Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9409010052
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: D7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CALVIN WOODWARD ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CLINTON, MD LENGTH: Medium
Even with suburbs pressing in and tobacco under assault in Washington less than 15 miles away, that ``bewitching vegetable'' still carpets the land.
``I've been thinking about giving it up some day,'' farmer Paul Goddard says of his crop. But switching from lucrative tobacco can be as hard as kicking a pack-a-day habit.
It has long been that way for a leaf loved and hated across time.
The world has hungered for North American tobacco since pre-Colonial European traders discovered its use among natives of the New World.
Tobacco helped finance the American Revolution, became a symbol of women's emancipation and gained such a reputation as a cure-all in the 1500s and 1600s that doctors blew smoke into patients' intestines with bellows.
Generations have become ``bound in aromatic chains,'' as a writer put it ages before Washington bureaucrats began dryly debating nicotine's addictive properties.
``This herbe, or rather weede, seemeth not voide of venome and thereby seemeth an enemy to the life of man,'' a critic said some 360 years before the U.S. surgeon general linked tobacco to fatal disease.
A 17th century Turkish ruler was said to have beheaded subjects caught with tobacco, his way of saying Thank You for Not Smoking. These days, smokers might feel they've lost their heads, so socially and medically unacceptable has smoking become.
Places to light up shrink by the week, and the Food and Drug Administration is weighing whether it can regulate cigarettes and take so much nicotine out of them they would lose their grip on the smoker.
For all their gains - among them the warning labels on packs, the 1971 ban on TV and radio advertising, smoking bans in many buildings - tobacco foes still face a huge enterprise that pumps $50 billion or more into the economy.
Despite a 20 percent drop in production over 20 years, the U.S. tobacco industry leads the world in exports, remains a pillar of agriculture, and markets aggressively for customers - spending almost $4 billion in 1990 for promotion and advertising.
The anti-smoking clatter has been greeted like the buzz of locusts on the farms of Maryland, where tobacco was the main cash crop from the 1600s to the 1980s, when fruits and vegetables surpassed it.
Tobacco is a tough plant, says Goddard, who farms 25 acres of it with his brother. ``It will wait for the rain.'' Not like the finicky tomatoes that swell and split with too much water or languish with too little.
Still grown mainly on small family farms, tobacco promises a decent payoff for people who can stand the backbreaking work - the flashing of knives and spearing of plants in a harvest-by-hand little changed from the old days.
The yield is astronomically higher than for most other crops - in 1992, farm receipts for tobacco averaged $3,890 per acre compared with $200 per acre of corn or soybeans.
But it's clear Goddard, a nonsmoker, prefers days like this one, selling green beans, onions and cantaloupes almost as big as basketballs at a stand stuffed with produce from his nontobacco acreage.
``Sometimes you have mixed emotions, you really do,'' he says. ``Nobody takes a gun to their heads and makes them smoke it. But I know what the doctors are saying.''
Ambivalence has been a hallmark of tobacco. It is evident not only among some growers, but among governments that nag people to quit while supporting tobacco prices, making tobacco loans and reaping tobacco taxes - more than $11 billion worth in 1992 for Washington, D.C., the states and communities.
Plenty of smokers, of course, have also been torn. In a 1915 Penn State publication, G.L. Hemminger argued both sides:
``Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
``It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
``It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
``It takes the hair right off your bean.
``It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen.
``I like it.''
by CNB