By Peter Galuszka
The humidity was wet as a warm washcloth one July morning at 4 a.m. some 43 years ago. I was an 18-year-old cub reporter working college summers at the Washington (N.C.) Daily News, a small afternoon newspaper on the fringe of North Carolina’s bright leaf tobacco belt.
About a dozen youngsters, maybe 10 years old, sleepily sauntered on the school bus used by the state employment agency hired by tobacco growers. The children were heading out to the tobacco fields where they’d spend the day working tobacco leaves.
They’d cut off the top of the flowering buds and eventually “prime” or cut bottom leaves first so they could be tied to sticks for placement in a hot, flue-heated barn. The point is to get the best smoking flavor but also the optimum amount of nicotine, which, of course, is the deadly and carcinogenic chemical that gives tobacco cigarettes their addictive kick.
Apparently, those kids in Bertie County N.C., might have thought the pin money they got from their hard field work might buy them candy or a movie ticket or a Coke at Hardees. But regularly handling tobacco leaves, it was later found out, exposes the kids to about 50 cigarettes-worth a day of nicotine and that causes the “Green Tobacco Sickness” which can involve nausea, vomiting and other maladies.
Using U.S. child labor to harvest tobacco is a time-honored tradition in the tobacco belt, especially in North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. But it is a dangerous business and young people shouldn’t be doing it, notes the Human Rights Watch.
Virginia is actually a fairly small producer of tobacco – only 7 percent – and only has about 895 tobacco farms that hire seasonally. But they rely on child labor and much of it does not involve alien workers.
Nicotine’s dangers have been highlighted more recently in electronic cigarettes which are a growing craze and now will be lightly regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One issue is that the e-cigs or “vapes” have small containers that hold nicotine although the user doesn’t get the other bad stuff in the smoke. The right amount of nicotine can be fatal if ingested by a child which is a concern if e-cigs are somehow broken apart if children play with them.
In the tobacco fields, the kids get into nicotine when they handle the leaves, which they do for hours at a time. There have been proposals to restrict working in tobacco fields to kids older than 16.
But guess who but the kibosh on that? That socialist Barack Obama, that’s who. His administration announced there would be no regulations on child labor in tobacco fields because of protests from tobacco growers.
Down South, some traditions never change.
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