Tobacco has lost its political clout in tobaccoland

Tobacco has lost so much of its political clout in North Carolina, the No. 1 state in tobacco production, that the legislature is likely to raise tobacco taxes and perhaps pass a ban on smoking in workplaces, including restaurants. Much the same is happening in the No. 2 state, Kentucky, where lawmakers this morning passed the second big increase in state tobacco taxes in four years and localities are passing smoking bans.

The main reason is the end, in 2004, of the federal program that limited production and supported prices of tobacco. "When the federal government paid the holders for their quotas, their link to the crop dissolved," notes Mark Johnson of The Charlotte Observer. "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." Much the same has happened in Kentucky.

"It's really a collapse of the political support,” Peter Daniel, assistant to the president at the North Carolina Farm Bureau, told Johnson, who notes other reasons: scientific research that shows the health impact of even secondhand smoke, and "transplants from the Northeast and Midwest, with no ties to tobacco or its history." (Read more)