Tobacco - biology.

« quality cigars are made entirely by hand, most cigars are manufactured by machine. Chewing tobaccos are generally made from thick grades of leaves to which binders and flavorings are added.

Chewing tobacco is formed by pressing the tobacco intoblocks known as plugs.

Snuff is made by grinding tobacco into fine powder, which is then allowed to ferment for a long period of time.

Frequently, snuff is scented withspices, such as jasmine or cloves. V TOBACCO INDUSTRY Over 6 million tons of commercial tobacco are grown each year.

Leading tobacco-growing countries are China, Brazil, India, the United States, Zimbabwe, and Turkey.Tobacco is an economically important crop for many nations—more than 2 million tons of tobacco leaf, at a value of more than $6 billion, are exported each yearworldwide.

Brazil exports the most tobacco leaf.

Some countries that grow and export tobacco also import foreign tobacco.

For instance, the United States imports thesame amount of tobacco as it exports.

The United States exports the most cigarettes and manufactured tobacco products, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the worldtotal.

Japan is the largest importer of tobacco products. Cigarette consumption, which accounts for most tobacco use in the United States, reached a high of 4,345 cigarettes per person per year in 1963.

This number hasdropped steadily since 1964, when a special report by the U.S.

surgeon general linked cigarette smoking with lung cancer, coronary artery disease, and other ailments.By 2002 yearly per capita consumption of cigarettes in the United States had dropped to about 1,980 cigarettes. As smoking became less popular in the United States and Europe, cigarette manufacturers have found new markets in eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the formerSoviet Union.

Due to the aggressive marketing efforts of the international tobacco industry, tobacco consumption in these areas is expected to rise by almost 3 percentannually. Since the Great Depression, the federal government has run price support programs for a variety of agricultural products, including rice, peanuts, and tobacco.

Thetobacco price support program stabilizes prices and ensures tobacco growers a fairly steady income.

Farmers registered in the program belong to a cooperativeassociation that sells their tobacco at auction.

The cooperative buys, at a price set each year, any tobacco that the grower cannot sell.

Although the federal governmentsponsors the cooperative association, it does not fund the purchase of unsold tobacco; that money comes from tobacco sales and association membership fees.

Thecooperative stores unsold tobacco and sells it the next year. VI HISTORY As early as 2,000 years ago, natives of the Americas used tobacco as a medicine, as a hallucinogen in religious ceremonies, and as offerings to the spirits theyworshiped.

When Italian Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus traveled to the Americas in 1492, he observed the Arawak people of the Caribbean smoking tobaccoloosely rolled in a large tobacco leaf.

They also smoked tobacco through a tube they called a tobago, from which the name tobacco originated.

Columbus’s crew introduced tobacco growing and use to Spain.

During the next 50 years, sailors, explorers, and diplomats helped spread pipe and cigar smoking throughout Europe.

Atfirst, it was used medicinally as a purported treatment for diseases and disorders such as bubonic plague, migraines, labor pains, asthma, and cancer.

Within 100 years,however, smoking for pleasure became common. In 1612 the British colony at Jamestown, Virginia, began growing wild tobacco and exporting it to England.

They soon switched to common tobacco, the milder kindgrown in the West Indies and in demand in Europe.

It quickly became the main crop grown in the colonies and was so profitable that without it, historians agree, theEnglish colonies in North America would have failed. As tobacco farming expanded through the colonies, growers brought British prisoners and debtors to work the fields.

These indentured servants earned their freedomafter 5 to 12 years of labor.

Growers soon found it more profitable to bring in African slaves, since they never had to be given their freedom.

Slavery enabled growersto farm larger areas, making giant plantations possible.

After 1776 tobacco farming expanded from Virginia south to North Carolina and west as far as Missouri.

Inabout 1864 an Ohio farmer happened upon a chlorophyll-deficient strain of tobacco called white burley, which became a main ingredient of American blended tobaccos. Cigarettes were invented in 1614 by beggars in Seville, Spain, a center for cigar production.

The beggars collected scrap tobacco and rolled it in paper.

However, snuff,cigars, and pipes remained the most popular means of using tobacco until the 19th century.

Cigarette popularity rose when British soldiers fighting in the Crimean War(1853-1856) found the cigarettes of their Turkish allies to be more convenient than pipes or cigars.

Cigarettes grew in popularity in the United States after the Civil War(1861-1865) but were relatively expensive because they were hand-rolled. Cigarette prices fell after American inventor James A.

Bonsack patented a machine to roll cigarettes in 1880; the machines could produce more than 10,000 cigarettesin an hour.

By 1919, cigarettes were more popular than cigars.

Smoking continued to grow in popularity until the 1960s and 1970s, when awareness of its health risksgrew. VII HEALTH EFFECTS Tobacco contains nicotine, an addictive drug.

Tobacco smoke also contains more than 4,000 chemical compounds, including at least 43 cancer-causing compounds.Forms of tobacco that are smoked—cigarettes, pipes, and cigars—cause lung cancer, emphysema, and other respiratory diseases.

Smoking also contributes to coronaryheart disease and, in pregnant women who smoke, low birth weight of newborns.

Chewing tobacco and inhaling snuff causes cancer of the mouth, nose, and throat andcan lead to nicotine addiction. Cigarette smoking causes nearly 90 percent of all lung cancer cases.

Inhaled tobacco smoke, from cigars and pipes as well as from cigarettes, also comes into directcontact with the tissues of the mouth, throat, and larynx, or voice box.

Several studies have estimated that smokers are four to five times more likely to develop oraland laryngeal cancer than are nonsmokers.

Studies have also linked smoking with the development of cancer in distant organs—that is, in organs not directly exposedto the smoke, such as the bladder, pancreas, kidney, stomach, liver, and uterus.

Smoking also causes health problems in nonsmokers.

Each year about 3,000nonsmoking adults die of lung cancer as a result of breathing the secondhand smoke from others’ cigarettes. Emphysema, the chronic narrowing and clogging of the airway passages in the lung, is the most common chronic lung disease.

Its victims are almost exclusivelysmokers; it very seldom occurs in nonsmokers.

However, not all smokers are susceptible to this disease; only 20 percent of heavy smokers will develop it. VIII ANTISMOKING ACTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES In light of the disease risks associated with tobacco products and their associated high health-care costs, many individuals and health organizations have lobbied forpublic policy changes that would change the way tobacco products are regulated, manufactured, marketed, and sold in the United States.

In November 1998 thetobacco industry and the attorneys general of 46 states, along with representatives of the public health field and lawyers representing smokers, announced an. »