USA
Nicotine is still nicotine, no matter the delivery system, and it’s still bad for you
House Call: Nicotine is still nicotine, no matter the delivery system, and it’s still bad for you
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/sep/25/house-call-nicotine-is-still-nicotine-no-matter-th/
E-cigarettes have been available in the United States for just more than 10 years now. In that time, they have really taken off and are becoming increasingly popular. They are frequently marketed as a safe alternative to smoking and other tobacco products, and sometimes as a tool to help you stop smoking all together. I’d like to have a look at these claims and other issues surrounding vaping.
Because e-cigarettes are so new, we don’t have solid information about their long-term health effects, but we can make educated predictions from what we know about lung damage from other types of chemical exposure. E-cigarettes may reduce your exposure to the harmful chemicals connected to smoking tobacco, but they are exposing you to other harmful chemicals. These are connected to the breakdown of the chemicals (nicotine, propylene glycol, glycerin, and flavoring compounds) during heating. The vapor from e-cigarettes goes deep into the lungs and contains a soup of toxic compounds from the heating of the fluid to 450 degrees F or higher, breaking down and allowing the recombination of the component chemicals into an enormous variety of chemicals. These compounds are much more likely than not to damage the lungs, even in nicotine-free vaping.
As a tool to help a person stop smoking, e-cigarettes produce mixed results. There are a few reports of people successfully quitting the habit using e-cigarettes, but there are far more cases where people simply end up using them to replace tobacco use in situations where they cannot smoke. Sometimes people even end up consuming more nicotine per day than they were before they started using e-cigarettes. Another issue with e-cigarettes that I was surprised to learn about was injury due to battery faults. Every year, there are people who are injured by exploding e-cigarette batteries.
A big problem I’ve seen with e-cigarettes has to do with young people. Many of the flavors offered are enticing to young people and research has shown that young people who vape are five times more likely to try smoking cigarettes than those who do not vape.
With the invention of nicotine delivery systems such as e-cigarettes, more research is being done on the effects of nicotine exposure that does not involve tobacco. The news is not good. In 2015, a group of scientists reviewed 90 articles reporting on the effects of nicotine that excluded exposure through smoking. Even without exposure to the tar and other chemicals from tobacco smoke, exposure to nicotine is harmful to your body. That said, there is debate in the public health community about e-cigs. In England, they are being recommended alongside nicotine patches, gum, etc., as an aid for quitting smoking. While I am not ready to recommend them, I agree that it is hard to believe that they are worse than burning compost and sucking the smoke into your lungs. Cough. Gag.
As I have written in previous columns, nicotine damages your cardiovascular system and puts you at increased risk of strokes, heart attacks and arterial disease. Nicotine makes wounds heal more slowly, so if you are injured or have to have surgery, your recovery time will be longer than it ought to be. Nicotine in any form increases the risk of getting cancer.
My advice is if you don’t vape, don’t start. If you smoke cigarettes and want to stop, don’t use e-cigarettes as a way to wean yourself off of nicotine. Talk with your doctor about trying one of several proven methods of smoking cessation and give one a try.
Dr. Bob Riggs is a family medicine physician practicing at Kaiser Permanente’s Riverfront Medical Center. His column appears biweekly in The Spokesman-Review.
Pulmonary toxicity of e-cigarettes
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28522559
Abstract
Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes or e-cigs) are designed to heat and aerosolize mixtures of vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, nicotine, and flavoring additives, thus delivering nicotine by inhalation in the absence of combustion. These devices were originally developed to facilitate smoking cessation and have been available in the United States for over a decade. Since 2010, e-cig use has expanded rapidly, especially among adolescents, despite a paucity of short- and long-term safety data. Patterns of use have shifted to include never smokers and many dual users of e-cigs and combustible tobacco products. Over the last several years, research into the potential toxicities of e-cig aerosols has grown exponentially. In the interim, regulatory policymakers across the world have struggled with how to regulate an increasingly diverse array of suppliers and products, against a backdrop of strong advocacy from users, manufacturers, and tobacco control experts. Herein we provide an updated review of the pulmonary toxicity profile of these devices, summarizing evidence from cell culture, animal models, and human subjects. We highlight the major gaps in our current understanding, emphasize the challenges confronting the scientific and regulatory communities, and identify areas that require more research in this important and rapidly evolving field.
Big tobacco bullies the global south. Trade deals are their biggest weapon
The industry has a long history of using trade to force their products into new markets. This has led to at least a 5% increase in cigarette deaths
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/17/big-tobacco-trade-deals-new-markets-bat
Cigarette packets often carry the warning to “protect children: don’t make them breathe your smoke”. In 2014, the Kenyan government attempted to do just that – banning the sale of single cigarettes, banning smoking in vehicles with a child and keeping the tobacco industry out of initiatives aimed at children and young people.
But as the Guardian reported last week, British American Tobacco, in an effort to keep Kenyans breathing their smoke, fought the regulations on the grounds that they “constitute an unjustifiable barrier to international trade”.
In fact, big tobacco has a long history of using trade and investment rules to force their products on markets in the global south and attack laws and threaten lawmakers that attempt to control tobacco use.
Back in the 1980s, as cigarette consumption fell off in North America and western Europe, US trade officials worked aggressively to grant American companies access to markets in Asia, demanding not only the right to sell their products, but also the right to advertise, sponsor sports events and run free promotions. Smoking rates surged.
In the 1990s, World Trade Organisation agreements led to a liberalisation of the international tobacco trade, with countries reducing import tariffs on tobacco products. The impact, according to a joint study of the World Health Organisation and the World Bank, was a 5% increase in global cigarette consumption and accompanying mortality rates.
Big tobacco’s lawyers were quick to discover the value of “next generation” trade agreements. In the 1990s, Canada dropped a plain packaging initiative after US manufacturers threatened a suit using the first next-gen trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). A few years later, Philip Morris threatened Canada again after it prohibited terms such as “light” and “mild” cigarettes. Philip Morris argued it would be owed millions in compensation for damage to its brand identity.
Philip Morris was able to credibly wield this threat because of the extraordinary powers that Nafta grants international corporations: the right to sue governments in private tribunals over regulations that affect their profits.
A toxic combination of far-reaching and poorly defined “rights” for investors, eye-watering legal costs, and tribunals composed of corporate lawyers with the power to set limitless awards against governments makes investment arbitration and the modern “trade” agreement a formidable weapon to intimidate regulators.
And what big tobacco learned in the global north it has been replicating in the global south, where threats carry greater force against poorer countries that may lack the resources to see down a legal challenge.
In 2010, Philip Morris launched a $25m claim against Uruguay after it introduced graphic warnings on cigarette packs. Though Uruguay successfully defended the measure, it still faced millions in legal costs. And Philip Morris effectively won, as Costa Rica and Paraguay held off introducing similar measures.
Such are the fears around big tobacco’s aggressive use of trade and investment rules that the US-negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal featured a carve-out excluding big tobacco from investment protections – an explicit admission of the problem.
But this does not go far enough. The important thing to realise is that the problem goes beyond big tobacco. Big oil, big pharma and big mining follow the same playbook, launching investment arbitration cases to defend their business models from governments that would regulate to protect public health, the local environment or the climate.
Rather than target individual companies or sectors, we must push our governments to reform trade and investment rules that grant such extraordinary powers to corporations. That means removing special investor rights and investment courts from trade agreements. It means removing limits on the freedom of governments to protect public health, labour and human rights and the environment.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Robert Lighthizer, US trade representative, served as deputy in a Reagan administration that pressured countries to open their tobacco markets to US exporters in the 1980s.
Vice-President Mike Pence’s record includes opposing smoking regulation, taking huge campaign donations from big tobacco, and denying the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. The EU commission, meanwhile, has been criticized for its meetings with big tobacco while it was negotiating EU-US trade talks.
The good news is that from Brazil to India to Ecuador, countries are stepping away from outdated trade and investment rules. In the UK, the Labour party manifesto opposes parallel courts for multinationals and proposes to review the UK’s investment treaties.
But until we scrap the powers that we grant big tobacco and others to frustrate and bypass our laws, efforts around the world to protect public health will continue to go up in smoke.
Tobacco Industry Makes Strides in Trump’s Washington
President Trump may have promised to “drain the swamp” of lobbyists in Washington, but six months into his administration it seems the swamp is winning.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/tobacco_companies_trump_administration_20170713
A new report published in The Guardian exposes how tobacco companies are gaining significant political victories under Trump, due to lobbying efforts and the fact that tobacco business insiders have been appointed to top positions in the president’s administration. Jessica Glenza explains:
America’s largest cigarette manufacturers, Reynolds American and Altria Group, donated $1.5m to help the new president celebrate his inauguration. The donations allowed executives to dine and mingle with top administration officials and their families.
Not long after Trump promised to transfer power from Washington to the American people, a wave of spending in pursuit of influence was unleashed. In the first quarter of 2017, tobacco companies and trade associations spent $4.7m lobbying federal officials. Altria, the company behind Marlboro, hired 17 lobbying firms. Reynolds, makers of the Camel brand, hired 13, according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.
Since then, tobacco companies have been putting points on the scoreboard. Politicians and officials with deep ties to the tobacco industry now head the US health department, the top attorney’s office and the Senate, even as tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death.
Agencies in charge of reviewing large mergers let a window slip by in which they might have requested information about a $49bn merger between Reynolds and British American Tobacco (BAT). That merger, expected to be voted through by shareholders next week, will make BAT the biggest listed tobacco company in the world, and puts proceeds from eight out of 10 cigarettes sold in the US into the pockets of two companies: Altria and BAT. …
The Food and Drug Administration has twice delayed legal briefs to defend regulations of e-cigarettes, products cigarette makers say are the future. Summer deadlines for cigar and e-cigarette makers to file applications with the FDA, which regulates the products, have all been delayed by the Trump administration.
And the high-profile attorney Noel Francisco, who once argued for Reynolds that including a quit-line phone number on cigarette packs amounted to government advocacy against smoking, has been nominated for the post of solicitor general, the government’s top attorney.
The companies now securing regulatory wins are also partly responsible for Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. “For Trump’s inaugural celebration, Reynolds American gave $1m. Altria Group gave $500,000,” Glenza reports. “The US Chamber of Commerce, which has been fiercely pro-tobacco in recent years, gave $25,000.”
Prior to becoming president, Trump profited from tobacco companies, Glenza says. His past financial disclosures “show he earned up to $2.1m from tobacco holdings in diversified portfolios,” although he has since claimed (without offering any proof) to have sold his stocks.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and members of Trump’s administration including Vice President Mike Pence have deep ties to the tobacco industry. Glenza shows the links between tobacco company donations and pro-tobacco policymaking.
“Tobacco industry influence in Washington is pervasive, in many different ways,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a longtime opponent of smoking, tells The Guardian. “As in so many areas, the promise to drain the swamp has been an extraordinary hypocrisy.”
Big tobacco still sees big business in America’s poor
The US is pegged as an ‘exciting’ market, but this growth disproportionately affects the poor – including the industry’s growers and laborers
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/13/tobacco-industry-america-poor-west-virginia-north-carolina
Wheeling his oxygen tank in behind him, Leslie E Adams shuffled into the lung doctor’s exam room and let out a long string of rattling coughs. He tried to catch his breath, and coughed some more. He is 63, but looks a decade older.
“I got stage three black lung. There ain’t no stage four. I’m on my way out,” said Adams. “Now, I am slowly going down the mountain.”
The American smoking rate has plummeted since the mid-20th century. Yet somehow the US remains a growth market. That is partly because the proportion of smokers has fallen, but the overall population is rising.
Add a nation bedeviled by inequality and those public health gains, while significant, have simply not reached every corner of the country.
With low taxes on cigarettes, intermittent regulations and tobacco-friendly politicians, many US states still mirror conditions around the developing world where tobacco companies see potential.
West Virginia arguably has the highest smoking rate in the nation. In places such as Logan County, where Adams, a retired coal miner, is from, the smoking rate was 37% in 2015. The last time the national average matched that was 1974.
“I smoked Winston, I smoked Viceroy. I don’t know what I was smoking last, I couldn’t tell you,” said Adams, about brands that once belonged to the tobacco giants Reynolds and British American Tobacco (BAT). “I just smoked anything. If it blowed smoke, I smoked it.” Adams is disabled with stage three pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung.
Adams will tell you he quit, but the truth is, after seven days in the hospital on a ventilator, he still tried to smoke three times. “I smoked about a half a one, and it just – I mean your lungs – it just takes all the oxygen out of them.”
Despite smoking bans, hundred-billion-dollar settlements and a smaller proportion of the American public smoking, Reynolds’ longtime ally BAT sees the US as “an exciting opportunity for long-term growth”.
Through the years, as the population rose, the proportion of Americans who smoke shrank, but their raw numbers stayed the same, at around 45 million smokers. Further, since the 1990s, the threat of tobacco litigation diminished and regulations proved less costly than feared, leaving tobacco companies room to increase the price of a pack. In America, where cigarettes are still relatively cheap, BAT only needs to sell two packs of cigarettes to make the same profit as it would selling six in other markets.
America is “highly attractive” and the “world’s largest tobacco profit pool” outside of China, BAT’s chief executive, Nicandro Durante, said, as he described a $49bn deal to buy Reynolds American in January. The deal will make BAT the largest listed tobacco company in the world.
It also means revenue from eight out of 10 cigarettes sold in the US will be pocketed by BAT and a rival group of companies – Altria Group, a US Philip Morris company. Not since Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency has tobacco been so consolidated.
Mergers and acquisitions have allowed tobacco companies to squeeze profits from customers and the supply chain. Companies charge more for cigarettes, while union organizers say “poverty wages” keep families on the ropes. Both are trends seen worldwide.
At the same time, the typical profile of smokers has changed radically. In 50 years, smoking moved from glamorous to commonplace. Wealthy Americans have the lowest smoking rates, and the middle class has increasingly quit; instead, smoking has become a burden of the poor, less educated and marginalized.
The $49bn merger between BAT and Reynolds, expected within weeks, is the most recent act of faith by tobacco companies that selling cigarettes to Americans will remain profitable long into the future, even if the Americans who buy them can’t afford it.
***
As a young man, Adams worked in mines so tight he lay on his belly to dig. He dug his own hole for urination. When he learned mine owners handed out dust masks that didn’t work, he sued.
Adams lives in the Appalachian mountains, in a valley between two green hills affectionately called a “holler”. He and his wife had two daughters and a son, and those children had eight of their own.
He started smoking at eight, sneaking beside the creek to puff corn silk. He smoked cigarettes for 40 years. Now, after one son died of a drug overdose, unable to chase after his grandkids and still craving cigarettes, Adams questions whether cigarettes should be legal at all.
“They got so many drugs in there you couldn’t quit if you wanted to. I still crave them. If I had one right now, and I’d go to sleep, you’d hold it, I’d smoke it in my sleep,” he said. “That’s how bad you crave them.”
Dr Tom Takubo sees more than 30 patients like Adams each day at his clinic in Charleston. His is the largest pulmonology office in West Virginia. Set in the capital of a rural state in a rural region, Takubo sees patients from as far away as northern Kentucky and southern Ohio.
“Even if smoking dropped off today, I would probably be going for the rest of my career,” said Takubo.
No one is allowed to smoke in his office, but even so, the air smells faintly of cigarettes. Takubo’s patients carry the scent of the smokes they prefer. Former miners, shop owners and factory workers waiting for their appointments named L&Ms (by Altria) or Salems (by Reynolds) as their go-to brands. One woman said she smoked whatever cigarettes were cheapest, and called them “floor sweepings”.
Takubo estimates 80% of his patients see him for smoking-related diseases. “Cancer, acute bronchitis, flare-ups of their asthma,” he said, naming a few.
The national adult smoking rate dropped from 42.4% in 1965 to 16.8% in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But in West Virginia, the smoking rate in 2014 was still 26%, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. One researcher with RWJF called the rate “extraordinarily high”.
When he is not seeing patients, Takubo has another role. He is also a Republican state senator in West Virginia, putting him in the unique position of treating the same people whose cigarette taxes he hopes to raise. He is occasionally told by a patient: “Now, doc, don’t raise the price of my cigarettes.”
“It’s really hard for me, because you hear people argue for financial reasons, for freedom of choice,” Takubo said about his fellow legislators, shaking his head. This year, inspired by a patient, Takubo introduced a bill that would have fined adults for smoking in the car with a child.
“I have a patient that’s lost about half of her lung function. She’s never smoked a day in her life,” he said. Instead, her father smoked in the car. “If she complained about it, he would roll the window up to teach her a lesson. She remembers even getting in the floorboard of the car because she couldn’t breath.”
But the bill was not successful. Takubo’s fellow Republicans voted it down.
West Virginia is also the epicenter of America’s drug overdose epidemic, but lung and throat cancer have proven far deadlier than opioids.
Drug overdoses killed 41 people for every 100,000 in West Virginia in 2015. The same year, lung and throat cancer killed tripled that number in south-western counties, such as Calhoun. There, those two diseases alone killed 123 people for every 100,000, according to the state’s health department.
The same year, 46% of adults in Calhoun smoked, RWJF found. The West Virginia department of health estimates that one in five deaths of people over 35 are due to smoking.
West Virginia scores badly on every imaginable indicator of poverty and inequality. Takubo has also argued increased tobacco taxes could bring the state significant financial relief. A $1 tax would have generated $100m in revenue for a state that had a $380m shortfall in 2016, and which spends $277m annually on smoking-related diseases. That too failed, although Takubo did help get a 65-cent tobacco tax passed.
Now, fearing Republicans in Washington will pass a healthcare reform bill that could severely cut Medicaid, a public health program for the poor, Takubo said simply: “That would kill us.”
State of the nation
In Washington DC, things have also changed in the halls of Congress. People who still smoke stand out, and perhaps for a good reason – Congress is mostly well educated and wealthy. Every single US senator has a college degree, and just 5% of the House of Representatives lack one. Most members of Congress are millionaires.
Today, someone with a high school equivalency diploma is nine times more likely to smoke (34.1%) than someone with a graduate degree (3.6%). A poll found Americans who earn between $6,000 and $11,999 are more than twice as likely to smoke as someone who earns more than $90,000.
Even 10 years ago, the “offensive and very strong” odor of a cigar prompted an aide in the Democratic representative Keith Ellison’s office to call the Capitol police on a congressman. Last year, the Republican House speaker, Paul Ryan, took pains to “detoxify” his predecessor’s office, a suite held by former speaker John Boehner. Boehner is a Camel smoker. He now sits on Reynolds’ board.
Tobacco companies don’t spend as much money lobbying Congress as they once did. They spent $72m trying to persuade lawmakers to see their perspective in 1998, compared to $19m in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But they have not abandoned political spending. They have shifted strategies.
Last year, Altria and RJ Reynolds spent $71.3m in California trying beat back a cigarette tax hike referendum. They failed there, but succeeded elsewhere. In North Dakota, tobacco companies spent more than $5 for every man, woman and child in the state, $4m altogether, and convinced voters to reject the tax. They also succeeded in Colorado, where they spent $7m.
States were awarded billions in damages from tobacco companies in recognition of the public health consequences. Yet they largely fail to spend the money they were awarded to prevent smoking. States collected $26.6bn from tobacco settlements in 2016, but spent only 1.8% on smoking prevention, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Tobacco companies, by comparison, spend $9.1bn a year on marketing, or $1m an hour, according to an analysis of Federal Trade Commission data.
North Carolina, America’s dominant tobacco-producing state, receives $139m annually from such tobacco settlements. Initially, the state set up three trust funds to spend that money: one to prevent smoking, one to help rural communities hit by a decline in smoking and one to help tobacco farmers.
The fund to prevent smoking was dismantled in 2011; all of that money was sucked into the state’s general fund. However, lawmakers allowed the settlement to continue to fund tobacco growing efforts.
Between 2000 and 2004, another $41m of North Carolina’s tobacco settlement went to retrofit tobacco curing barns, a move that researchers called “arguably counter-productive to tobacco control”, and which some farmers believed was at the behest of tobacco manufacturers.
“From our very first day, there was a constant struggle with the legislature,” said Vandana Shah, the first policy director of the tobacco use prevention fund in North Carolina. She now works for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “I’d be doing the rounds of begging and pleading that they don’t take our money away, and explaining the value of the program.”
Winston-Salem, AKA ‘Camel City’
Reynolds American’s hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has developed a relatively strict tobacco policy. An after-dinner cigarette in “Camel City” must be smoked outside, and finding a hotel room to smoke in is a significant task.
The regulations are reflective of how cities have handled smoking in recent years. Even Reynolds employees who smoke must use smoking lounges away from their colleagues.
Tobacco companies, said Gayle Anderson, the head of the Winston-Salem chamber of commerce, “really didn’t fight these laws at all … There just didn’t seem to be that kind of pushback.” She worked for Reynolds from 1976 to 1987.
Once North Carolina’s largest city, Winston-Salem enjoyed a golden era on Reynolds’ wealth. “The moneyed families that ran the factories and mills shared their wealth with the community, endowing it with high schools, auditoriums, hospitals, stadiums, parks and recreational facilities bearing their names,” the local history From Tobacco to Technology said about the 1930s. “Their executives chaired the charities and the capital campaigns to raise money needed to achieve the community’s objections, be it a new terminal at the airport, an arts council for the city or assistance in relocating a college to the city.”
Reynolds still employs about 5,000 people in Winston-Salem, according to Anderson. For many years the notion was: “If you could get in at Reynolds, you were set for life,” she said.
Reynolds recently donated a 70,000 sq ft, immaculately maintained research facility to the town for redevelopment. Reynolds, Anderson said, “is still probably the single largest philanthropic company”.
“I can’t imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars that’s worth,” said Anderson. “They’re benevolent and care a lot about the community, but it’s more like a partnership.” If Reynolds were to ever leave, “it would be a real blow to our ego, for sure”.
‘We’re down here getting sick, going hungry’
If the company is seen by some as benevolent, that does not necessarily translate to automatic financial security for farmers and their workers. One twentysomething farmer stood by a running tractor as he described the start of each tobacco season in eastern North Carolina. It begins, he said, “with a loan from the bank that you don’t know if you’re gonna pay back”.
He started cutting tobacco in a friend’s field when he was about eight years old, the farmer said. As he smoked a Camel menthol, he acknowledged: “I shouldn’t, as much shit as I spray on it.”
For farmers, the tobacco system has changed considerably since the 1990s. Auctions are obsolete. Now, farmers contract directly with cigarette manufacturers or leaf buyers. This farmer’s entire crop is contracted to Alliance One, one of two major leaf companies.
Labor disputes are common here. Farmers can face cash shortfalls mid-season, making it difficult to pay workers on time. Farm laborers have no collective bargaining rights in the US, and child labor is legal on farms. Children as young as 12 can start working unlimited hours outside of school, and children of any age can work on a family-owned tobacco farm.
With only a handful of companies left to sell to – Philip Morris International, Altria, BAT, Japan Tobacco International and two leaf buyers who serve the same companies – farmers feel at the behest of tobacco companies, those interviewed by the Guardian said. This year, some tobacco buyers didn’t offer farmers formal contracts until spring, when tobacco was already growing in greenhouses.
Nevertheless, after a long fight with the Mount Olive Pickle Company, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (Floc) secured a collective bargaining agreement with farmers in the North Carolina Growers Association. Several tobacco companies used farmers in the association, thus some tobacco workers were also covered. Last year alone, Floc handled around 500 total labor complaints, often for wage violations. But their influence is small: the union represents just 7% of North Carolina’s 100,000 workers.
The group has asked BAT to recognize a right to organize for all farm workers worldwide, and blames low pay for frequent disputes.
“I think they should pay more,” said Sintia Castillo, a labor organizer for Floc, whose accent reflects her heritage. Some words come out North Carolina country, others with a snap of second-generation Spanish. “You’re rolling in money at the top, and we’re down here getting sick, going hungry.”
Castillo has six brothers and sisters, and started working in the fields with her family at age seven. She moved to tobacco around 13 and into packing houses at 18. Now she’s 24, a woman whose work has acquainted her with the paradox of organizing people without rights.
“There’s been times I fire people up, and then they get fired,” she said.
She tells a story about Brent Jackson, a state senator and tobacco farmer. Jackson was forced to repay several thousand dollars in back wages after he was sued in federal court by migrant workers. The union then alleged he “blacklisted” the seven farmworkers. Jackson pulled out of the growers association.
Last week, he sponsored a bill to make it illegal for farmers to deduct union dues from paychecks, or for growers to end a dispute with farmworkers by signing a union contract. The bill is currently on the governor’s desk. Campaign finance records show Jackson received $9,400 in donations from tobacco companies.
“Child labor exists because of poverty wages. There’s no way that a family can live off of $7.25 per hour,” said Catherine Crowe, an organizer with Floc. Forcing children not to work without increasing wages, the union contends, would only leave struggling families worse off.
Philip Morris International and Alliance One have said they do not buy tobacco from farms that employ children under 18 for most tasks and, in general, tobacco companies have said growers are “not our employees”. Nevertheless, tobacco company audits have identified many instances of child labor in the supply chain.
In the past, Crowe and Castillo said, BAT has shown more willingness to work with the organizing committee, promising to encourage Reynolds to listen to union demands. As for how the unified company will act in the future: “That,” said Crowe, “is the question.”
This article was amended on 13 July 2017 to clarify Vandana Shah’s position with the North Carolina tobacco use prevention fund.