>> NARRATOR: It's a vegetable,
but it provides no nourishment.
It was a native cure long before it became a known
carcinogen. The first president of the
United States, George Washington, grew it.
The 18th president, Ulysses S. Grant, died from smoking it.
For some, it's a source of communion, pleasure and
sustenance. Others see it as pure poison.
It's the most contradictory of crops.
Now, "Tobacco" on<i> Modern</i> <i>Marvels.</i><font color="#FFFF00">
Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00">A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS
>> NARRATOR: They feed us,</font> clothe us, give us medicines,
intoxicate us, stimulate us, provide us with fuel.
The list goes on and on. Our relationship to what we
grow is usually fairly simple. If we need a crop, we cultivate
it and consume it. End of story.
But tobacco isn't that simple, because, in some ways, it's
consuming us. Tobacco's many facets, from the
mundane, to the satisfying, to the sinister, make it a very
complex crop. For starters, it's adaptable.
>> IAIN GATELY: It would be very hard to find a place, I
mean, short of Antarctica or the Arctic where it isn't
cultivated. >> NARRATOR: It's profitable.
>> DOUG LEE: A good average acre of tobacco will bring
ballpark figures of $3,500 an acre.
The profitability of tobacco is still the best here of
any crop we grow. >> NARRATOR: It's pleasurable.
>> CARLOS FUENTE JR.: Oh wow. Actually, it smells like food.
It's got nuances and I smell cinnamon and a little spice,
pepper, but it's wonderful. It's so good it makes you wanna
eat it. >> NARRATOR: It's a tax bonanza.
>> BILLY YEARGIN: The tobacco industry overall, every year
pays somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion
just in taxes-- from the seed through the cigarette and into
the local, municipal, state, and federal taxes.
>> NARRATOR: It's a killer. >> RICHARD CARMONA: Smoking is
the single largest preventable cause of death in the United
States. Tobacco is the only
product, if used as directed, will kill you.
>> NARRATOR: And it's wildly successful.
Whether grown for cigars, pipes, cigarettes or smokeless tobacco
products, six million tons of tobacco are produced each year,
with the U.S. ranking fourth in production behind China, India
and Brazil. >> GATELY: Tobacco's the largest
non-food crop which is grown in the world today.
>> NARRATOR: Tobacco is grown in 21 states in the U.S.,
but most production comes from Kentucky and North Carolina.
The U.S. crop is mostly two different types of tobacco,
flue-cured and burley-- the primary tobaccos found in U.S.
blended cigarettes. >> JEFFREY WIGAND: Burley
tobacco is a very high nicotine-type tobacco that grows
in Kentucky and parts of Indiana and Virginia.
It's a very scrubby, bushy- type plant.
>> NARRATOR: Flue-cured tobacco gets its name from the way in
which it's heat-dried after harvest.
Unlike burley, it has low nicotine content, but high sugar
levels, which enhance its taste. Farmers start their crop in
mid-February in greenhouses. >> LEE: We come to the field in
usually mid-April, and we transplant that plant into rows
here like you see in the field. >> NARRATOR: Tobacco requires a
lot of nitrogen from the soil. Farmers will apply 2,000 pounds
of fertilizer per acre. Fertilizers will help the plant
make sugars, cellulose, and, most importantly, nicotine--
the addictive chemical produced by the plant.
>> WIGAND: Without nicotine in the tobacco plant, it would
have virtually little or non-existent commercial use.
>> NEAL BENOWITZ: When a person smokes a cigarette, the tobacco
is burned and nicotine is distilled off into particles.
These particles contain water, tar and nicotine.
And these fine particles are inhaled into the lungs, and
then they impact or they crash into the very small airways in
the lungs. When these particles impact,
nicotine is absorbed pretty quickly into the bloodstream in
the lungs, goes into the heart, and then goes right out to the
body, including to the brain. It only takes about 15 seconds
from taking a puff on a cigarette to when nicotine has
its effects on the brain. There's a concept of rapid
reinforcement makes the drug more addictive.
You know right away what the effect is.
You can adjust the dose. And so smoking is actually
the most addictive way of taking a drug.
>> NARRATOR: But before the tobacco can be smoked, the
plants must mature, growing to be 42 inches high in 60 to 70
days. At this point they will be
harvested gradually. >> LEE: We go out every week or
two and we'll cut off two, three, four leaves each time we
go through. We will end up at the top
which is the best, the highest nicotine, the best plant that
the companies want for making cigarettes with.
>> NARRATOR: The leaves must be dried before they can be sold.
>> LEE: We call these bulk barns for drying tobacco.
The curing process from start to finish usually takes
about seven to eight days. We'll yellow the leaf up at
about 95 to 105 degrees, depending on the outside
temperature. >> YEARGIN: Therein lies
the term bright leaf. Once that color is held, then
the tobacco is subjected to a pretty intense heat, up to
finally 160 degrees. And that's where it stays until
all of the moisture has gone out of the leaf, and especially
the stems. >> NARRATOR: The tobacco will be
stored in 750-pound bales until the tobacco company is ready to
receive it. Worldwide, 5.5 trillion
cigarettes are smoked each year. It's a staggering number, but
it begins mundanely enough with a seed planted, a leaf cut from
a stalk, as it has for thousands of years.
Historians believe that tobacco was first cultivated in the
Andes sometime between 5000 and 3000 BC.
>> GATELY: In South America, the tobacco was used in a number of
ways which would dazzle us now. Smoking was only one option of
taking it. People sniffed it, they smoked
it, they smeared it all over their bodies, they smeared it
on other people's bodies, they drank it in a paste and
they even used it as an enema. >> NARRATOR: Shamans, spiritual
leaders and healers, used it to diagnose illness.
>> GATELY: They would consume enough, really, to take them to
the edge of death. And that would take them into
the spirit world where they could thereby examine the
problems within their patients. >> NARRATOR: But it wasn't until
Columbus reached Cuba on October 28, 1492, that Europeans
discovered-- not the gold they sought-- but tobacco.
>> GATELY: When Columbus sent some of his lieutenants to
investigate inland and try and find a little more about the
people who inhabited it, and what their habits were, one of
the first matters they reported back was that these people were
smoking. And to them, it was an
absolutely surreal habit. They had no idea.
They had no precedent for it in Europe.
They came across a tribe who were smoking very large cigars.
>> NARRATOR: Tobacco quickly gained new converts.
Its smoke wafted easily across cultural barriers.
Spanish and Portuguese sailors picked up the habit and
brought tobacco to Europe where, ironically enough, it developed
a bogus reputation as a wonder cure for all sorts of ailments.
Once the British began visiting North America, they, too, took
up smoking as a recreational habit.
John Rolfe is credited as the first English settler to
successfully raise tobacco for commercial use in Jamestown,
Virginia, in 1612. Since its inception, the colony
had been beset by disease and starvation.
>> YEARGIN: John Rolfe realized that there could be a
potential market for this tobacco that the natives were
growing along the James River. Actually, that is what
turned our failure, our fourth failure in settling this
continent, into a success. >> NARRATOR: Tobacco secured the
survival of the fledgling colonies, and by the end of the
17th century, England was importing more than 20 million
pounds of colonial tobacco per year.
>> YEARGIN: We became a tobacco society because tobacco
was currency. It paid for the preachers, it
paid taxes, it bought wives. >> GATELY: Tobacco was the
dollar or the euro of the English settlements in the
United States. >> NARRATOR: And tobacco also
paid for slaves. >> YEARGIN: The slaves brought
into Jamestown in 1619 were brought to help in the
cultivation and harvesting and marketing of tobacco.
>> NARRATOR: In the 18th century, colonial tobacco
farmers, among them George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson, struggled as inequities in the tobacco trade
left them permanently indebted to British merchants.
In tobacco-producing areas, the American Revolution became known
as "The Tobacco War," and in 1776, Benjamin Franklin used
five million pounds of Virginia tobacco to collateralize a loan
from France to help finance the American Revolution.
But whether the world was at war, or at peace, as long as
there were ships on the sea, tobacco found new customers.
>> GATELY: Tobacco use spread through Europe and then beyond,
because it was carried there by the ships of European nations
down to Africa across the Mediterranean into the Levant
into Turkey. It spread up the rivers through
into Russia. From Russia it went to China,
and it was also carried there by the ships of the Portuguese.
>> NARRATOR: In the 19th century, tobacco use continued
to spread, and even crossed battle lines.
>> YEARGIN: During the Civil War the South had tobacco,
the North had coffee and food. And many, many times, the, the
Yankee and the Rebel would meet in the middle of a path after
a battle, and switch tobacco for coffee or tobacco for food.
>> NARRATOR: Tobacco, in many forms, has been exchanged across
cultural barriers, between friend and foe, and for
millennia. But in the 20th century,
one form of tobacco, cigarettes, would become the dominant form
of consumption and cause an ongoing healthcare crisis.
But what's actually inside a cigarette?
It's a lot more than just tobacco.
"Tobacco" will return on<i> Modern Marvels.</i>
>> NARRATOR: We now return to "Tobacco" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i>
1.3 billion people, one-third of the world's adult population,
smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use is rising in the
developing world by 3.5% per year and falling slightly in the
developed world. There are more Chinese smokers--
300 million-- than citizens of the United States.
In 2005, Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette
company, generated 4.6 billion dollars in profits.
Cigarettes, by far the most common form of tobacco
consumption, are also the most deadly.
Unlike most pipe and cigar smokers, cigarette smokers
inhale intentionally, allowing toxins to penetrate deeper into
the body. >> BENOWITZ: There are different
risks associated with different forms of smoking.
Cigarette smoking is the one associated with the greatest
risk, and that is the one that's associated mostly with higher
risks of lung cancer and mouth cancer and chronic lung disease.
>> NARRATOR: But if cigarette smoking is so deadly, why is it
so popular? >> WIGAND: A cigarette is an
elegant form of a drug-delivery device, almost like a hypodermic
syringe and needle. And the delivery that one wants
out of a cigarette is nicotine. >> NARRATOR: Nicotine may be the
addictive product, but other cigarette components that
accompany it are actually more lethal.
So what's inside a U.S.-blended cigarette?
Tobaccos, flue-cured, burley and Oriental, only make up about
half the cigarette. The rest is known as "add-ons."
One add-on, reconstituted tobacco, is made from a mixture
of stripped stems, offal, or tobacco dust, swept from the
factory floor, and "reclaim"-- cigarettes that have passed
their prime and have been sent back to the factory.
It all goes into a giant vat. >> WIGAND: It's beat up, and
as it's being beat up, its constantly extracted like a
teabag. Well, that means I removed all
the chemicals, all the solubles, and then it's pooled into
another vat, and this is a chemical-reaction vat.
>> NARRATOR: The resulting solution is known as the "mother
liquor." >> WIGAND: So you have this
mother liquor, which is an aqueous-based system,
water-based system, in which now I can add a host of
chemicals: diammonium phosphate, urea, ammonium hydroxide, and
these additives in the recon are used to deal with nicotine
manipulation. The others are thought to use as
ameliorants. If you tried to smoke a
cigarette without additives, it would be very harsh.
How do I mellow that harshness out?
How do I smooth it? Chocolate, butterfat, glycerol.
Sounds a lot like the things I buy in a grocery store, isn't
it? All foodstuffs.
Well, they're actually added. >> NARRATOR: Once chemically
reacted, the mother liquor solution is applied to paper
made from the ground stems, offal and reclaim.
This paper is dried and shredded and is known as reconstituted
tobacco or "recon." It will make up 30% of the
cigarette's contents. When it's smoked, the ammonia in
the recon will enhance the absorption of nicotine in the
smoker's body. >> WIGAND: Nicotine, as it
exists in the plant, is sort of like a molecule with a ball and
chain on it. And I want to free this molecule
up by taking that ball and chain off and now we start changing
its shape we call "freebase nicotine."
Freebasing nicotine is much the same as freebasing cocaine.
Increases potency, increases delivery.
>> NARRATOR: "Expanded tobacco," a puffed tobacco product that
has been expanded with carbon dioxide, is also part of the
blend to act as a filler. So, in a finished cigarette, 20%
is expanded tobacco, stems and reclaim-- tobacco from returned
cigarettes-- and 30% is recon. The other 50% is tobacco which
is also treated with sugars that mask the bitter taste of
nicotine and enhance its absorption into a smoker's body.
Tobacco, stems, reconstituted, reclaim and expanded tobacco
are mixed in a bulking bin the size of a bus.
It's all cut to 28th-of-an-inch slices called "rag" and
pneumatically moved to the cigarette fabrication side of
the plant. There, the rag will be rolled in
paper, glued, joined with filters made from cellulose
acetate and packaged. This process occurs at a rate of
roughly 20,000 cigarettes per minute, sometimes 24 hours a
day. Long before offal, casings and
recon, cigarettes had humble origins.
Their beginnings can be traced to Spain in the early 19th
century and the Seville Tobacco Factory.
Cigarettes were rolled from scrap tobacco, often the
leftovers from cigars and snuff. >> GATELY: Much of the tobacco
produce in Spain in its central monopoly factory was sold loose,
and the poor people would literally roll it up.
>> NARRATOR: In the 19th century the cigarette's
popularity took off with the invention of the first
cigarette-making machine. James Buchanan Duke, known as
Buck Duke, saw the future. In 1884, the Duke Company went
into business with James Bonsat, the machine's inventor,
and by the late 1880s they were manufacturing four million
cigarettes daily. Buck Duke was a risk-taker and a
marketing whiz. >> GATELY: He inserted cigarette
cards in the packs with pictures of actresses which he admitted
were just there for prurient interest, or lastly football and
baseball stars, and so he was the one who got cigarettes in
front of the nation, and they responded.
I mean, smoking rates absolutely shot through the
roof. >> NARRATOR: After
mechanization, the movies gave cigarettes their next big boost.
>> YEARGIN: One direction cigarette advertising went, of
course, was the Hollywood market.
Ronald Reagan, as an example, had his image put on the back of<i>
Look</i> and<i> Life.</i> >> NARRATOR: In 1950, around
half of the adult population in the industrialized world smoked
cigarettes. Medical professionals were
beginning to make a statistical link between smoking and
disease. >> RICHARD CARMONA: Health
professionals were noticing that gee, people who smoke seem to
have a higher incidence of lung disease.
As they got the science together, they were able to
demonstrate conclusively that if you smoke, you have a higher
incidence of cancer. That's where it all started.
>> NARRATOR: Tobacco companies turned growing public concern to
their advantage and introduced filter cigarettes in the early
1950s, boosting sales but doing little for public health.
>> CARMONA: In fact, when you use the lower nicotine or low
tar, you actually smoked more. Cancer rates didn't change,
lung disease rates didn't change.
>> NARRATOR: Since the first Surgeon General's report on
smoking in 1964, there have been 29 reports that have linked
smoking to cancer, heart disease, chronic lung diseases
like emphysema and bronchitis and infections that increase the
risk of influenza and tuberculosis.
It's the burning process that increases the toxicity of the
chemicals in cigarettes. >> BENOWITZ: When you burn any
organic material like tobacco, you generate a number of
substances that potentially damage DNA.
These are classically talked about as tar.
Two main classes of cancer-causing chemicals are the
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and the nitrosamines.
Both of those classes of drugs can damage DNA in such a way
that it alters the control of cell growth.
And then when you see uncontrolled cell growth, you
then see cancers develop. >> NARRATOR: In all, more than
4,000 chemicals enter the lungs when a smoker inhales.
Among them, acetone, formaldehyde, pesticides and
heavy metals: arsenic, cadmium and chromium extracted from the
soil by the tobacco plant. The body's defense systems that
function when we eat are bypassed when we draw smoke into
our lungs. >> WIGAND: Whatever's burned
in the cigarette goes directly into the system, the blood.
And that toxins that come out of it, or poisons, go directly to
any access organ: heart, brain, etc.
>> MAN: If you'd raise your right hand.
Do you swear...? >> NARRATOR: The record shows
the big tobacco companies knew the link between smoking and
disease and covered it up. >> CARMONA: The information was
available decades ago, but because of the need to keep the
product out there, uh, people withheld information from the
American public or obscured that information.
>> NARRATOR: In 1994, Jeffrey Wigand, an ex-Brown and
Williamson tobacco executive, began to work with the FDA to
reveal harmful industry practices that had been withheld
from the public. >> WIGAND: I took the FDA in
1994 through the whole gamut of tobacco science and tobacco
chemistry, nicotine addiction. My code name was "Research."
It was something right out of a James Bond novel.
>> NARRATOR: Litigation began to heat up, culminating in 1998 in
the Master Settlement Agreement; a payment by the tobacco
companies of $206 billion over a period of 25 years.
The money goes to the states as compensation for tobacco-related
healthcare costs. Whether through sales, taxes or
lawsuits, cigarettes generate cash flow, and like nicotine,
cash flow is proven to be addictive.
But while cigarettes were being examined in the courts, cigars
were enjoying a faddish popularity boom.
Premium cigars, like fine wine, are marketed as luxury products,
and like fine wine, they've been known to cause a little sticker
shock. "Tobacco" will return on<i> Modern
Marvels.</i> >> NARRATOR: We now return to
"Tobacco" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i> >> NARRATOR: Like a fine wine,
a premium cigar is aged, its pedigree is important, and it's
expensive. Hand rolled.
Packed in a mahogany box. Impeccably presented.
From seed to smoke, it's designed to stand apart.
>> FUENTE: There are cigars and there's cigars, just
like there is wines and there's wines, and watches and watches,
and any luxury product. And today, a really fine cigar
may cost an average of ten dollars to $20 a cigar.
>> NARRATOR: Unlike cheaper machine-made cigars, which are
an automated product containing shredded tobacco, premium cigars
are made from whole pieces of select tobacco and entirely by
hand. >> FUENTE: Each cigar-- from the
moment you plant the seed to the moment that that cigar is
enjoyed-- each leaf has passed from a minimum, between
400 pairs of hands up to 500 pairs of hands.
>> NARRATOR: That hands-on approach is evident in the
Fuente/Fuente Opus X rolling room of Tabacalera A. Fuente y
Compania of the Dominican Republic, one of the largest
family-owned-and-run cigar companies in the world.
Fuente's top-of-the-line cigar is the Opus X.
Each cigar contains three parts: the outer wrapper, the
binder leaves, and the interior filler leaves.
>> FUENTE: As the cigar maker's creating the bunch-- the inside
of the cigar-- with small little tubes and creating this round
cylinder, and after he rolls the two binders that hold the filler
leaves together, it's put in the press at the cigar maker's
table. >> NARRATOR: After binder and
filler have been pressed for an hour and a half, the roller, who
has trained for years, spirals the wrapper leaf around the
interior leaves. It's not as easy as it looks.
Too much pressure will tear a leaf that has aged for as much
as a decade. The rolled cigars are sealed
with gum arabic and then inspected.
>> FUENTE: When he finishes checking 50 cigars, he will tie
them and weigh them. And they have to be precisely
within one ounce. What this proves is that the
length and diameter is exact and that every specific leaf is
in the right position and is the right amount of leaves.
>> NARRATOR: The annual output of 750,000 Opus X cigars are a
small portion of the 35 million cigars the company will make by
hand each year. The Opus Xs will spend the next
12 months aging in Spanish cedar cabinets.
>> FUENTE: 365 days, 24/7, with temperature and humidity
constant, what happens is you have a marriage of different
tobaccos. >> NARRATOR: A year later, the
cigars are finished with a band, a piece of Spanish cedar,
and cellophane. >> FUENTE: The Fuente Opus X
has a certain spice. Cinnamon, maybe even leathery.
It's, it's got a certain taste that's very unique.
>> NARRATOR: Though they may consume a unique product, cigar
smokers suffer from the same rate of esophageal and oral
cancers as cigarette smokers, as much as eight times that of
non-smokers. But since most cigar smokers
don't habitually inhale, they have a far lower risk of lung
cancer than cigarette smokers, and nearly eight times as many
Americans die from lung cancer than from oral cancer and
esophageal cancer combined. But in a business that focuses
on tobacco's taste, cigar maker Carlos Fuente, of Cuban
descent, uses Cuban seed for his most prized cigar.
Where cigars are concerned, it all goes back to Cuba.
And it always has. On October 28, 1492, two of
Columbus' men, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, were the
first Europeans to smoke cigars with Arawak natives in Cuba.
They puffed on a giant cigar. >> GATELY: It's described by
Rodrigo de Torres as as thick as his wrist.
>> NARRATOR: Over the next three centuries, as tobacco
smoke spread across the globe, Cuba became known as a high-
quality tobacco producer. But the entire business changed
when the U.S. imposed a trade embargo on Cuba in October 1960.
Many of the cigar makers and growers in Cuba relocated.
>> FUENTE: Most of the Cuban families who were involved with
cigars or cigar making moved to countries in the Caribbean near
Cuba that had very similar soils, and those countries
included Honduras, Nicaragua and Dominican Republic.
Of course, some in Mexico and some in Jamaica.
>> NARRATOR: Carlos and his father, Carlos Sr., ultimately
moved to the Dominican Republic in 1980.
They recognized the quality of the soil.
>> FUENTE: Cuba and the Dominican Republic, they're
born from volcanoes, they're volcanic soils that are very,
very fertile. >> NARRATOR: In this fertile
soil, tobacco is grown from November to February.
>> FUENTE: After a certain stage when the tobacco plants
become maybe a couple of feet, 24 inches off the ground, then
what we do is we tie them. Each plant, one by one, by hand
is tied with a string. >> NARRATOR: The string
stabilizes the plant, which has a shallow root system.
The wrapper leaves, the most delicate part of the cigar, are
grown beneath a cheesecloth shade.
>> FUENTE: It takes out approximately 15 to 20 percent
of the sunlight. And what that does is help the
tobacco to become a little bit more elastic, more pliable.
>> NARRATOR: The tobacco is harvested by hand three leaves
per week, as they ripen. The leaves are then hung in
massive tobacco barns to dry for roughly 55 days.
>> FUENTE: During this time, there's a transformation of the
chlorophyll into the starches. And what happens is that as the
heat from the bottom, by small little fires that are done very
carefully, that heat rises to the top of the tobacco barn.
There, the moisture evaporates. >> NARRATOR: Once dried, the
tobacco is off to the fermentation warehouses for an
initial fermentation in 4,000- pound bulks.
Under pressure in these giant piles, the tobacco will heat up.
>> FUENTE: It could go as, as low as maybe 103 to 105 degrees
Fahrenheit, up to 140. Once that you've found this
magic moment, you take the balks, you get your tobacco
leaves and you give it oxygen, you give it air so it breathes.
And it's releasing all these nitrates, nitrogen.
The starches are converting into sugars, and the tobacco,
as it ferments, it becomes sweeter, sweeter and finer.
>> NARRATOR: During a six-month fermentation, as much as a
third of the harsh-tasting nicotine decomposes.
The tobacco's texture also changes, from sticky to
powdery, signaling that it's time to bale it and place it in
long-term aging, anywhere from five to ten years.
After aging, the tobacco is finished in sherry barrels.
>> FUENTE: The wood contains the nuances of the sherry, and
the tobacco is like a sponge. With time it starts absorbing
all those flavors and all those aromas from the wood.
>> NARRATOR: It's nuances like these that cigar connoisseurs
seek out, as well as drive demand and pricing in the
premium cigar marketplace. But would you smoke something
called Purple Cow out of a large-mouthed bass?
A pipe smoker would, and would be happy about it.
"Tobacco" will return on<i> Modern</i> <i>Marvels.</i>
>> NARRATOR: We now return to "Tobacco" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i>
The pipe is probably the most varied piece of smoking
paraphernalia. It ranges from merely
utilitarian object, to historical artifact, to work of
art. Pipes are made from clay,
glass, stone, porcelain, metal, antler, gourd, bone, shell...
and briarwood, favored by American and European pipe
makers. Briarwood, a root from the
Mediterranean heath tree, has beautiful grain and ruinous
flaws. >> SAM LEARNED: People often
ask me how long does it take to make a pipe and I say how long
does it take to make three? Well, I know how to make a
pipe, but two of them are gonna fall apart on me.
>> NARRATOR: This rate of failure is built into the
prices of custom pipes, which range from hundreds to
thousands of dollars. The custom pipe craft involves
rigorous specifications. >> LEARNED: This is the bowl
hole. And this shows the types of
clearances of wood that you need on each side of the bowl
to give you the proper insulation in terms of the
comfort of smoking the pipe so that the bowl doesn't get too
hot. This is the draft hole.
You'll notice that it comes in dead-centered on the bottom of
the bowl hole, perfectly executed.
>> NARRATOR: These specs are the same for all the pipes,
including the so-called "hawksbill" pipe that Sam will
fashion from briarwood. >> LEARNED: Now we're going to
draw the pattern on the piece of briar that I've selected to
make this pipe. It's a tight fit, but it's
gonna work. The first cut we're going to
make is across the back of the shank.
It'll give me a chance to see if I've got any defects there.
Looking good. We've lost it.
That's the defect, and it's major.
So now what I'm going to do is set this aside.
There's no point in going any further with this.
>> NARRATOR: Beyond aesthetic issues, a defect in the bowl
could allow heat from the smoldering tobacco to burn
through. Once draft, tenon and bowl holes
are drilled, Sam's ready to shape the pipe.
>> LEARNED: You'll notice there are a few other lines drawn on
the pipe. That's to give me a visual of
the profile I'm making. And I will use this hundred-
grit sanding disc to roughly cut this out.
>> NARRATOR: Sandings with progressively finer sandpaper,
from 150 to 600 grit, will yield the smooth shape of the
hawksbill pipe. Once stained, it's polished
with carnauba wax. Sam Learned produces a wide
variety of pipe shapes and finishes.
He also makes fanciful figural pipes.
>> LEARNED: This is what I call the large-mouth bass-- and note
the tail, the mouth. And I mean there's an
incredible amount of handwork in this pipe.
>> NARRATOR: Handwork has long been the tradition of pipe
makers. When the English colonized the
New World, they encountered Native Americans smoking out of
handcrafted pipes, made from carved wood and stone, that were
central to their daily lives. >> GATELY: If a tribe wanted to
declare war against another, it would send it its war pipes.
If it intended to offer peace, it would send it the pipe of
peace. And as a consequence, when
smoking was introduced to England, it was smoked out of
pipes. >> NARRATOR: Today, if you're a
pipe smoker, you probably have a preferred pipe tobacco blend.
Cornell & Diehl in Morganton, North Carolina, makes the two
main tobacco blends. >> CRAIG TARLER: There's an
English blend that is without any flavoring on it-- just the
natural tobaccos. Then there's aromatic blends,
and they have flavor on them. These are our finished flavors,
here. They're all food-grade flavors.
One will have apricot in it and maybe a little vanilla.
And we mix these according to formula.
>> NARRATOR: Though cigarettes and pipe tobaccos both have
food flavorings, or ameliorants, most pipe tobaccos
are not treated with chemicals to enhance nicotine delivery.
In addition to taste and strength, one key component of
an aromatic pipe blend is its "room note."
>> TARLER: That's the smell of the tobacco in the room to the
other people in the room. If you have a nice smell, a, a
warm food smell, like apricot or maple syrup, the pipe smoker
is better accepted by those around him.
>> NARRATOR: The global pipe tobacco market is roughly four
million pounds a year. Of this, the premium market
accounts for 200,000 pounds. This is Cornell & Diehl's
market. >> TARLER: You might call us a
boutique. Many of our new customers are
coming over from smoking cigars, or are stopping smoking
cigarettes. >> NARRATOR: Pipe smoking
carries similar rates of oral and esophageal cancer as cigar
smoking-- but far lower lung cancer rates than cigarettes
since, like cigar smokers, pipe smokers don't habitually inhale.
Cornell & Diehl produce around 80,000 tins a year.
>> TARLER: We manage to do some fun labels.
The recent one was Purple Cow. We even did Old Outhouse one
year. We have Bayou Night.
We have Mississippi Mud. We've always said that if you
can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined.
>> NARRATOR: But what about people who want to consume
tobacco, but don't want all that smoke?
For them, there's smokeless tobacco-- chewing tobacco,
American moist snuff, and Swedish snus-- products that are
only consumed in the United States and Scandinavia.
>> PATRIK HILDINGSSON: Swedish snus is a fine-ground oil
tobacco product. It comes in loose or in pouches.
Larger pouches, one-gram sized, or smaller pouches.
You use it between the upper lip and gum and it comes in
various flavors. >> NARRATOR: Swedish snus is
the most discreet of smokeless products.
Besides being barely visible, it doesn't involve spitting and
is used by half of Swedish tobacco consumers, who absorb
doses of nicotine from snus through their mouths.
As with all forms of smokeless tobacco, users show increased
incidence of oral cancer over nonusers.
Swedish snus is the mainstay of Swedish Match-- a nearly
century-old Swedish company that markets both premium and
machine-made cigars, chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco, moist
snuff, matches, lighters and snus.
What separates Americans from their Swedish smokeless
counterparts is spitting. American favorites-- moist snuff
and chewing tobacco-- are placed between the lower lip and gum,
requiring expectoration, and are primarily used in rural areas.
Moist snuff is a ground-tobacco product, but chewing tobacco
comes as a cut leaf. >> GERRY ROERTY: Chewing
tobacco is cut and stripped to a certain size.
It is then processed, and then we put what is called a casing,
that's essentially a top flavoring, on the product.
It's usually a molasses or a sugar type flavoring on the
product. It is then dried to a
specified point, and then it is put into a pouch.
>> NARRATOR: Swedish Match's chewing tobacco is called Red
Man. It was originally produced by
the Pinkerton Tobacco Company in Ohio, starting in 1904.
>> ROERTY: To this day it's still the most popular form of,
of chewing tobacco that's on the market.
>> NARRATOR: But no matter what your preference, if you're a
tobacco user, there are almost as many quitting products as
tobacco products. And much like consuming, how
you quit is a matter of taste. "Tobacco" will return on<i> Modern
Marvels.</i> >> NARRATOR: We now return to
"Tobacco" on<i> Modern Marvels.</i> >> BENOWITZ: Of all the people
who smoke cigarettes, for example, 70% to 80% or more are
addicted. If you look at alcohol use,
probably 5% or 10% of all alcohol users are addicted, and
even if you look at cocaine and heroin, there's a lot of
casual use and probably 50% or fewer cocaine and heroin users
are actually addicted. So by those criteria, nicotine
is the most addictive of the various addictive substances
people use. >> NARRATOR: Once it enters the
brain, nicotine causes the release of a cascade of
hormones-- dopamine, serotonin and endorphins-- which increase
pleasure, reduce appetite, and improve mood.
But nicotine also alters the chemical structure of a
smoker's brain. >> LISA KROON: The brain will
produce more nicotine receptors that then need to get
activated, so then the brain is gonna want to seek more
nicotine and a person's gonna do that by smoking.
Without cigarettes, smokers may experience withdrawal symptoms
in as little as an hour. >> KROON: Withdrawal symptoms
are terrible. People feel really rotten.
They feel irritable, angry. They have insomnia, can feel
depressed. >> NARRATOR: For smokers who
attempt to quit, there are a number of approaches to
overcoming withdrawal symptoms. >> CARMONA: Some people respond
better to behavioral therapy, some to pharmacotherapy, some a
combination of behavioral and pharmacotherapy.
And then there are those few who go cold turkey and just
say, "I'm gonna do it." Not real common, but they do it.
>> NARRATOR: More succeed by developing a plan with a
counselor. >> KROON: The idea with getting
the counseling and the professional support is, okay,
what am I gonna do in that situation?
When, when I feel stressed, what can I do instead of grabbing for
a cigarette? >> NARRATOR: On the
technological side, there are three types of quitting
medications. Some require a prescription and
some don't. The first category is nicotine-
replacement therapy in the form of gum, inhaler, nasal spray,
patch or lozenge. Nicotine replacement provides
less than half the nicotine a smoker would normally get and
tapers off over the 12-week course of treatment.
>> BENOWITZ: The second category is Bupropion, which is also
known as Zyban, which was marketed originally, and still
is, as an antidepressant. But it was found that people
taking this drug had less craving for cigarettes.
>> NARRATOR: And it turns out that the effects of Bupropion
resemble the effects of nicotine in the pattern of
hormone release in the brain. a third category is a drug,
varenicline. This is a totally new category
of drug, which has got nicotine-like effects, but also
nicotine-blocking effects. The nicotine-blocking effects
mean that if you have a, a lapse or a slip, and you smoke
a cigarette, it's not as satisfying.
>> NARRATOR: Up to 30% of those who try will completely kick the
habit, but most will take multiple attempts.
Success rates double with counseling and medication.
>> KROON: Most ex-smokers say that quitting smoking is the
hardest thing that they have ever done in their lives.
>> NARRATOR: Smokers who do quit still have a higher risk
of cancer than nonsmokers, but far lower than smokers who
don't stop. There are many lasting health
benefits to quitting. >> CARMONA: Your general health
will improve, so those people who have emphysema, they'll
have less problems. Those people who have chronic
bronchitis will have less acute infections, and so on.
Your quality of life will improve.
So nobody ever should think, "I've done it my whole life, I
shouldn't stop now." >> NARRATOR: Many people have
little reason to believe that our society will wean itself
from tobacco. >> LEE: I think people are going
to use tobacco as long as they can afford it.
I think there'll be tobacco grown right on and on, but the
volume may change, may decrease. But I still think tobacco's
here to stay. >> WIGAND: Will we see this
product gone in 20 to 30 years? I don't think so.
Do I think it's gonna become more regulated and constrained?
Yes, it's happening. >> NARRATOR: Regulated or not,
tobacco has been with humankind for thousands of years.
And increasingly, this contradictory crop that
generates profits and has become a source of bitter
conflict will continue to pit pleasure against mortality.<font color="#FFFF00">
Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00">A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font>
To me tobacco and sugar cane are in the same family. A little every now and then is divine enjoyment. Over do it, and you get tar lung or diabetes/ obesity. But they would never paint sugar cane cultivation in a remotely negative light, even though far more people die from its related diseases, and astronomically more than pipe-smoking related deaths (virtually zero from what I understand).
Thankfully I have a VPN or I couldn't watch this.
Time to find a good vpn I guess ... Not available in my country lol
This was when the History Channel was still good. Modern Marvels, How it's Made and Mythbusters were peak TV for me.
There are a bunch of full episodes of Modern Marvels on YouTube and they're all great.
Love this show
I got into pipe smoking because of this video!
Not available in my country :( i love modern marvels