WASHINGTON - Warning: The subject of this exploration willconstrict your blood vessels, choke your windpipe and dispatch youto an early grave, 5 million of you a year. The most lucrative cropthe Americas have ever seen, it kept the British at bay, kept theenslaved entrapped, kept Hollywood sexy. Until it didn't anymore.
Stipulation: Deep bows to the great public health triumph ofwrestling Big Tobacco to the mat and changing human behavior. Neverbefore were millions persuaded to give up a highly pleasurable,relatively cheap habit because it was bad for them. And never since.
But: Tobacco itself refuses to die. It's stubborn. It's meant togrow here. The seeds are tiny as a flea and germinate like crazy. Inless than a month, you can have a robust green crop that's good formuch more than smoking. You can grow vaccines in it. Extract proteinfrom it. Make drugs from it.
Ten years after Maryland became the only state to use its tobaccosettlement money to pay hundreds of farmers to quit growing the evilsot-weed, it's turning out that tobacco has redemptive virtues.Nobody needed to bother exploiting them before; the stuff was sofabulously successful for 400 years as a vice. Even nicotine, thenatural and highly addictive chemical in tobacco, has its benefits.
People smoked in part because a cigarette could calm you down andpep you up. Now research studies are exploring exactly how nicotinemay safely halt cognitive decline and help those with Alzheimer's,Parkinson's, depression, schizophrenia and attention problems. Thepure nicotine in the smoking cessation patch used in these studiesis extracted from an American product that American farmers know howto grow.
If you drive around Southern Maryland, you can still spy it. Amidthe corn mazes and alpaca petting opportunities, the pick-your-ownpeppers and the thick crop of McMansions, there'll be a couple acresof plants that look like soldiers - upright, sturdy, tall as a man,with bushy leaves bigger than the blade on a ceiling fan.
You'll come upon a weathered barn, with some of its boardsmissing. But on closer examination, you'll see the slats are openedwith a precise symmetry. They let in the air that cures the tobaccohung on its stalks up in the rafters.
Inside the barn, the sheaves, as it has been said, feel likevelvet and smell like money.
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The sticks that Sylvester Brady uses to spear up the cut stalksin the field and hang them in the barn - some of them are 100 yearsold. Brady is 39, and some of the 161 / 2 acres of burley tobacco hetends are off Route 4, right behind the library with its exhibitshowing how Calvert County wouldn't have existed without tobacco,which is why the leaf is so prominent on the county flag. He's oneof a handful of growers who didn't sign up for the state's tobaccobuyout program. Nearly 900 in the state did, and the first to signup got their last checks this year.
Like tobacco, Brady is stubborn. He grows the crop under contractwith Philip Morris. It's old-style farm life. There are nocomputers, no mechanized harvesters. Handle the plant when it's wet,and it makes you sick as a dog, feverish, cold, shaky. It tookresearchers some time to determine that was 'green tobacco sickness'and to teach workers how to avoid being poisoned by the oil. Amongits many attributes, tobacco is a potent natural pesticide.
'You've got to love to fool with it to fool with it,' Brady said.'It can try your patience.'
Slaves built the great tobacco fortunes of North Carolina andVirginia and worked the plantations of Southern Maryland. Afteremancipation, blacks and whites worked as sharecroppers and fieldlaborers. It continued to flourish because of voracious demand.World War I Gen. John J. Pershing pleaded from France in 1918: 'Youask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much asbullets.'
Fifty years later, the lawsuits over the health hazards started.
Gary V. Hodge was finishing up a long stint as executive directorof the Tri-County Council for Southern Maryland as then-Gov. ParrisN. Glendening was thinking about what to do with Maryland's share ofthe billions in tobacco money won through court settlements in thelate 1990s.
Tobacco was 'part of this deep cultural heritage of one of thedozen oldest counties' in the nation, Hodge says. Its dominance wasending just as bedroom-community development was expanding. Hehelped come up with an innovative plan to pay Maryland farmers astipend each year for a decade to tide them over while they lookedfor other crops. To participate, a farmer had to pledge to quit thecrop, unless - and here was the forward-looking loophole - he wereto grow tobacco for beneficial purposes. Hodge had some ideas forthat.
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Tobacco is often called the white mouse of the plant world, andNicotiana tabacum has been turned inside out for study. The firststudies of nicotine, in which researchers watched how a chicken'sleg twitched when exposed to the drug, were conducted in the late1800s. They led to the discovery - and naming - of nicotinicreceptors in the brain that play a key role in neurotransmitting.
The plant itself has relatively few genes, so it's easy tomanipulate to maximize any trait - low or high nicotine, fastermaturity, slower burn rate, tougher leaves for finer cigar-wrapping.
It has a density of high-quality protein, and extracting,purifying and exploiting the value of that protein is where Hodgesaw opportunity for Maryland growers. So a team of University ofMaryland researchers also have been fooling with tobacco for thepast several years.
Agronomist Robert Kratchovil grows a new varietal, hybridized forvery low nicotine and very high protein and leaf mass, at a smalltest plot at the university's Upper Marlboro farm. This tobacco isharvested several times a growing season, like spinach, and cartedoff to College Park, where food science professor Martin Lo throwsit into a whirring grinding machine that resembles a giant blender.He has experimented with when to harvest for highest protein contentand what else might be done with the pulp.
Lo grew up in Taiwan, where, he says, tobacco smoke is used insome non-Western medical applications and where his grandparentsalways told him to finish his rice. Both inform his quest for newbenefits from tobacco. 'My belief in science is that we have to behumble,' Lo said. 'We only know a little. One development triggers afew new ideas that may lead to something else.'
So far, the project has identified industrial applications forthe extracted protein, such as binding agents in paint. Thecellulose could be dried and converted into biofuel.
Left over in the plant pulp are dozens of compounds. One of themis solanesol, a precursor of coenzyme Q10, necessary for cellfunctioning. CoQ10 declines, like nearly everything, with age,sending the middle-aged from the cardiologist to the drugstore. 'Onebottle at Costco is 32 or 33 dollars!' said Lo, who theorizes thatthe enzyme could be produced faster and cheaper from tobacco. Hebrews tea from the pulp, hunts for fermentation possibilities andlooks 'to use (the tobacco plant) down to the very last drop.'
The next challenge is to build a small bioprocessing facility inthe heart of what was tobacco country. Hodge and his partner, NeilBelson, are trying to raise money from investors for that.
Not just in Maryland is bioprocessing seen as the great hope fortobacco farming. North Carolina, the leading state for production,has a venture underway. And other companies are farther along.
Kentucky BioProcessing in Owensboro got a $17.9 million grantfrom the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for aproject dubbed Blue Angel - to see whether the firm could developthe capacity to fast-track vaccine production in case of pandemic.
Tobacco is under study as a way to fight measles and tooth decayand as a medium for personalized vaccines. 'You take a biopsy of atumor,' explained Kentucky BioProcessing chief executive HughHayden, build a construct to fight it, and tobacco grows so fastthat 'you go to having a finished (medicine) in a number of weeks.'
Few of these pioneers argue that the virtues of tobacco willreplace its cash value as a vice. Reputation reclamation is hardwork.
'You can take a crop that once was non-healthy, and still is, andturn it into an alternative that still allows people to make money.It has a lot of promise,' said Ben Beale, the Maryland extensionagent in St. Mary's County, where dozens of Amish and Mennonitesstill grow tobacco for the cigarette companies.
AP photo
