from seed lot to sales counter. We have to point out that the companies will probably buy just about every stalk of tobacco grown,” Merryman said.

Though Fisher and others said the goal of a “smoke-free society” by the year 2000 also applies to the South, Merryman scoffed, “Not in our lifetimes.”

A common sentiment in South is that tobacco growing will outlast its critics.

“Tobacco will be around for a long time,” said Bob Hornback, who raises the crop near Shelbyville, Ky. Hornback’s grandfather did too--and his granddaughters grow tobacco for 4-H projects.