Cigarettes: Bad for Workers, Bad for You

Big Tobacco can't seem to catch a break these days, poor guys.  First everyone starts banning smoking in public because it kills people.  Then everyone starts taxing cigarettes because they kill people. And now, all around the world, migrant workers who pick tobacco are making ridiculous requests, like to be paid fairly for their work and not be exposed to deadly chemicals.  Poor Big Tobacco!      

There is the potential for exploitation in any industry which employs large numbers of migrant workers, and tobacco is no exception.  In Malawi, child labor and forced labor have been identified throughout the tobacco industry.  In India, children are often enslaved in factories rolling small, unfiltered cigarettes called bidis.  Even in the U.S., workers have complained about mistreatment at the hands of employers while picking tobacco.     

When I first started researching this issue, I assumed that tobacco is that it is one of the few consumer products which doesn't have a more fair or more sustainable option.  Wrong! The UK recently released an ethically-sourced cigarette, which actually gives a portion of the proceeds to support disadvantaged Native American workers.  This unexpected dichotomy boggled my progressive brain which commonly defaults to: tobacco=bad, fair trade=good.  But what happens when they join forces?  My dilemma is illustrated by the contrast between the shiny happy feel-good interracial handshake logo and the giant "SMOKING KILLS" warning on the ethically sourced cigarettes above. Weird.

Can an ethically sourced cigarette be a good thing?  Is it just Big Tobacco pushing their addictive, deadly products on children and exploiting their workers which makes the industry terrible, or is it the product itself?  Is there a place for small tobacco or fair tobacco?  It seems to me that no matter how much the farmers are paid, no matter how much the exploitation is reduced, at the end of the day, it's still a cancer stick.   

 Image from guardian.co.uk