Of shoulders and chemical additives

16 July 2017

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a blog post. Being a fixed term employee rather than self-employed does that to you. But while I am between gigs I thought it was timely to keep the writing habit in good working order.

Back in student holiday days, I once had a job working in the Rothmans’ Tobacco Factory in Napier. While I had some moral debates with myself and others about working for the “merchants of death”, summer holiday jobs weren’t plentiful at the time. It was either the wharves, the freezing works or the tobacco factory.

Getting a job was a matter of connections. I had no wharfie connections, I wasn’t that keen on working with blood and guts and having a neighbour who was a supervisor at Rothmans was the ticket to a job in tobacco.

At first I worked in the “Roll-Your-Own” part of the factory and during a second stint got promoted to the “Pipe Tobacco” section. The “Roll-Your-Own” work was hot and dusty. The “Pipe Tobacco” section was almost laboratory like. There was a delicious smell of aromatic essences in the air, as various flavours were sprayed on to the tobacco before packaging.

I was reminded of all this by way of Wallace Chapman’s RNZ interview of Simon Chapman, Emeritus Professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=201851251

The two Chapmans spent the best part of 20 minutes destroying the myth that somehow “rollies” were more “natural” and therefore better for you than tailor-made cigarettes. Simon talked about the evils of roll your own tobacco containing 22% by weight of additives designed to enhance moisture compared with 0.25% additives by weight used in tailor-made cigarettes.

The world became more enlightened of this practice courtesy of New Zealand’s Official Information Act, when a government agency in response to an OIA request in the early 1990s released a substantial report giving chapter and verse on tobacco manufactured in this country.

The Professor also pointed out that now that a great deal of tobacco is grown in less developed countries of the world, it was probable that many pesticides banned from agricultural use in more regulated economies, were also finding their way into today’s tobacco products.

On the face of it, it was lamentable that Governments seemed uninterested in regulating the levels of additives in tobacco, especially as so many consumers thought roll-your-own products were likely to be less harmful than factory made cigarettes.

In a triumph for Government bureaucrat decision-making and communications, the Professor said that when the subject had been raised with officials they had pointed out that in terms of the health risks of smoking, the addition of additives in tobacco was just like turning up the temperature in hell by one degree. Beautifully put!

In other words, if people wish to kill themselves by smoking why invest huge amounts of taxpayer money in a regulatory regime to rid tobacco of chemical nasties when the only effect might be to reinforce the myth that some forms of tobacco are less harmful than others.

The conclusion to all this?: Many decades after smoking was proven as a killer the subject provides endless angles for academics and the media alike while the addicted continue to grasp at straws.

As for me, my wife tells me that for the time (and only the time) I worked in the tobacco factory I had very well developed shoulders and biceps – perhaps one of the very few healthy by-products of that unfortunate but still legal industry.