The High Cost of Prohibiting Tobacco: Harming Health & Environment
Tara A. Spears
The time for drawing the line in the sand with the rights of smokers on one side and the harmful effects of smoking on health and the environment on the other side is past. In an effort to curb the ongoing problem of smoking and the harm to the environment caused by the tobacco industry, Mexico initiated one of the world’s strictest anti-tobacco laws. The new 2023 law establishes a total ban on smoking in public places, including hotels, restaurants, beaches and parks. The new law, which is part of the country’s General Law for Tobacco Control reform is meant to improve the quality of life for everyone.
But this noble health policy comes at a cost. Who is suffering the most? Those exposed to second hand smoke or the environment? Or is it the campesinos that are now out of work due to tobacco production decreasing? We who live in Nayarit have reason to be doubly concerned about smoking pollution: the Riviera Nayarit is a huge tourist destination so the local economy needs the visitors to survive, and, because this state is the largest tobacco producer in the country, we have the pollution from the crop to deal with. 
As federal senator, Miguel Ángel Navarro said, that higher taxes on cigarettes hadn’t created any health improvements among Mexicans but the higher taxes have hurt the tobacco agricultural sector and caused jobs to be lost in Nayarit. “I don’t know what is more painful, dying from an illness related to tobacco or dying from hunger . . .” Western Mexico’s Nayarit is comprised of humid terrain that once was known as the Gold Coast because of the value of its tobacco crops.
According to Mexico News Daily in 2019 there were 3,426 tobacco farmers in Nayarit and the harvest season creates 15,000 jobs for jornaleros, or day laborers. The tobacco plantations generate an annual economic impact of 950 million pesos (US $49.4 million). Mexico has a long history with tobacco: the tobacco plant, its cultivation and consumption were exclusively pre-Columbian tribes. The word “cigar” and its diminutive “cigarette”, is derived from the Mayan word “sik’ar”, with which tobacco leaves rolled in dried corn leaves were designated. It was the pre-Columbian Indians who invented the treatment and fermentation of tobacco leaves so that they lost acrimony.
It has been documented that the indigenous Mexican people cultivated tobacco in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time, tobacco was produced intensively in the areas of Compostela, Guatemala, Oaxaca, Yucatan and Veracruz.
The tobacco was chewed on a kind of ball of tobacco leaves that was spat once all its substance was extracted. Tobacco was smoked in mud or wooden tubes that were filled with chopped grass. The tobacco was snorted once the herb was reduced to powder or bite that they aspirated through the nose.
In the 21st century it is impossible to be unaware of the health dangers to smoking. Lesser known, however, is the devastating pollution effects that are connected to commercial tobacco growing. Besides the economic factors the ancillary agricultural practices of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides contaminate the water groundwater in addition to being absorbed by the laborers through contact.
Growing tobacco is very labor intensive. In Mexico’s warm humid climate tobacco plantations have a higher yield than average in other countries. Harvest generally occurs between the months of March and May when the largest number of leaves are cut. Tobacco plants are ready for harvest 11 to 15 weeks after they are planted. The entire stem can be harvested, then dried and cured.
Successful tobacco cultivation required steady labor from early winter through the fall in Mexico. The season begins in November when laborers clean and prepare the beds where tobacco seed was sown, and sowing usually occurred in late December or early January. Because tobacco seeds are very delicate and sensitive to wind, weather, and disease-related injuries, tobacco seeds are started in a protected area, such as a greenhouse or grow room. It generally takes 50 to 60 days for the seeds to germinate. When they are between 6 and 8 inches (15.24 and 20.32 cm) tall, they are tough enough to be transplanted out.
Once transplanted, tobacco seedlings required nearly constant tending until harvest. First, after a certain numbers of leaves appeared, workers would use a small knife or a sharpened thumbnail to cut off the top of each plant to prevent it from flowering. During the summer months, laborers performed three additional tasks: weeding, suckering (or the removal of secondary shoots that would divert energy away from the tobacco leaves), and removing worms and beetles. All three of these tasks required workers to pay close attention to individual plants, to work hunched over, and to perform tasks by hand. Harvesting the tobacco plants takes place as the plants ripened.
If the tobacco plant is being grown for its tobacco harvest, the flowers must be removed before they begin to bloom, typically between 8 and 12 weeks in the growing period. Harvesting, curing and packing tobacco are all delicate operations requiring experienced laborers and close attention.
According to Laborrights.org, Tobacco farming involves severe, arguably irreversible costs to farmers and their families. Some of these costs of tobacco farming are becoming indentured labor and environmental degradation. Both results lead to worsen and perpetuate the conditions of poverty of the farmers . Men, women and children who cultivate tobacco experience long hours of stoop labor, harassment in work activities, abject poverty, staggering debt, exposure to nicotine and pesticides, and poor health.
In Mexico children aged 0-14 years who work in tobacco fields are exposed to potentially harmful and toxic amounts of pesticides (organophosphorous and carbamic). Children and adults are harmed by polluted drinking water from pesticide run-off. Most tobacco families in Mexico are financially unable to afford protective clothing and bottled drinking water which increased their exposure to carcinogenic agents.
To sum up, the types of environmental costs that stem from just one tobacco product-cigarettes- result from the large amounts of energy, water and other resources used in manufacturing cigarettes. The waste generated by this process include chemicals used in the preparation and treatment of the tobacco leaf. The use of fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides; metals involved in the manufacture and shipping of cigarette-making machines; the energy used for manufacturing and distributing tobacco products (coal, gas, etc.); consumption of wood pulp and effluent left over from cigarette paper and packaging manufacture; consuming energy required for, and effluent created by extraction, extrusion and processing of cellulose acetate filters; Tobacco manufacturing is extremely water-intensive; the toxic effluent from the cigarette-making process; and the thousands of chemical additives, including flavorings and pH modifiers such as ammonia. It is absolutely shocking how tobacco growing and tobacco products harm people and the environment.
Tobacco waste ends up everywhere and it is a well-known public nuisance for many communities, especially those with few resources to remove it. Clean-up and disposal are costs of tobacco use that are not currently borne by manufacturers, distributors, or users of tobacco products. Just think of all the butts in the sand.
The World Health Organization and dozens of other scientific agencies have published reports on the ill effects of the tobacco industry. With up to two-thirds of every smoked cigarette discarded onto the ground, between 340 and 680 million kilograms of waste tobacco product litters the world each year. But it is not just the volume of this waste that is a problem. Tobacco product waste also contains over 7000 toxic chemicals, including known human carcinogens, which leach into and accumulate in the environment.
This toxic waste ends up on our streets, in our drains and in our water. Research has shown that harmful chemicals leached from discarded butts, which include nicotine, arsenic and heavy metals, can be acutely toxic to aquatic organisms; research into their longer term effects on water supply are ongoing.( U.S. National Cancer Institute 2022.)
The economic cost of waste generated by the tobacco industry, its contribution to climate change, the loss in productivity resulting from poor farmer health and the environmental damage, must all be considered in order to account for the full cost of the tobacco epidemic. No matter how much more efficient the tobacco industry becomes, or how much better regulated, the industry will never be environmentally benign
Ultimately, every effort made will move us a step nearer to a world that recognizes tobacco as a serious problem for the entire planet. And it is imperative that we act fast. The human, financial and environmental costs are simply too great for us not to.
Most importantly, the environmental consequences of tobacco consumption move it from being an individual problem to being a human problem. It is not just about the lives of smokers and those around them, or even those involved in tobacco production. What is now at stake is the fate of an entire planet.