Categories
· Agricultural
· Federal
· Editorial
USA, by State
· North Carolina
Organizations
· FDA
|
With the FDA regulating tobacco, more changes are in store for a North Carolina mainstay. But Americans' health will improve.
Jump to full article: Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, 2009-06-14
Intro: From the earliest days, in countless ways, tobacco built North Carolina. The business and its profits erected everything from humble flue-curing barns to soaring Duke Chapel, and from the coast to the mountains tobacco-growing shaped a landscape of auction barns, warehouses, cigarette factories, even whole towns. Tar Heel generations, black and white, followed one another into the broiling fields, the leaf-laden barns and the red-brick factories. It was a living, good for many, grand for some, and a way of life. Is it over? . . .
The change is a good one, particularly the focus on youth. . . .
Old habits die hard. For generations North Carolina politicians have protected tobacco, even sought to boost its prospects here by exporting addiction abroad.
That, of course, was how the whole thing got started, roughly 400 years ago. North Carolina colonists cashed in on tobacco shipped to England. As in Virginia, then the greater tobacco producer, much of the pre-Civil War labor was done by slaves. The bright leaf curing process -- discovered in 1839 by a slave in Caswell County -- eventually brought North Carolina tobacco to the top rank and created the cigarette industries of Durham, Winston and elsewhere.
The rest is history. . . .
our state's fields are still first in production, even as tobacco's share of our economy falls. More dislocation lies ahead, but FDA regulation is unlikely to put the industry out of business in North Carolina, and less smoking will surely be good for America.
Jump to full article » |