|
Tobacco has lost its pull in N.C.
Story Date: 2/13/2009
| |
Source: Mark Johnson, THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER, 2/13/09
Just a few years ago, a legislator in Raleigh would have been wasting time trying to raise the cigarette tax or to ban smoking in places like White Swan Barbecue, a roadside motel-turned-diner on U.S. 301 in Johnston County where customers are free to puff away.
This year, the legislature may do both.
Linwood Parker, owner of the White Swan, knows about commerce and politics, and he has watched tobacco's influence on both collapse.
Parker used to rake in $3,000 a week as workers from the now-defunct Smithfield tobacco auction market streamed into his restaurant. Many of those customers – and the money they spent – are now gone.
The next shot may come this year from the state legislature. The possibility of lawmakers passing another cigarette tax hike and a ban on smoking in restaurants and workplaces illustrates just how far the golden leaf industry has fallen within North Carolina.
“It's really a collapse of the political support,” said Peter Daniel, assistant to the president at the N.C. Farm Bureau.
North Carolina still produces more tobacco than any other state, and its legacy is evident throughout the state. “You can't drive by a school or hospital in Eastern North Carolina,” Parker said, “that wasn't built with tobacco money.”
That legacy is fading.
Just after Christmas the upscale Tobacco Road Sports Café opened in Raleigh, seemingly embracing the crop's role in the state's heritage.
The owners, though, took an online poll to decide whether to ban smoking in the dining room: 82 percent said “yes.”
Steve Black, owner of the Hotel Charlotte Restaurant in Charlotte, still allows smoking. But the pressure of health concerns led him to take the ashtrays off the tables, almost eliminating the smoking without saying anything.
“When the recession hit, it was the smokers who kept me in business,” Black said. “I'm torn.”
The American Tobacco Co. factory built by the Dukes in Durham now houses restaurants that ban smoking and offices of GlaxoSmithKline, which makes Nicorette gum and Commit lozenge – over-the-counter drugs to help smokers quit.
The former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. research building in downtown Winston-Salem now houses Wake Forest University medical school laboratories that study chemical addictions.
In the legislature, tobacco lobbyists long wielded potent influence among lawmakers who were mindful of hundreds of thousands of farmers, tobacco quota holders and cigarette plant workers. Brass ashtrays stood sentry in the atriums outside the legislative chambers, and lawmakers lit up cigarettes on the floor of the House and Senate as recently as 2003.
Smoking is now banned throughout the legislative building and lobbyists are fighting against a second cigarette tax increase in four years.
“We don't have the political muscle we did have,” said Rep. Leo Daughtry, a Republican from tobacco-thick Johnston County.
One reason is science, said Sally Malek, who heads the Tobacco Prevention & Control Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health.
The tobacco industry reached its apex before the full extent of the health hazards of smoking were known.
“It's much clearer that tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in North Carolina and the nation,” Malek said.
The changing attitudes are also the byproduct of a deal cut in Washington five years ago. Congress approved a buyout of the tobacco quota system in 2004.
Quotas essentially were licenses to grow tobacco, sometimes passed down over generations, and a device to help stabilize the price. Most holders didn't farm, but instead leased their quota to farmers.
When the federal government paid the holders for their quotas, their link to the crop dissolved. The ranks of North Carolinians with a direct investment in tobacco plummeted from more than 100,000 quota holders to fewer than 3,000 tobacco farmers.
The face of North Carolina has changed in recent years. Transplants from the Northeast and Midwest, with no ties to tobacco or its history, moved in. They clustered in the major cities, accelerating the shift to a more metropolitan state.
Personal experience, however, as much as hometown plays into the evolving perceptions of tobacco, said Rep. Becky Carney, a Charlotte Democrat. She backs a smoking ban despite fond memories of pulling leaves of tobacco to dry and sell as a young girl on her uncle's farm in Person County.
“There are very few people in North Carolina,” Carney said, “who can't relate to a family member or friend who has been negatively affected by smoking.”
Urban lawmakers increased in number and influence in recent years.
Less than 20 years ago, the president pro tempore of the Senate was Sen. J.J. Harrington, a Bertie County Democrat whose family business made equipment for tobacco farmers.
“They were advocates for the industry. You don't have that now,” said Tommy Bunn, president of U.S. Tobacco Cooperative, a tobacco purchaser and manufacturer. “You have advocates for high-tech and pharmaceutical because that's prevalent throughout the state now.”
The chief proponent of the proposed ban on smoking in restaurants and work places is the House majority leader, Rep. Hugh Holliman, a Lexington Democrat who owns a printing business. Holliman is a lung cancer survivor.
Holliman cautioned against making too much of signs of the demise of tobacco. He pushed a similar smoking ban two years ago, only to watch it lose by six votes.
“Tobacco,” he said, “hasn't lost all of its clout.”
|
|
|
|
