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Thoughts On Coca, Cannabis, Opium & Tobacco – Gifts Of The Great Spirit


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Hidden Endocine Disrupters Sickening Oregon LGBTQ Smokers

According to Cascadeaids.org LGBTQ youth and adults in Oregon use tobacco at a 40% higher rate than heterosexuals, among the highest usage of any community, and have much higher rates of many devastating diseases. Everyone knows there’s a connection, but nobody has been able to figure it out. We’ve found what we think is solid new laboratory-verified evidence (data tables are below) and if we’re right, the path is wide open to a simple, elegant at least partial local-level solution that can start improving health and saving lives virtually overnight.

Our new research offers hard evidence (below) that there are hidden supertoxic chemicals in tobacco products that we believe are behind much of the elevated rates of specific diseases among LGBTQ youth and adults.

That’s because what they are smoking is heavily but invisibly contaminated with hidden supertoxic chemicals that target and attack immune systems and endocrine systems and other body systems and functions in people who are already especially vulnerable. Our research has just uncovered the existence of these contaminants for the first time ever in the US.

Here are some of the results of these hidden toxins in tobacco, and some of the smoking-related diseases with higher LGBTQ community rates that nobody can explain.

Smoking rates are 40% higher and …..

1. A 28% greater proportion of Oregon lesbians suffer from obesity.

2. Oregon lesbians also have elevated risk of breast cancer versus heterosexual women.

3. Oregon LGB adults are 50% more likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, relative to heterosexuals. 

4. Gay Oregon men are at enhanced risk of prostate, testicular and colon cancers.

5. A 20% greater proportion of Oregon LGBTQ adults report living with arthritis, diabetes, asthma or heart disease.

All these diseases related to the fact that LGBTQ people smoke more. Up until now the reason for that has been a total mystery, because nobody knew about the endocrine-disrupting pesticides that contaminate the cheapest tobacco products – the kind smoked by economically marginalized LGBTQ youth. We just did the first research ever here in Portland in December 2018 and the hard data below is evidence of what the Portland LGBTQ communities are inhaling without having a clue.

Here’s why the those higher rates of smoking and the endocrine disruptors and fungicides in them are linked to the higher rates of cancer and other diseases.

Each of the tobacco pesticide contaminants shown below, and many of the combinations, are linked to specific diseases. LGBTQ people smoke 40% more pesticide contaminated tobacco products, and they get more of these diseases.

But it is not necessary to prove what part of these diseases smoking tobacco itself may be causing, not only because that isn’t actually known, but simply extensive peer-reviewed journal studies prove that these specific contaminants of specific tobacco brands do cause these specific diseases.

And by the way, I am only showing the data for three brands here. We have just generated this and other data through testing off-the-shelf tobacco products in Portland, Oregon in December, 2018 and we are planning our next run now. 

Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18

There is a simple solution to totally eliminating these added risks. Think of clean needle programs. We recognize that IV drug users are exposed to terrible added harm by using dirty needles and we supply them with clean needles to reduce the harm they are doing to themselves. We don’t condone IV drug use, or encourage it, but we recognize that people are doing it and won’t or can’t stop, so we reduce the damage as much as possible.

We can and should do the same with tobacco use, which when you look at the substances being injected into users bodies through the smokestream are every bit as harmful to smokers as diseased needles are to IV drug users. I am talking with clinics serving Portland’s marginalized communities with major smoking and health issues connected with specific diseases like HIV/AIDS and discussing how easy it would be for them to begin a program of supplying their patients who smoke with organic tobacco, either hand-rolled by volunteers from organic leaf bought online or just using pre-packaged organic RYO organic tobacco.

Organic tobacco can be bought for as little as $10/pound from reputable suppliers, and can be easily hand-processed by volunteers into cigarettes that any smoker will readily and even happily accept once they have tried them in comparison to any brand they’re now smoking. Natural flavorings can also be added if there is a need for mint or other familiar tobacco product flavors.

What I’m advocating is a volunteer organization that works with clinics in marginalized communities to supply organic cigarettes as a first step in weaning smokers off of contaminated tobacco products, then transitioning them into a smoking cessation program that actually deals with tobacco addiction rather than the disguised impact of pesticides and fungicides.

The cost of distributing free organic tobacco in an HIV/AIDS program, or any other kind of community-based health program would be minimal, especially compared to the social and economic value of the potential outcomes.

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT POSTS

Hidden Causes Of HIV/AIDS Treatment Failure

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nOD

The Korean Genome + Smoking + (DDT) = Diabetes Epidemic

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nO6

Did Mom Give You Testicular Cancer?

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nP4

Ancestral DDT Exposure & Trans-generational Obesity

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nNO

Smoking & Breast Cancer – A New Link?

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nNl

Little Cigars And High Liver Cancer Rates In Marginalized Communities

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nMy

Sweet Cheap Poison At The Bodega

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nLj

Prostate Cancer & Tobacco Pesticides: Hidden Links

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nKy

Obesity & Obesogens: The Tobacco Connection

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nJ4

Tobacco Pesticides & Childhood Leukemia

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nIL

Tobacco Road – Brazilian Tobacco, Nerve Agents, and American Cigarettes

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nyp

DDT, Little Cigars, & Dropouts

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nIk

Dude! That Shit’s Shrinking Your Balls!

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nK3

Do You Want To Make Little Cigars Illegal In Your Community?

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nEY

Smoking & Health – Fake Science Kills

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nxW

A Community-Level Tobacco Control Strategy

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nAX

Tobacco Product Risk Reduction

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nCy

Stop IQOS From Vaporizing The Lives Of Millions

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nBr

Just Incidental genocide

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nGt

Organic Tobacco Is Safer Tobacco & Here’s Why

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nH5

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Did Mom Give You Testicular Cancer?

             Stu Kraft – Brother, Friend, Artist, Beloved Fisher

I dedicate this post to our brother Stu Kraft, a mountain man full of joy, talent, energy and life whose mother was a heavy smoker from the 1950’s until her death of lung cancer. Stu was born with reproductive system issues, and turned even that into art. He loved to make his friends uncomfortable by joking about his “monoball”, and once serenaded a large party with an impromptu and delightfully bawdy song about a sailor with one ball and the feats he manfully managed to perform. It turned out that Stu’s monoball must have been attacked in the womb by the hidden DDT in his Mom’s cigarettes, because when he was in his early 50’s monoball turned on him and killed him.

Researchers have long known there is a connection between smoking and testicular cancer. They just couldn’t explain what it is.

But when you examine a secret tobacco industry study from 1972 (see more below) then we can see that it’s more than just possible that a lot of 2019’s testicular cancer will arise from a genetic hit in the womb from the DDT in a mother’s (or grandmother’s) cigarettes in the 1960’s or 70’s. That genetic hit occurred because with every puff she was inhaling massive doses of hidden organochlorine pesticides.

Mothers weren’t being irresponsible by smoking in those days – many doctors even advised it. Mothers smoked because they believed it would help to keep their weight from getting out of control and to deal with the stress of Motherhood. Everybody did it.

Here’s How Mothers & Fetuses Were Exposed To DDT in the 1970’s

The problem with looking at DDT in Tobacco products is that all the DDT exposure studies ever done deal only with the health consequences of environmental exposure to DDT and ingestion in food or water. Nobody has ever studied the health effects of smoking pesticide contaminated tobacco products because the Tobacco industry knew about the problem and actively and completely suppressed that kind of research. It just hasn’t been done.  But DDT and other organochlorines have been there in heavy concentrations since 1955, and we now know that genetic damage caused by organochlorine pesticides is transgenerational, and targets specific parts of the genome in order to accomplish this stealth transmission of genetic disease.

Bottom line – if that mother or grandmother we referred to above was pregnant and smoking cigarettes between 1955-1980 she was without any question micro-dosing herself and her unborn child with DDT.

I referred to a confidential RJR report above. It’s from 1972, with all the original signatures, and reports on tests of DDT contamination of three RJR brands. All three brands show heavy contamination, and other research I’ve done shows that the entire tobacco product supply in the US in those days was loaded with enough chemicals to explain nearly all the smoking-related disease we see today.

If the anti-tobacco forces weren’t barely disguised Victorian moralists moralists, under the weight of factual evidence of pesticide contamination they would have to recognize that there is a legitimate question about whether it is actually tobacco that is responsible for all smoking-related disease and if not, what else is responsible and in what proportion? The fact is that there was DDT in every US cigarette in 1972, and that the sons of mothers born to mothers who smoked in those days are now known to be at high risk of testicular (and other) cancer in 2019. I’ll link you to peer-reviewed journal research on this below but first here’s a table summarizing the data on DDT in those three RJR brands in 1972. This is what millions of grandmothers of today’s middle-age men were inhaling. (BTW – this report only covered DDT – there were many other heavy organochlorine residues in 1972 cigarettes.)

RJR Confidential June 21, 1972

Project 2358 – Cigarette Development; Notebook Pages: 250701-250719

In The Cigarette DDT – Range PPM (20 samples) DDT – Avg PPM (20 Samples)
4841 – Regular Unfiltered 4.14 – 7.96 6.06 +/- 0.99
4842 – Filter King 3.38 – 6.65 4.95 +/- 0.90
4843 – Filter King 4.86 – 6.82 5.89 +/- 0.61
In The Cigarette Smoke    
4841 – Regular Unfiltered 0.35 – 0.57 0.42 +/- 0.06
4842 – Filter King 0.16 – 0.35 0.025 +/- 0.05
4843 – Filter King 0.24 – 0.46 0.35 +/- 0.05

 

Here’s What’s Happening To Male Children Today

J Natl Cancer Inst. 2008 May 7;100(9):663-71.

Persistent organochlorine pesticides and risk of testicular germ cell tumors

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18445826

CONCLUSIONS:

Increased exposure to p,p’-DDE may be associated with the risk of both seminomatous and nonseminomatous TGCTs, whereas exposure to chlordane compounds and metabolites may be associated with the risk of seminoma. Because evidence suggests that TGCT is initiated in very early life, it is possible that exposure to these persistent organic pesticides during fetal life or via breast feeding may increase the risk of TGCT in young men.

Here’s Why Even Tiny, Steady Doses Of DDT Matter

Male Reproductive Health and Environmental Xenoestrogens

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.96104s4741

Long-term exposure to small amounts of organochlorine contaminants leads to the accumulation of considerable burdens in animal and human tissues. It is therefore not the amount of DDT to which a mother is exposed during pregnancy that is critical but rather her lifetime exposure that will determine the level of exposure of the fetus and the breast-fed infant.

Here’s Evidence That This Is Happening Worldwide

Human Reproduction, Volume 16, Issue 5, 1 May 2001, Pages 972–978

Testicular dysgenesis syndrome: an increasingly common developmental disorder with environmental aspects: Opinion

https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/16/5/972/2913494

This article summarizes existing evidence supporting a new concept that poor semen quality, testis cancer, undescended testis and hypospadias are symptoms of one underlying entity, the testicular dysgenesis syndrome (TDS), which may be increasingly common due to adverse environmental influences.

Experimental biological investigations and epidemiological studies leave little doubt that the TDS can be a result of disruption of embryonal programming and gonadal development during fetal life. As the rise in the incidence of the various symptoms of TDS occurred rapidly over few generations, the aetiological impact of adverse environmental factors such as hormone disrupters, probably acting upon a susceptible genetic background, must be considered.

While the focus of this post is on DDT and TDS, take a look at the pesticide contaminants that we just found in a sample of tobacco brands purchased off-the-shelf at out Portland-area minimarts, The first thing that stands out is the number of contaminants and – look at that – the cheaper the brand the higher the contamination and the worse the contaminants. In fact, the cheaper the brand the more Testicular disrupting/damaging chemicals there are – look at the Carbendazim in the Swisher Sweets. Combined with the action of DDT on Testicular tissues and hormones Carbendazim is equally well-documented as a male reproductive system poison and carcinogen.

Carbendazim is a broad-spectrum benzimidazole antifungal with potential antimitotic and antineoplastic activities. Although the exact mechanism of action is unclear, carbendazim appears to binds to an unspecified site on tubulin and suppresses microtubule assembly dynamic. This results in cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase and an induction of apoptosis.

The point of this is to say that the brand of tobacco product your mother smoked matters more than just about any other factor in determining your risk of Testicular cancer as an adult. This means staying alert and getting checked often – which Stu did not do. I would end this with RIP, but there’s no way that “Tiny Ball” is laying around resting, wherever he is.

CURATED BLOG POSTS ON RELATED TOPICS

Hidden Causes Of HIV/AIDS Treatment Failure

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nOD

The Korean Genome + Smoking + (DDT) = Diabetes Epidemic

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nO6

Ancestral DDT Exposure & Trans-generational Obesity

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nNO

Smoking & Breast Cancer – A New Link?

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nNl

Little Cigars And High Liver Cancer Rates In Marginalized Communities

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nMy

Sweet Cheap Poison At The Bodega

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nLj

Prostate Cancer & Tobacco Pesticides: Hidden Links

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nKy

Obesity & Obesogens: The Tobacco Connection

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nJ4

Tobacco Pesticides & Childhood Leukemia

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nIL


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Hidden Cause Of HIV/AIDS Treatment Failure?

It’s critical that we re-define the threat to HIV/AIDS patients who can’t quit smoking because the threat from smoking during HIV/AIDS therapy is far greater than anything previously imagined. Quite simply, every tobacco brand we’ve just tested is loaded with hidden fungicides including some of the most potent and dangerous kinds.

New hard data from lab tests we just ran on popular cigarette brands identify fungicides as a hidden factor in the well-documented failure of HIV/AIDS treatment in cases where heavy smoking is involved.  A cocktail of unregulated fungicides contaminates every popular tobacco product we tested, and these fungicides interact very negatively with almost every medication used in HIV/AIDS therapies.

Fungus infections are a severe, sometimes nearly intractable HIV/AIDS problem, and Azole-class fungicides are among the most-used in treatment. However, HIV/AIDS healers are very aware that Azole fungicides have serious, sometime severe interactions with many other medications that need to be used. Therefore, cross-exposure is carefully managed.

Hidden Azole-class fungicides in the tobacco brands that patients continue to smoke through treatment are feeding multiple Azole fungicides into their system with every puff. Interactions with their other meds must run wild, and surely nobody can explain them because nobody knows about which fungicides are in the tobacco brand the patient is smoking, or even that this problem exists. 

As you can see in the table below, every brand we tested had high concentrations of fungicides, including azole-class fungicides. Note that even the relatively clean American Spirit Blue shows significant contamination, while the Marlboro Reds and Swisher Sweets are very heavily contaminated with multiple fungicides. We tested other brands – these three are quite representative of how the range of contamination correlates with price, meaning that economically marginalized people receive the highest doses of endocrine disrupting chemicals in their smoke. Many of the most difficult HIV/AIDS patients are also economically marginalized and depend on the cheapest tobacco brands, which are the most heavily contaminated with hidden fungicides.

And of course, a young impoverished lifetime of inhaling these immune and endocrine system disrupting chemicals in cheap flavored tobacco products may well have lowered the threshold of vulnerability in HIV/AIDS victims in the first place.

Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18

People are very likely dying unnecessarily today because of this specific preventable issue, contamination of tobacco products with toxic fungicides that conflict with or cancel their HIV/AIDS therapy.  The impact of this hidden toxic cocktail on the chemicals being used in therapy, as well as on the patient’s own organs and endocrine system, are probably what generates the devastation that is seen in these xenobiotic chemical victims. That said, we can’t overlook the separate and equally devastating impacts of  DDT, Carbendazim, and other endocrine-disruptors in tobacco products, but this post will focus just on the fungicides.

THE PROBLEM: SUMMARY

We know that even while in therapy, and causing failure of the therapy

1. Many HIV/AIDS victims remain heavy smokers. 

2. Azole fungicides interact negatively with almost every HIV/AIDS drug

3. So do many other classes of anti-fungals.

THE CONCLUSION

Hidden Azole fungicides in tobacco products are a major risk factor in the high rates of failure of HIV/AIDS therapy among smokers.

SIMPLE, INEXPENSIVE, & PROBABLY VERY EFFECTIVE

HIV/AIDS clinics can implement the solution to this tragedy without needing to address or solve the problem of contaminated tobacco.

I believe that a community-based organic tobacco replacement program would turn out to be the most effective smoking-related disease mitigation approach ever implemented. But that’s for later. Just like a needle exchange. Turn in your contaminated tobacco products; receive organic smokes in return. The present cost would be a fraction of one percent of the future avoided costs, not to mention the avoided suffering and death.

The program can be a simple as buying organic cigarettes and distributing them, or as much fun as buying whole organic tobacco leaf and having rolling parties.

Hand-rolling parties using organic tobacco leaf would offer a great participatory opportunity for raising awareness and encouraging patients to help themselves and educate others.

These organic smokes can be handed out just like medications, needles, condoms, vitamins and other necessities; hand out the these uncontaminated hand-rolled cigarettes along with medication and do some awareness-raising of why this is so important. Then check the vitals on the patients who switch from contaminated to organic tobacco and check the results.

This has never been done before, and I can promise that the results will be dramatic when someone finally has the courage to try.

I realize that the perfect solution would be to find a way to empower victims to stop smoking completely, and this may actually be a path to that outcome for some. But for those who must for whatever reason keep smoking, at least they won’t be inhaling a cocktail of therapy-negating Azole fungicides and immune-system disruptors like Carbendazim and DDT.

Unfortunately this simple little program would threaten everybody from the tobacco companies to the FDA and the Prohibitionist/Eugenics interests among the Elite. This program, which can easily be implemented on the most local level, would actually eliminate most smoking-related disease and death and that would never do. Don’t for one minute think that the Elite are unaware that most of the people killed by contaminated tobacco products are by their definition not worth keeping alive. They are very aware, and think they are immensely clever for getting away with it for as long as they have. 

For members of the LGBTQ communities who are currently smoking but do not have HIV/AIDS, this awareness could be a future life-saver. Seeing what their brothers and sisters are going through and knowing why will be a huge incentive for HIV/AIDS patients who have turned their therapy around by eliminating the fungicide-contaminated tobacco products can share that experience more effectively than any program ever designed.

I am the inventor of “American Spirit” organic  tobacco and the writer of “Cultivators Handbook of Natural Tobacco” so I know the organic tobacco network pretty well. I’ll be happy to help any clinic access dependable low-cost supplies of any kind of organic tobacco from cigarettes to RYO to whole organic leaf.

I can also help set up a tobacco product pesticide/fungicide testing program using qualified US labs so that clinic and patients can know exactly what is in the specific tobacco brand that is threatening therapy.

So, thanks for staying with this post. You may be interested in some related posts, or maybe this has been way too much already, in which case thanks for visiting and reading!

Prostate Cancer & Tobacco Pesticides: Hidden Links

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nKy

Ancestral DDT Exposure & Trans-generational Obesity

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nNO

Obesity & Obesogens: The Tobacco Connection

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nJ4

Smoking & Breast Cancer – A New Link?

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nNl

Little Cigars And High Liver Cancer Rates In Marginalized Communities

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nMy

Sweet Cheap Poison At The Bodega

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nLj


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The Korean Genome + Smoking + (DDT) = Diabetes Epidemic

Summary

Hidden DDT contamination of tobacco products may be a missing link in the equation connecting the Korean Genome, Tobacco product smoking, and the emerging Type 2 Diabetes epidemic in Korea.

Background 

First, we have data-based hard evidence from lab tests just completed (12/18) that the American tobacco supply appears to be heavily contaminated (see data below), and we are certain based on this and other data that this reflects the global tobacco supply situation.

There is also this:

1. Solid research (cited below) that shows that exposure during fetal development to specific organochlorine pesticides including DDT leads by now-known genetic pathways to increased risk, and increased rates of Type 2 Diabetes in people with the Korean genome.

2. The connection between smoking tobacco products and Type 2 Diabetes among Koreans (cited below) is also well established, but there is no cross-over understanding of the role of pesticides in smoking-related disease. 

Without taking the hidden pesticides in tobacco products into account, the relationship between smoking and Diabetes cannot be fully understood, and the specific genetic vulnerabilities of Korean people cannot be accounted for in making health care decisions. With such knowledge, doctors would be better able to treat patients, and reluctant patients would have new evidence-based smoking quitting motivation showing them the specific pesticides in their specific tobacco product brand choice and what those pesticides are doing to their treatment outcome.

3. Other research (cited below) shows that the damaging effects of DDT exposure persist across multiple generations, and that people of Asian ancestry are disproportionately vulnerable to certain specific genetic damage from DDT exposure in previous generations.

Unfortunately the problem of DDT and Diabetes doesn’t stop with the person who is smoking contaminated tobacco today. It appears that even if a person today is not a smoker, and not being exposed to DDT that way, if their mother or maternal grandmother smoked she was undoubtedly exposed to DDT with every puff, and that effect is now known to reach across generations and put exposed people at higher risk of multiple diseases.

This strongly implies that Koreans with Type 2 Diabetes today whose mother’s mother smoked may have inherited the damaged genes that led to their diabetes from a grandmother whose DNA was attacked by the pesticides in her cigarettes 50 years ago.

4. It’s an open secret that Asian tobacco products are heavily contaminated with pesticide residues including DDT and other organochlorine pesticides. Asian health authorities have been struggling for years trying to find a way to stop the tobacco pesticide contamination but the industry has the fix in at every important political and regulatory level in every country including, I’m very sure, in Korea.

5. In this post I will offer links to peer-reviewed research and hard data to demonstrate that this is a possibility worth examining. These pesticides are known contaminants of tobacco products worldwide. 

The Most Compelling Evidence

First, here’s new hard data showing the extent of pesticide contamination of American tobacco products. (Notice the multiple endocrine-disruptors.)

Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18

Here’s a startling study linking DDT to obesity and diabetes across generations of people, which given the history of smoking in Korea suggests a link to today’s Korean Diabetes epidemic among others.

Ancestral dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) exposure promotes epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of obesity

BMC Medicine 2013 11:228

Background

Ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of environmental factors and toxicants have been shown to promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease. The present work examined the potential transgenerational actions of the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) on obesity and associated disease.

Conclusions

Observations indicate ancestral exposure to DDT can promote obesity and associated disease transgenerationally. The etiology of disease such as obesity may be in part due to environmentally induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance.

At least some portion of the Type 2 Diabetes epidemic among Korean smokers must be due to their genetic vulnerability to organochlorine pesticides like the DDT hidden in the tobacco products they are smoking.

In our recent tests of off-the-shelf American tobacco products for pesticide contamination, 20% of the samples tested revealed a high concentration of DDT. The following study looked at Koreans only but if this pattern is repeated or amplified among tobacco brands smoked by Asian populations, then smoking OC-contaminated tobacco products represents a hidden danger of increased risk for Type 2 Diabetes. This is due to the unreasonably dangerous exposure of smokers and their immediate households to OC pesticides in tobacco product smoke.

This research also has strong implications for Korean-American and in fact all Asian-American youth who disproportionately smoke the highly contaminated brands of tobacco products that are often the only choice available in marginalized Asian-American communities. Obviously Asian youth in America have Asian genomes, which means that they are at heightened risk of transgenerational pesticide-induced disease from smoking contaminated tobacco products.

Another Piece Of The Puzzle

We see that DDT damage crosses generations. Now let’s see what it specifically does to Koreans.

Environ Int. 2010 Jul;36(5):410-4.

Strong associations between low-dose organochlorine pesticides and type 2 diabetes in Korea.

Low-dose organochlorine (OC) pesticides have recently been associated with type 2 diabetes in several non-Asian general populations. As there is currently epidemic type 2 diabetes in Asia, we investigated the associations between OC pesticides and type 2 diabetes in Koreans.

Most OC pesticides showed strong associations with type 2 diabetes after adjusting for age, sex, BMI, alcohol consumption, and cigarette smoking.

In this exploratory study with small sample, low-dose background exposure to OC pesticides was strongly associated with prevalent type 2 diabetes in Koreans even though absolute concentrations of OC pesticides were no higher than in other populations. Asians may be more susceptible to adverse effects of OC pesticides than other races.

Notice that this study found the effects of OC pesticides even AFTER smoking was controlled as a factor, which means that the effects of the pesticide contaminants in the tobacco products were masked in the data, but would have spiked the results even more if shown.

Unfortunately multiple research studies show that older Koreans strongly tend to continue smoking after being diagnosed with Diabetes, which means that those smokers are continuing to reinforce the cause of their disease while being treated. I have to also wonder about the cross-interactions between all of the pesticides in what they are smoking and the medications that they are taking to treat the disease.

In other words, unknown to them or their doctors, smoking is continuing to expose them to the OC pesticides that caused their diabetes in the first place, which probably effectively cancels out any positive impact treatment may be having.

Smoking and Risk for Diabetes Incidence and Mortality in Korean Men and Women

Diabetes Care 2010 Dec; 33(12): 2567-2572.

Younger age, lower economic status, heavier smoking habit, lower Charlson Comorbidity Index and comorbid hypertension were identified as factors associated with continued smoking after the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.

Older patients and patients with longer diabetic duration were more likely to quit smoking.

Contrastingly, smokers in the lower economic status and heavier smoking habit categories were more likely to continue smoking after the diagnosis.

Conclusion

The economic, social and personal cost burden that the 100% preventable OC pesticide contamination of tobacco products imposes on Asian countries may represent the difference between a viable healthy economy and society and a sickened, low-productivity, low energy society in Asia.

Given the rapidly advancing chemistry of pesticide agents and their increasing impact on the human endocrine system, Asian societies must control this devastating hidden and unregulated poisoning of their people by the international tobacco cartels.

As you can see in these related posts, this issue is by no means confined to people with Asian genomes, not to DDT, nor to Diabetes.

Sweet Cheap Poison At The Bodega

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nLj

Obesity & Obesogens: The Tobacco Connection

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nJ4

Tobacco Pesticides & Childhood Leukemia

https://wp.me/p48Z9A-nIL

 


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Ancestral DDT Exposure & Trans-generational Obesity

The data and research studies we’ll look at in this post offer evidence that many, many millions of people today who are suffering from obesity may have a problem that, for those with a specific kind of family history of smoking, is totally independent of their diet or other behavior. In other words they aren’t eating or doing anything that can completely explain their obesity, but they are suffering, getting sick and dying of it. They may not be able or choose to eat the best diet, and they may not be able to live in the healthiest environment, but do those factors explain what’s causing their obesity enough that we can say “case closed”?

The newest research (shown and linked-to below) says the case is far from closed. It is linked to hidden endocrine disrupting pesticides including heavy DDT in the tobacco products smoked by women in the 1955-1980 time period. And by the way, knowing that pesticide damage may have been done to your mother or grandmother by constant DDT exposure, and that you were exposed before and maybe after birth, may lead your doctors today toward thinking about new ways of helping you.

So this post and these ideas aren’t just about raining awareness of the terrible things that smoking did to mothers and grandmothers of today’s generations, it’s about how knowing what was done generations ago may, in these new days of genetic science, give us new options to repair the damage.

To begin with, we have a study that shows us, although that was not the researcher’s objective, that people suffering from obesity today had mothers or grandmothers who were exposed. Not exposed by smoking – nobody knew that or even admits it today. But because as we’ll see shortly cigarettes were loaded with DDT in the period 1955-1980, people struggling with obesity today may well be the victims of DDT in the cigarettes their mother or grandmother smoked in 1970. DDT is now classified along with a number other supertoxic pesticides as an Obesogen – a chemical compound that causes obesity with the right exposure. It was a hidden but heavy contaminant of the tobacco product supply in those days, along with other supertoxic organochlorines including Endrin, Aldrin, Dieldren, Heptachlor, and Chordane.

This means that that people born to mothers who smoked 1955-1980, or to mothers whose own mother smoked 1955-1980, are at higher risk of transgenerational obesity just from that factor, exposure to DDT in the womb, even without any further exposure. In utero DDT exposure at just the wrong point in the unfolding tissues of the fetus, causes specific DNA damage that extends well beyond obesity in the later life of the unborn child  to include multiple kidney, prostate, testicular and ovarian diseases and several specific cancers including breast cancer and childhood leukemia.

Here is a data table from a confidential internal RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company that shows the levels of DDT contamination of their three most popular brands. Virtually any woman smoking an RJ Reynolds brand in those years, and earlier, was inhaling DDT at these levels. If she was pregnant, her child was exposed at precisely the right point to initiate the obesogenic process because even if she didn’t smoke every day of her pregnancy DDT lingers and accumulates in organs and fatty tissues. Her babies would have been exposed, and the transgenerational process initiated.

RJR Confidential June 21, 1972

Project 2358 – Cigarette Development; Notebook Pages: 250701-250719

In The Cigarette DDT – Range PPM (20 samples) DDT – Avg PPM (20 Samples)
4841 – Regular Unfiltered 4.14 – 7.96 6.06 +/- 0.99
4842 – Filter King 3.38 – 6.65 4.95 +/- 0.90
4843 – Filter King 4.86 – 6.82 5.89 +/- 0.61
In The Cigarette Smoke    
4841 – Regular Unfiltered 0.35 – 0.57 0.42 +/- 0.06
4842 – Filter King 0.16 – 0.35 0.025 +/- 0.05
4843 – Filter King 0.24 – 0.46 0.35 +/- 0.05

I hope that this information can empower people suffering from obesity or any of the other diseases now associated with transgenerational effects of DDT exposure to seek alternative treatments and therapies that may help in ways not being addressed by Western Allopathic medicine as represented by the US FDA, which actively rejects responsibility for regulating pesticide contamination of tobacco products. FDA simply refuses to so so, and there can only be one reason for that. Only one.

Ancestral dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) exposure promotes epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of obesity

BMC Medicine 2013 11:228

Background

Ancestral environmental exposures to a variety of environmental factors and toxicants have been shown to promote the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult onset disease. The present work examined the potential transgenerational actions of the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) on obesity and associated disease.

Conclusions

Observations indicate ancestral exposure to DDT can promote obesity and associated disease transgenerationally. The etiology of disease such as obesity may be in part due to environmentally induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance.

Here is direct evidence that smokers of at least brands of RJR cigarettes were exposed to DDT with each puff they took before, during and after pregnancy. I have a copy of the original report found in the Tobacco settlement files. Here are the important data.

RJR Confidential June 21, 1972

Project 2358 – Cigarette Development

Notebook Pages: 250701-250719

In Cigarette DDT – Range PPM (20 samples) DDT – Avg PPM (20 Samples)
4841 – Regular Unfiltered 4.14 – 7.96 6.06 +/- 0.99
4842 – Filter King 3.38 – 6.65 4.95 +/- 0.90
4843 – Filter King 4.86 – 6.82 5.89 +/- 0.61
In Cigarette Smoke    
4841 – Regular Unfiltered 0.35 – 0.57 0.42 +/- 0.06
4842 – Filter King 0.16 – 0.35 0.025 +/- 0.05
4843 – Filter King 0.24 – 0.46 0.35 +/- 0.05

This level of contamination was universal in 1972, and included many other organochlorines that RJR didn’t test for – at least not in this report. But tobacco products in those days were heavily contaminated with the whole range of OC pesticides including Endrin, Aldrin, Dieldrin, Chlordane, and many others whose impact on human health have never been studied.

This also means that people who themselves smoke or use DDT contaminated tobacco products today are reinforcing the transgenerational effects of DDT exposure by their mother or grandmother. It’s also important to say that the tobacco products with the highest levels of DDT today are those being smoked by poor, marginalized Hispanic, African American and Native American youth.

Obesity is one of the known effects of current DDT exposure, so as long as this synergistic pathway goes unrecognized in our understanding of obesity the opportunities for successful healing will be unnecessarily limited. A good first step would be to remove all tobacco products contaminated by high levels of DDT from the market.

This study of transgenerational effects of exposure to DDT ought to provoke questions about what the tobacco manufacturers knew in 1972, or earlier, or afterwards about organochlorine pesticides in their products.


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Smoking & Breast Cancer – A New Link?

Because of the heavy concentrations of DDT and other endocrine disrupting pesticide residues we recently detected contaminating popular tobacco brands, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that beginning with the 1950s every tobacco product being smoked, puffed, dipped or chewed in America had extremely heavy concentrations of organochlorine pesticides. Heavy use of xenobiotic “crop protection” agents for tobacco began in the 1950s with DDT and quickly included aldrin, endrin, dieldrin, chlordane and other byproducts of wartime toxic gas research.

With that in mind, please check this:

DDT Exposure in Utero and Breast Cancer  The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 100, Issue 8, 1 August 2015, Pages 2865–2872,

Maternal o,p′-DDT predicted daughters’ breast cancer (odds ratio fourth quartile vs first = 3.7, 95% confidence interval 1.5–9.0). Mothers’ lipids, weight, race, age, and breast cancer history did not explain the findings.

DDT and Breast Cancer: Prospective Study of Induction Time and Susceptibility Windows . Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 13 February 2019

“Considering the patterns we observed, working backward to determine when a woman first came into contact with the chemical could help inform early detection and treatment of DDT-associated breast cancer.”

Women who were born roughly between 1955-1980 to mothers who smoked (or dipped or chewed) any of the popular tobacco brands of the times were heavily exposed to DDT and other organochlorines in the womb and probably throughout early childhood as Mommy smoked to get rid of all that pregnancy weight and then kept on smoking, maybe in secret, just a little, because it calmed her nerves.

A confidential industry study done in 1972 that I located in the Tobacco Settlement files reported an average of almost 6 mg/kg total DDT over all the brands they tested anonymously. The report ended with a hope that DDT concentrations would be dropping in the future (it had just been banned worldwide for the first time in 1972), and a warning that the data must be kept secret.

But when you look at what we found in tobacco products in 2018 you can see how little progress has been made. While there is only one instance of DDT contamination here it is extreme, and as you can see there are several rather extreme concentrations of other hazardous endocrine disrupting pesticide residues here even in this small sample. There are also residues of pesticides for which no data exist – their effects are unknown. It’s a crap shoot with human lives rolling snake eyes.

Community Tobacco Control Partners Test Results 12/18

If my interpretation of how our new tobacco pesticide residue data applies to the breast cancer research on endocrine disrupting chemicals is right, and it seems pretty straightforward, women in 2019 with medical history that includes parental and especially maternal smoking during birth years 1955-1980 are at severely heightened risk that requires close attention. I am NOT saying that the threat ended in 1980 – it changed, and it got worse. As you can see from the data above, female babies born today to young mothers who smoke Swisher Sweets, or who live in a household where they are smoked, are continually exposed to heavy doses of DDT. What does that say about their risk for breast cancer in 2050?

But in this post I am talking only about DDT and organochlorine exposure of women who were born to smoking mothers 1955-1980.

Know thy unknowns: why we need to widen our view on endocrine disruptors, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 71:3, 2016 (209-212)

These compounds ‘interfere with any aspect of hormone action’, and by doing so can adversely affect physiology and development and thus increase the risk of metabolic and reproductive disorders as well as hormone-sensitive carcinogenesis and impaired neurodevelopment

So keeping with the theme, here are a few more things you may want to review.

Environmental chemicals and breast cancer: An updated review of epidemiological literature informed by biological mechanisms, Environmental Research, 160, (152-182)

Organochlorine concentrations in adipose tissue and survival in postmenopausal, Danish breast cancer patients, Environmental Research, 163,(237-248)

Receptor activities of persistent pollutant serum mixtures and breast cancer risk, Endocrine-Related Cancer, 10.1530/ERC-17-0366, 25:3, (201-215),

 Evidence of the Possible Harm of Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals in Humans: Ongoing Debates and Key Issues, Endocrinology and Metabolism, 10.3803/EnM.2018.33.1.44, 33:1, (44), 

 Changes in the total effective xenoestrogen burden (TEXB) of breast cancer patients during an 18-month post-surgical follow-up, Reproductive Toxicology, 10.1016/j.reprotox.2017.03.007, 69, (212-220),

A Ternary Mixture of Common Chemicals Perturbs Benign Human Breast Epithelial Cells More Than the Same Chemicals Do Individually, Toxicological Sciences, 10.1093/toxsci/kfy126

Finally, as you look at this last reference, note the “higher girl’s BMI” factor, and consider the role of EDC in obesity. What if the EDC’s in the mother’s tobacco products contribute in utero and during childhood to the child’s obesity which in turn adds to her potential for breast cancer development? If so, we know for sure harmful pre-natal EDC exposure is going on today and is not just something that happened 1955-1980. 

Prenatal smoking and age at menarche: influence of the prenatal environment on the timing of puberty  Human Reproduction, Volume 30, Issue 4, 1 April 2015, Pages 957–962

We find that older maternal AAM (hazards ratio (HR): 0.75, confidence interval (CI) (95%): 0.71–0.79) and higher birthweight (HR: 0.86, CI (95%): 0.75–0.97) lower the chance of earlier menarche; while higher girls’ BMI at 8–9 years (HR: 1.12, CI (95%): 1.10–1.15), and maternal cigarette smoking on ‘most days’ during gestation (HR: 1.40, CI (95%): 1.10–1.79 with ‘no smoking’ as the reference level) increased the chance of earlier menarche. All factors were statistically significant at P = 0.05.


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Oregon Smokes 4 Billion Grams Of Tobacco A Year

Oregonians smoke 11.1 Million grams or 390,000 ounces of tobacco products a day. That puts Tobacco sales in Oregon over 4 Billion grams, or almost 9 million pounds of tobacco products a year. Californians smoke 62.3 Million grams or 2.3 Million ounces of Tobacco products a day. The amount of tobacco product smoked in California in a year almost requires an exponential expression – 22,739,500,000 grams a year. 

How many of those 4 Billion grams a year are being grown by Oregon Cannabis growers? How about the 22 Billion a year in Cali?

How many of those 11.1 million grams a day in Oregon are heirloom tobacco varieties like Mopan Mayan, Mount Pima or Aztec Rustica?

How many have such individualistic aroma and flavor profiles that they match beautifully with unique Oregon-grown Cannabis terpene profiles?

How many are being sold alongside Oregon’s premium Cannabis in Oregon dispensaries?

How many of those grams are “medicinal Tobacco” – and what could a new designation like that mean?

I think it’s quite possible that some of those 11.1 million grams a day can be authentic heirloom tobacco, grown both indoors and sun-grown as a complementary crop by skilled Oregon Cannabis growers. I think it can sell at $3.50/gram, $100/ounce retail implying gross farm revenues of $30/ounce or $480/pound at wholesale, with strong retail-price web selling options.  

A market of 9 million pounds a year at $480 a pound represents a theoretical total for on-farm revenues of $4.5 Billion per year. A fraction of that amount would still represent a major new agricultural opportunity for Oregon growers. 

As a point of comparison, Santa Fe Natural Tobacco buys 1.7 million pounds of organic tobacco a year from 100+ growers worldwide for manufacturing just the American Spirit organic cigarette brand. None of the SFNT’s other natural brands are organic tobacco. As you can see, even American Spirit organic cigarettes total tobacco demand for worldwide production amounts to only a tiny fraction of just Oregon’s own tobacco consumption. There may be a lot of room in local, state and regional markets for new heirloom tobacco/cannabis brands that can begin very small at the farm producer level.

I think $25,000 a quarter acre (500-600 cured pounds) is reasonable if the untapped market is anything like what I believe it is. An existing cannabis grower can find out pretty quickly. Just put in a couple each of maybe six different heirloom tobacco strains off to the side, raise them and cure them out using traditional methods, then do a nice blend with your cannabis flowers (or trim) and try it out locally with maybe a few hundred people. Find out what they think. Get an idea of what they will pay. After doing that, any cannabis grower would know for sure what the local market is for heirloom tobacco at virtually no cost to find out.

Grams of Tobacco Consumed Per-Day In Selected Cannabis Growing States
State Retail Grams Tobacco Daily – All Brands
Oregon 11,100,000
California 62,300,000
Washington 29,388,240
Colorado 13,937,280
Nevada 9.336,971
Michigan 31,567,585
Tennessee 21,007,048
Massachusetts 12,781,552
billdrake4470@gmail.com

Maybe This Is A Timely Opportunity

Cannabis and Tobacco are such a natural pair in the marketplace and in peoples’ lives that it makes sense, if you are in the Cannabis business, to look at the tobacco business. You can bet this predatory industry is looking at Oregon’s Cannabis.

In order to approach this idea productively you have to set aside everything you believe you know about Tobacco itself, the Tobacco industry, growing Tobacco, Tobacco products, the economics of Tobacco, and the medical and scientific evidence against Tobacco (which is actually against Tobacco products – not at all the same thing, which is at the core of the industry’s con game.)

So far there doesn’t seem to have been a market anywhere in the world where $500/pound indoor-grown heirloom, perhaps even organic tobacco can be justified by a potential market. Nobody in the world is currently paying $100/Ounce retail for tobacco. That probably sounds crazy.

However, I think it’s possible that Oregon may have inadvertently reached the point where people can discover the value of $100/ounce tobacco, which is what I think real heirloom tobacco is worth, but for the moment let’s just agree that tobacco is a very valuable plant that Cannabis growers may not have considered and that the public has not yet discovered.

I believe that thousands of people are ready to discover the pleasures of heirloom tobacco smoked and vaped with their artisan cannabis, and all the circumstances that could release this unrealized demand look to me like they line up for Oregon Cannabis growers in 2019.

With many of the heirloom varieties maturing at under 70 days and some in as little as 45 days after planting out, there is plenty of time for indoor and outdoor growers to get ready, put in a small tobacco patch, and see what happens.

Background & Discussion

There are +/- 800,000 tobacco product users in Oregon, and they smoke, dip, vape and chew everything from cigarettes to blunts, from snus to chew. But for the sake of keeping it simple let’s just say that on average each tobacco product user in Oregon smokes 17 cigarettes a day, the US average, or the equivalent in some other tobacco product. At 0.8 grams of tobacco materials per cigarette (which is a whole ‘nuther story), that means that Oregon tobacco users are consuming 11,100,000 grams of what they believe is tobacco a day, over 4 Billion grams a year.

With many Oregon Cannabis growers getting slammed at only $500/pound for their flowers and their indoor production costs running around $1.25/gram, many growers are looking around for ideas, and this may be one worth considering. Even when Cannabis prices can be managed back up to more reasonable levels by opening export markets, which will provide temporary relief for some growers, the time may be right for growers to consider the potential market for heirloom Tobacco production at what I think is a sustainable grower price of $500/pound.

Heirloom Tobacco Under Lights – The Research

I really don’t know that it will be feasible to put tobacco and cannabis plants side-by-side under lights as a commercial proposition. It’s never been tried to my knowledge, and there are some questions to be answered. But, with some of the compact tobacco strains whose height and growth cycle to maturity can be coordinated with the Cannabis strains under cultivation – quite likely. It is certainly one of the first things I would try. Some kind of inter-planting might work well, especially with some of the heirloom tobacco varieties that have compact growth profiles. I have several varieties in mind that grow quickly to maturity, have relatively compact profiles, and have leaves that cure to mild but potent smoke.

But whether in its own space under lights, or in a curtained off part of an indoor Cannabis grow space – I believe that heirloom tobacco production under lights might be a very profitable junior partner in an indoor Cannabis business. There has been plenty of research and experience with conventional tobacco that can be ported over to indoor tobacco/cannabis production.

Experienced Cannabis growers will be able to immediately put the research data on every aspect of tobacco to use in growing heirloom varieties even though almost all the research is done on either the conventional tobacco types used by the industry or experimental strains that were never meant to be smoked. There are thousands of studies involving every conceivable parameter of tobacco grown in greenhouses or under lights for research.

Be careful! Sorting through all the irrelevant tobacco research that’s out there could take a lifetime, since tobacco is the white rat of plant genetics and is used extensively in plant biology research worldwide. Sorting through and applying the relevant knowledge base to small-scale heirloom tobacco production will not be a stretch, and I can be helpful. It’s important to note that since Cannabis growers love to experiment, they will find that Tobacco is at least as responsive and interesting a plant as Cannabis. Once a market for premium Oregon heirloom tobacco is established, a market for new strains of heirloom tobacco crosses won’t be far behind.

There are a number of special characteristics of tobacco that I think will make it profitable enough per square foot of indoor production space that it can work from that perspective. For example, the way tobacco is harvested, one maturing leaf at a time working from the bottom up, is in synch with the rhythms of Cannabis flower harvesting with multiple, continuous passes. Cannabis flowers and tobacco leaves receive parallel treatments in handling and drying – I see no reason why they couldn’t share the same space. Tobacco and Cannabis can, obviously, be packaged together in a lot of creative ways.

There are many other reasons why I believe that parallel indoor tobacco and cannabis production is feasible here in Oregon and maybe elsewhere.

Potential Heirloom Tobacco Markets

Under rational market conditions Cannabis production is much more profitable than anything else including Tobacco (wait for legal Coca Leaf production), but while Tobacco isn’t Cannabis in dollar value per SF, it’s up there.

More important the markets for Cannabis and Tobacco are almost exactly the same – with some important differences, but still with huge overlap. In other words, people who enjoy beautiful Cannabis flowers will love aromatic tobacco leaf, and people who are hooked on 20-40-60 commercial cigarettes a day might find that 2-3 hand-rolled (or pre-rolled) real tobacco smokes would do them just fine. Oregon Health Authority says that roughly 250,000 of the 800,000 Oregonian adults who smoke cigarettes also smoke Cannabis – I think the crossover is far greater and will exceed expectations. The same is true in every Cannabis-legal state.

The fact that high quality heirloom tobacco indoors under lights on a boutique commercial scale hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean the knowledge isn’t there – it is. Frankly there is very little that is mysterious about growing tobacco, and the finer points of each strain will reveal themselves to curious growers just as the secrets of Cannabis plants unfold for the attentive grower. There are very good reasons why Native Americans understood that Tobacco is a sacred plant, and with their respectful attitudes toward sacred traditions Oregon growers are well-suited to re-discover those qualities while building an incredible new business sector at the same time.

A good selection of heirloom tobacco seeds is, for some strange reason, readily available online, and Native American tribes have privileged access to a US government-funded tobacco germplasm collection where every strain of tobacco ever grown or discovered wild in the world is kept alive and producing a pure line of seed. In many, even most cases people will be able to access tobacco seed from the specific sacred tobacco that, for example, may have been collected 150 years ago on their ancestral land by a government botanist cataloging Native American medicinal plants.

The possibilities are really quite endless.

Sun-Grown Cannabis Flower

I’m an old-time outdoor Cannabis grower and I don’t mean to ignore the potential for a single summer crop of sun-grown heirloom tobacco as an adjunct to Cannabis for Oregon’s outdoor growers. The same environmental and cultural factors that make Oregon Cannabis such a distinctive high-value crop can work to the advantage of Oregon Cannabis growers who might start with a few heirloom tobacco plants outdoors as an experiment and see where it goes. It might take a bit of legal work or maybe not, but I don’t see any reason why an Oregon Cannabis grower who wants to grow some Aztec Rustica and then pre-roll some of their Durban Poison flower in their Aztec Rustica leaf shouldn’t go right ahead and do it.

And of course it won’t be long before somebody discovers the delights of THC & Terpene-infused heirloom tobacco leaf.

The fact that tobacco is very attractive to bugs will undoubtedly be an issue outdoors in Oregon; however, native tobacco strains are adapted to their natural environments and there are a number of NW native tobacco strains available as well as some heirloom strains from other environments that might also do well in Oregon’s short-cycle summers. There has also been a lot of work done on organic tobacco production done at NCSU that can be adapted for both indoor and outdoor purposes in Oregon.

At the core of Oregon growers’ advantage, however, is that Oregon growers are used to spending a lot of quality time with their plants, and that’s exactly what it takes to produce premium tobacco. I have studied 300 years of worldwide tobacco literature and can say without doubt that experienced hand labor is proven beyond doubt to be the path to premium tobacco. It’s really no different than wine grapes or Cannabis flowers. Technology and chemistry can go a long way in certain directions, but there will always be a market for hand-produced, highest quality, organic or responsibly grown Cannabis, Wine, Food and Tobacco.

A New Market For Trim?

Cannabis growers may find that they have a higher-value use for their trim when they blend their highest quality Cannabis trim leaf with heirloom tobacco leaf to make a very special RYO blend that can carry their own growers brand name because of its unique characteristics. With over 800 varieties of heirloom tobacco to choose from, growers will have no trouble differentiating themselves through skillful tobacco/cannabis blending of both leaf and flower.

CBD Hemp

Many different people are attracted to the exploding market for responsibly-grown CBD hemp, and growing Cannabis as hemp using very similar horticultural techniques can be very profitable as long as the market holds up. People say that CBD growers right now are getting $2500-$60,000 acre for their production depending on where they are, what strain they’re growing, how well its growing, and the selling terms and prices in their market. I’m sure that a lot of people are already warning about a flood of new production hitting the market and what that will do to prices, so Hemp growers who have learned from history are probably already looking around for complementary production possibilities.

I’ll propose that as long as a grower is getting into a couple of acres of CBD hemp as a start-up why not put in a quarter acre of an attractive heirloom tobacco strain too and see what happens if you pick it, cure it, and sell it on Amazon or at your farmers market. It’s at least as easy as Cannabis to grow, harvest and cure. Then you’ll be able to answer the important questions for yourself. Do people like it? Will they pay a good price for it? If they will, maybe you ought to think about growing some more. Not go into full-scale heirloom tobacco production, but a nice steady $20-30,000/acre (or more) on a couple of acres isn’t a bad little side-business. Maybe if a few growers are doing it then you get together as an heirloom tobacco growers co-op, buy some inexpensive, low-volume tobacco leaf processing machinery, and develop your own brand. 

Lets Do the Math

At this point, ZERO of Oregon’s 11.1 million grams a day are heirloom, exotic tobaccos grown under lights year-round and under the summer sun by experienced Oregon Cannabis growers. Maybe that’s because we haven’t actually done the math and maybe looked at things in new ways.

Here’s the math – pretty simple stuff.

40,000 SF of Tobacco = 2200+ pounds of prime leaf* per cycle @ $500/Pound = $1,100,000/per cycle x 2 cycles/year = $2,200,000/Year/Acre

*this is a conservative fact-based yield estimate; I will argue that a reasonable expectation indoors under lights is 3000 pounds of prime leaf/acre/cycle

Why $500/Pound? It’s just my opinion of what organic heirloom tobacco might sell for, and because that would work out to about $30/Ounce to the grower and with wholesale/retail margins and taxes we get to $100/Ounce or $10/8th retail for organic heirloom Tobacco at retail. So that’s the question – will a significant number of current Cannabis and Tobacco users be willing to pay $100/ounce for heirloom organic tobacco when it is presented as a premium, Oregon-grown experience in line with ancient traditions.

One ounce of authentic, powerful heirloom tobacco won’t be smoked or vaped at nearly the frequency of contaminated, synthetic commercial tobacco products, and so for regular smokers that $100 ounce will last as long as their ounce of Cannabis and will be perceived by many as extending the life of the more costly Cannabis ounce. We can bet that a lot of people will do the math – one ounce of Cannabis at $300 and one ounce of Tobacco at $100 = two ounces of great smoke at $400 instead of $600. Sweet!

I think that the perceived value of heirloom Tobacco and Cannabis will be seen as roughly equal from the smoker’s point of view. Using tobacco and cannabis together is already well accepted and understood, and in fact is the preferred way of smoking in much of the world. What will be new for Oregon smokers, and for possible export markets in other US states as well, is the experience of smoking authentic tobacco, whether combined with Oregon Cannabis or by itself.

Oregon Cannabis and Tobacco growers would be able to make as a legitimate health claim within Oregon, directed only at Oregon smokers and vapers, that a combination of responsibly-grown heirloom tobacco with responsibly grown Cannabis is a healthier alternative to commercial tobacco. I’ve just documented the extensive pesticide contamination of commercial tobacco products being sold in Oregon, so making the relative safety argument is a slam dunk.

Commercial cigarettes aren’t actually what anyone thinks of as real tobacco, but that comes under a discussion of the marketing advantages of Oregon-grown heirloom tobacco. As for Federal regulations on tobacco; do Oregon growers care about Federal regulations on Cannabis when it comes to in-state Cannabis production and sales?

I think that the Oregon Cannabis industry ought to give serious thought to the development of a parallel heirloom tobacco industry.