From Jet Fuel to Medicine, Tobacco Growers Turn a New Leaf

(Credit: Raymond Gregory/Shutterstock) It is notorious for its role in the expansion and continuation of American slavery, and for its adverse health effects. The latter includes cardiovascular disease and various cancers, including lung cancer, the most common malignancy, underlying millions of deaths each year. Health officials, attorneys, and activists have spent decades targeting its industrial cultivators in an effort to limit its advertising and sale, particularly to minors. We are talking about tobacco. If at a frustratingly slow pace, tobacco use has been declining over the past 40 years in the United States, because health awareness programs are having a significant effect. A typical first-grader could explain why it is bad to smoke. So could the CEO of a tobacco company, and so could any farmer cultivating tobacco in places like Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Carolinas, where the crop still plays a major role in the economy. Many such farmers might rationalize that they remain in business to satisfy people who are already addicted, but others have turned over a new leaf — pun intended — in recent years. Some farmers have replaced the “filthy weed” altogether with something that grows in the same kind of environment, such as chickpeas — a crop change that takes advantage of the nation’s growing palate for hummus and falafel. But biotechnology is facilitating an additional pathway: utilization and redirection of the tobacco plant toward applications other than delivering nicotine and carcinogens into the human body. An increasing number of non-traditional applications of tobacco are emerging and range from growing medicines to synthesizing jet fuel. If the fuel is energetic enough for at least some of these ideas to take off, it won’t make tobacco less addictive, but it could enable the industry to remain aloft without continuous need for new generations of children to become nicotine addicts.Tobacco Ban on Passengers Does Not Apply to the Aircraft Itself As cultivation of tobacco started decreasing in North America in the late 20^th century, it started ramping up in Africa and Asia. To support world consumption of cigarettes, cigars, and other unhealthy products, the plant is produced in mass quantities that are challenging to redirect to other ends. But another product that humans do use is in mass quantities is fuel, especially when it comes to flying. A Boeing 747 burns more than 10 tons of fuel per hour while cruising, or nearly 4 liters (one gallon) each second.