The King Is Dead

It is a clear blue morning in Robertson County, Tenn., not far from the old John Bell farm, site of the Bell witch haunting, one of the oldest ghost legends in the country. At the request of a visitor, Gene Davidson has interrupted his morning to ride around a farm his family has owned for 60 years. He stops his Ford pickup in the middle of the road, picks up a pair of binoculars and aims it at a coyote loping along in a pasture. “We’ll have to take him out,” Davidson says. The coyote could be carrying the rabies virus, Davidson explains, and shouldn’t be this close to houses in the area. Davidson lowers the binoculars and drives on. He looks less like a farmer than a beach tourist. He wears shorts and tennis shoes with white socks pulled over the ankles. His silver hair curls out from under a gardener’s hat. When he talks, he raises a hand to his head to emphasize what he’s saying. For 32 years, Davidson has traveled from this farm to Nashville to represent this portion of Tennessee in the General Assembly, rising several years ago to become the House majority leader only to be ignominiously replaced for failing to support a state income tax backed by the House leadership. In the mid-1990s, he was chair of the education committee, worrying about textbooks, class sizes and funding for rural schools. And for the past four years, he’s chaired the state agricultural committee, whose mission, along with the state’s agricultural commissioner, is to keep Tennessee farmers happy. This spring, Davidson joined a surprisingly large number of legislators who have announced they won’t be seeking reelection. He is, essentially, burned out. Unlike senators, who run every four years, he faces reelection every two years. “I’m tired of fighting it,” he says. “For 32 years, I’ve been running constantly. The House is not like the Senate. We’re always having to go to different events, social events, picnics. I have the business here. Every summer I had to take off when I should have been here. I didn’t have an opponent only three times out of 16 elections. I didn’t have the fire, the burn in the belly, anymore. I’ll miss the people in Nashville. I know I will. But I won’t miss the campaigning.” As a farmer, Davidson, who was born New Year’s Day, 1947, has benefited from a Darwinian shift in the agricultural landscape. America’s farming community has aged considerably. With no heirs to the family farm, many have leased or sold out. Davidson grew up in a small white farmhouse near the field where he spotted the coyote. Today, his family controls 15,000 acres of farmland in six counties, including three in Kentucky. It is a mega-corporation, whose assets include a sizable grain elevator. Acting as a CEO-farmer requires Davidson to make commodity decisions a year in advance of sales, and to weigh requests from farmers asking if he’d be interested in their property. “We look at the soil to see how good the land is,” Davidson says, still driving along a narrow, two-lane road unoccupied except for an occasional highboy or tractor. “If it’s better land, we can afford to make the bid higher.” The Davidson farm has a variety of uses: 500 acres of wheat, 400 head of beef cattle, soybean and corn. The farm also grows about 40 acres of tobacco—20 acres of burley, which is chopped up and stuffed into cigarettes, and another 20 of dark fire-cured tobacco, which is ground into chewing tobacco. Dark fire tobacco has long been honored in Robertson County, which calls itself the dark fire-cured tobacco capital of the world. Its history in the area can be traced to at least the 1820s. As recently as 2004, county farmers produced 7 million pounds of dark fire, so-called because it is cured in a barn whose floor is heated by smoldering sawdust. Davidson doesn’t chew or smoke, but he remembers a grandfather who puffed a pipe and a grandmother who dipped snuff. He recalls toiling hours in the tobacco patch. “I hated it as a child, but I learned to like it as I got older because I started making money.” When he was in his early teens, he thought he’d struck it rich after making $110 growing tobacco as part of a 4H project. If it’s so lucrative, why doesn’t he plant his entire farm with tobacco? Because, Davidson says, dark fire tobacco is a risky crop to grow. He’s lost an entire season’s worth of tobacco in barns that caught fire and burned to the ground. Besides, tobacco is labor-intensive, with all the handling and curing it requires before it can be sold to tobacco companies. Hiring through a temp agency, Davidson must rely on migrant labor, which has become both expensive and volatile, with the election year crackdown on immigrants. And tobacco is the only crop Davidson irrigates. If he plants 15,000 acres of dark fire tobacco, he’d have to be creative with his resources. “Where’s the water going to come from?” he asks. Davidson can foresee a time, especially if the labor market tightens, when his family will stop growing tobacco altogether. If so, he’ll follow a long line of Tennessee tobacco growers who have retired, especially after the federal government discontinued subsidizing the crop two years ago in what has been called by one industry analyst “the most dramatic and rapid change in American agricultural history.” Tobacco has plummeted to the point it is no longer the No. 1, 2 or 3 crop in the state as it has been since recorded history. It is now No. 5, valued at $96.7 million last year, and likely to sink lower in the next few years. (In 2001, the crop was valued at $175.2 million.) Tobacco generates far less income for the state than the health problems it causes. According to the Tennessee Department of Health, relying on figures provided by the Centers for Disease Control, smoking causes $1.69 billion in health care costs (in 1998 dollars), including $626 million paid by the taxpayer-funded TennCare program. Productivity losses caused by sick days and other health problems have been estimated at $2.6 billion (in 1998 dollars). As if caught in slow-rolling inertia, the statehouse has been sluggish responding to the changes occurring across the rest of America. San Diego has banned smoking on beaches. An entire California city, Calabasas, has banned smoking throughout the city, even on sidewalks and parks. Lexington, Chicago, Washington, Austin, New York City and Boston have banned smoking in most buildings, private as well as public. The reason is simple: as a widely-reported Surgeon General’s report released last month emphasized, second-hand smoke causes premature death and diseases in people who don’t smoke, including an increased risk of developing lung cancer. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, there are only baby steps. Gov. Phil Bredesen signed a bill June 20, to much applause and accolades, prohibiting smoking in all government-owned buildings. The measure was largely seen as symbolic since many public buildings were already smoke-free. But it did move designated smoke break areas outside and, most visibly, outlawed smoking at the Legislative Plaza, the underground bunker where most house and senate members set up shop. Last spring, during the same time frame Tennessee legislators were wringing their hands, deciding whether to prohibit smoking in governmental buildings, Louisiana and Arkansas joined 20 other states, including Florida and Georgia, that have already passed laws forbidding smoking in restaurants and private office buildings. In fact, it is now illegal in Arkansas to smoke in a car with a child young enough to be placed in a child protective seat, punishable by a $25 fine. At the bill signing, Gov. Phil Bredesen acknowledged legislative reluctance to pass smoking restrictions, citing a “logjam” at the statehouse. As the agricultural committee chairman, Gene Davidson was seen as the main stumbling block for anti-smoking groups since the house leadership, namely Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, sent bills to the ag committee knowing Davidson would kill them. Davidson’s tobacco stance has been libertarian: farmers already have been saddled with enough government restrictions through cigarette taxes and agricultural guidelines. Therefore government should stop placing more restrictions on farmers and their products. “He kept using the phrase that we’re trying to ‘balance the budget on the back of tobacco farmers,’ ” says Chastity Mitchell, who lobbies for an anti-smoking umbrella group called Campaign for a Healthy and Responsible Tennessee. “Gene was absolutely our biggest obstacle by far. It’s always been that way. We couldn’t get senators to move bills in the senate because they knew there wasn’t going to be any momentum in the house because of the agricultural committee.” Davidson denies he’s a stumbling block, saying all bills received a fair hearing in his committee. Even so, he’s curious about the law banning smoking in government buildings. The bill didn’t go through agriculture as it should have. It went through the house finance committee. Some people say the reason it bypassed Davidson was that he was a lame duck committee chair—the time was ripe for an anti-smoking bill to sneak through. Which likely means Speaker Naifeh was ready to throw the anti-smoking groups a bone, hoping they’d go away for a while. Others say the bill applied to a part of the code unrelated to tobacco, so it shouldn’t have gone through the ag committee anyway. In any event, smoking in the Legislative Plaza was beginning to embarrass legislators because so many school kids walk through during session. And school kids, even in Tennessee, have begun to learn that second-hand smoke isn’t good for anyone. Davidson says the bill’s committee assignment is still a mystery to him. “Something was going on I don’t understand yet,” he says. The tour of his farm has ended and he’s leaning against the bed of his pickup. His wife is watering plants on the side of the two-story farmhouse. With some prompting, Davidson recalls the time in 1998 when 46 states, including Tennessee, reached a settlement with the four major tobacco companies, bringing $200 billion to states strapped with paying smokers’ medical bills. It was also acknowledgment from Big Tobacco that it had lied to the public about the risks associated with smoking. Davidson doesn’t remember being happy about the influx of new money to help with the budget or concerned that the money might trickle to the state’s hospitals and anti-smoking programs. He remembers being anxious his livelihood soon would be threatened. He didn’t want the federal government to outlaw growing tobacco—a paranoid thought, he knows, but one he couldn’t stop himself from thinking. “Farmers are always the worst at looking at the whole negative side of things, the whole downside,” Davidson says. He flashes a look as if to say, what else can we do? “In a way, that’s being practical.” Eugene Davidson’s main tobacco opponents have been two senators from the same northern Middle Tennessee area he represents, in the heart of tobacco country. Both are registered nurses. But that’s about all the similarities Diane Black and Rosalind Kurita share. Kurita is tall and thin and somewhat of a marksman. She has won awards shooting skeet, at one time besting an NRA lobbyist in a one-on-one match. She has a reputation as being difficult to work with, in part because her straight-shooting style doesn’t leave much room for diplomacy. Ambitious to a fault, Kurita announced she was running for U.S. Senate two years ago, only to drop out last spring when she had trouble keeping up with Harold Ford Jr.’s fund raising. Black is shorter, with dark hair and a maternal nature. Her office is decorated in soft light and she likes to play CDs of birds chirping as she works, a white sweater draped over her shoulders. A pro-life Republican, she has had several run-ins with Speaker Naifeh over the years, particularly after a snide comment he made last spring after he learned Black had become airsick while flying over tornado-strewn parts of her district. “He’s not a real Diane Black fan,” she says. Naifeh has a reputation for shunting her bills into committees he knows will kill them without much public comment. Kurita and Black teamed up in 2003 to prohibit smoking in the Capitol, which had undergone a massive cleaning of its limestone walls and ceiling caused primarily by years of tobacco smoking inside the historic building. In fact, workers at WASCO Inc., which contracted to clean the Capitol for $1.2 million, called the soot they pulled off Greek columns “nicotine” because, to them, it was obvious what they were cleaning: the effects of tobacco smoke. Neither Kurita nor Black campaigned on a nonsmoking agenda. Nobody goes to the Capitol to eradicate cigarette smoking. But it has been logical for them to push for less smoking because both are strong advocates of public health issues. Black, at least, stops short of condemning tobacco farmers for their choice of crops. At some point, the issue for her is more about personal responsibility and less about aiding a habit with serious health consequences. “I am 100 percent against punishing tobacco farmers,” Black says. “I was even against the tobacco settlement. Smokers know what the product is doing to them. It’s been on the side of a pack of cigarettes since the 1970s. I am not in favor of putting tobacco farmers out of business. My goal is to say there’s rights for both the tobacco smoker and the nonsmoker. One right doesn’t override the other’s.” On June 20, Black was one of a handful of legislators who traveled to the Capitol to applaud Gov. Bredesen as he signed the bill banning smoking in government buildings. It was a routine day for Bredesen. The non-smoking legislation was the last of seven bills he signed that day on issues as varied as licensing of athletic trainers and the hiring of minors in state parks. After each bill was signed, Bredesen would say, “All right, it’s the law” and glance around the room. When it was time for the nonsmoking bill, Bredesen praised the sponsors, Sen. Roy Herron, a longtime anti-smoking advocate, and Craig Fitzhugh, who, in his 10 years on the Hill, has shown little interest in anti-smoking legislation until the prohibition in state buildings bill came along. Both legislators flanked the governor as he signed. Diane Black, meanwhile, was standing to the governor’s far right, six people away from the law the governor was signing with a gold pen. Back in her office a half-hour later, Black wasn’t exactly glum, but she wasn’t thrilled either. For eight years she’s worked on anti-smoking legislation. If it weren’t for the longstanding feud with Naifeh, she suggests, she, not Herron, would have been at the governor’s side. “It just about breaks my heart,” she says. “It’s been my issue for all these years. It’s bittersweet for me. It’s been my bills. My passion. My subject. Yet, it has happened. There’s no more smoking in the Plaza. That is the important thing.” She wonders who will enforce the ban in the Legislative Plaza. Will the sergeant at arms stand up to senators and representatives who flout the law by smoking in their offices? “If an employee reports somebody smoking in the halls,” she asks, “will the leadership do anything about it?” The other thing she wonders is why Bredesen hasn’t done more to help the anti-smoking cause. It isn’t like the governor has been bought and sold by the tobacco industry. His campaign finance reports, totaling $6.8 million for this election cycle, show only a $3,500 contribution from the Altria Group PAC, the company that owns Philip Morris. Bredesen, following Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee and governors in other states, has been on a well-publicized health kick, dropping 25 pounds through diet and exercise. Instead of preaching against the ills of smoking, however, Bredesen has preferred to talk about childhood obesity and diabetes, another lifestyle choice costing Tennessee taxpayers nearly $1 billion annually in health-related expenses. For this story, Bredesen’s office denied access to the governor, issuing a platitude-filled statement so lame it’s not worth repeating here. It’s confusing to Black why the governor hasn’t been more vocal about tobacco. “It seems to me he could make it one of his issues. He’s worried about obesity and diabetes. Smoking goes right to the top of things that can negatively impact you. When the governor wants something done, he has an army of staff to lobby and address issues to get something done. When he gets behind something, he can make it move. He has the ambassadors to lobby and research to get legislators information and move them in the direction they need to go. He brings a lot of credibility, if he’s sincere and it’s done for the right reasons.” Every year since at least the 1940s, the University of Tennessee has held a tobacco education seminar for farmers at its extension facility in Greeneville, an hour east of Knoxville. Starting at 8 a.m., farmers take a hayride out to tents erected next to tobacco fields, where they learn about things like optimal nitrogen-soil content, disease-resistant varieties of tobacco, fertigation (fertilizing through irrigation pipelines), soil temperature, crop rotation, moisture depletion and remedies for the blue mold and black shank fungus as well as blue leaf spot disease. Industry reps from Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds are here, but loiter in the background. Some of the UT professors make sure to thank them for sponsoring tobacco experiments, characterizing their contributions as “invaluable.” The UT administration has begun to hear from the public that its tobacco program might be irresponsible. But they see it as part of their mission to provide farmers with the best practices available. “We’re concerned as anyone about the health implications,” says Roland Mote, an assistant dean of the tobacco experiment station. “But we look at it as an economic development issue.” Farmers seem to enjoy the day, traveling from as far away as Madison to attend. They are almost all white males approaching retirement age and beyond. At the end of one of two teaching sessions, they walk around examining the velvet leaves of the tobacco plants or hop on the hay-hauler for the trip back to a university-sponsored lunch of steak and potatoes. At the turn of the last century, some of these farmers probably would have had an intense hatred of the tobacco representatives among them. Because companies had colluded to keep prices obscenely low, Kentucky and Tennessee farmers revolted in a violent mutiny, called the Black Patch Wars, against the tobacco industry and farmers who sold to them. They formed a short-lived collective, but it dissolved at the onset of the World War I, a war that unwittingly increased the amount of cigarette consumption as the military handed out free smokes to troops. By the 1930s, American taste for tobacco had increased, though the price continued to fluctuate in boom and bust cycles. Federal officials agreed to subsidize tobacco by buying surplus at a predetermined price. At auctions around the state, government officials were as much a part of the buying process as tobacco companies. In Tennessee, the government’s tobacco was stored by sanctioned cooperatives, where it was either sold to Big Tobacco when inventory dwindled or, in some cases, had to be destroyed because it was in such poor condition. Two years ago, that subsidy came to an end. Competition from third-world countries in South America and elsewhere convinced many farmers it was time to move toward a more market-driven model. Other farmers, noticing that Philip Morris favored an end to the subsidy, wanted to retain the old system under the theory that anything cigarette makers wanted couldn’t be good for farmers. They pointed out that it was the tobacco companies who taught overseas farmers how to grow tobacco in the first place. Sitting underneath a shed at the UT tobacco day is Hugh Wells, a senior vice president in charge of agriculture at Greeneville Bank, dressed in a yellow polo shirt and slacks. His thin silver hair is pushed to one side and he wears oversized gold-rimmed glasses. Someone nearby says they’ve heard Philip Morris might be looking for more acreage to grow tobacco next year, an irony not lost on the men within earshot. A farmer sitting next to Wells says, “I hope Philip Morris starves.” “A lot of these farmers feel like the tobacco companies pushed them out of business,” Wells explains. “For years farmers felt like they were working hand-in-hand with tobacco companies. If the government wanted to add a big tax, farmers all went together to the statehouse to defeat it. Then the tobacco companies wanted to kill our programs and farmers don’t have anywhere else to go. Some of the farmers are hoping the co-op warehouse will stay open so they don’t have to sell to tobacco companies.” Wells says a decade ago the tobacco crop in Greene County was worth $35 million, an annual income of money that has literally built towns from the ground up. “If you buy a Cadillac automobile for $50,000, $45,000 of that money goes to Detroit,” Wells says. “But if we sell $50,000 worth of tobacco, $45,000 of it stays right here. It circulates through the community five times over. It stays here and generates food, clothing, automobiles, schools. Tobacco money kept turning over in this community. Now we don’t know how much money we’re taking in. We just know it’s a loss. We feel it in the community.” Getting onto one of the hay-haulers, one of the farmers, in striped overalls and wearing a blue wrist protector, says to the other, “I’ve always enjoyed raising tobacco. I miss it.” The sentiment is one expressed almost universally by the state’s tobacco farmers. Ken Givens is a former legislator who, like Gene Davidson, was head of the agriculture committee. He is now the state’s agricultural commissioner. As farmers eat their lunch, he gives a short speech, pointing farmers toward a micro-grant program—up to $10,000 per applicant—to buy bulls and other livestock. For 54 years, Givens grew tobacco in Hawkins County, where he grew up, stopping in 2002 only because the demands of being agriculture commissioner were too much to continue farming. “Growing tobacco was who you were,” says Givens, who planted upwards of 75 acres of burley tobacco, the kind ground into cigarettes. “It’s what your culture was. It was as addictive as smoking tobacco. Once upon a time, family members were the only available labor pool. Everybody from the elderly to teenagers picked tobacco. Schools shut down during picking season. It was an excused absence. Tobacco was that important.” It is this sense of nostalgia that keeps many farmers returning to growing tobacco even though some of them net no more than $400 per acre from the crop, not counting their own labor. The farmer in striped overalls and blue wrist guard turns out to be Hilton Seay, the 66-year-old former principal of Greeneville High School. He stopped growing tobacco three years ago when the federal subsidy system ended. He didn’t like that Big Tobacco, not the federal government, would set the minimum price. “I could see where things were going to be more freewheeling,” he says. He grew up tending to six acres of tobacco about 12 miles from the UT extension farm. Tobacco put him through college all the way to the doctorate level and paid for his wife’s degree and three kids’ college education. “That extra money came in mighty, mighty handy,” he says. He and his wife used to plant tobacco at night, a 12-volt battery lighting a bulb over the setter. “Some like golf, I like to pick and plow tobacco,” Seay says. “You never take pride in any of these crops like you take pride in growing tobacco for some reason or other. Yes, I miss it, topping off tobacco, sweat filling my boots up. I miss going out to the patch and watching it grow.” He’s thinking about returning to tobacco but is worried he won’t be able to find labor. He’s not as agile as he used to be and his kids have moved away. Seay admits he has struggled with telling high school students to stay off tobacco when he was busy growing it. “Is that hypocritical or not?” he asks. “These things can crucify your conscience a little.” Though he doesn’t smoke, his two sons chew and smoke; his father used to chew tobacco right off the stalk. “It’s a lifestyle choice,” he says, but at the same time, the answer doesn’t satisfy him. “You like to justify things. You look at the health factors and wonder what it is you’re doing.” Winding down a dirt road that runs along parts of the fast-moving Clinch River, past a small cemetery and a farm with a herd of llamas, you’ll find the farm of Pat Osborne, just inside the Virginia state line, which she and a brother inherited in the early 1990s. You know you reach it when the view of the land between the road and river opens and you see not fields of gold, but fields of purple. Osborne owns the largest lavender farm east of the Mississippi, a farm that not long ago produced two crops, cattle and tobacco. In 2001, during her family’s annual picnic at the farm, Osborne became disgusted with the look and smell of the cattle. “I was aggravated shoveling cow manure,” she says. “I thought there must be something better than this.” She saw in an issue of Country Living magazine where a professional couple living in Washington had given up their jobs to grow lavender. Osborne, a lab technician with a master’s degree in microbiology, flew to Sequim, Wash., home to the largest concentration of lavender farms in the country, where she ordered five varieties of lavender for test plots. Three of the varieties bloomed in the spring and a soil sample from her farm sent to the University of Delaware tested positive for lavender growing conditions. From there, Osborne didn’t look back. She distilled her first batches of lavender oil using a moonshine still she bought from an ad in the paper. Her boyfriend, Bill Watts, runs a more modern still with water he pumps from a mountain stream and cooled by the Clinch. It takes about two hours to distill a gallon of lavender oil condensed through a copper tube running through a green plastic barrel. “People think we’re crazy,” Watts says. “But she never got $25 per pound for tobacco.” Osborne mixes the oil or lavender buds into products like lemonade and jelly or massage and bath oils she sells online or at fairs in the region. Osborne envisions a lavender-spawned agro-tourism industry—groups of farmers growing lavender in the region and hosting an annual street festival like Sequim does. “Tour buses going farm to farm,” she says. “Gift shop products, people in town making products, a food bar. I could just see tourists coming here.” But first she must convince people she isn’t the town kook, which hasn’t been easy. “No. 1, I’m a woman,” she says. “No. 2, I have no farming experience. No. 3, I didn’t grow up here.” She has a cousin named Gale, who rides up on his four-wheeler shaking his head at her. Gale still grows an acre or two of tobacco on land adjacent to Osborne’s. “He thinks people are going to be out here trying to smoke the purple weed,” she says. “He’s still trying to grow tobacco. He doesn’t know what else to do. He’s not open to change. He’s spending $1.45 per pound to grow tobacco worth $1.60 per pound.” Osborne is amused by the notion that tobacco farming might be addictive. But she breaks it down along gender lines. “On this road,” she says, indicating the dirt road in front of her house, “the only people not growing tobacco are women. We have women growing sheep, goats, llamas and lavender. I don’t know if women are more open to change or more practical. All the women I know are growing things good for people. I think women are more interested in the health of their families.” It’s doubtful many farmers, male or female, will consider lavender seriously. For one thing, Osborne has to create her own retail market. Her lavender is worth $25 per pound only because she creates products consumers will buy. There is no middleman, in the same way tobacco is sold to RJ Reynolds. Farmers still snicker at former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for mentioning Belgian endive as an alternative crop before the 1988 Iowa Caucus. They weren’t laughing merely because endive is a politically correct-sounding vegetable; it’s that Dukakis should have known there is little demand for endive. Planting it is too risky. Yet Osborne’s point should be well taken. She isn’t trying to solve the nation’s farming or health care crisis. She, like every other farmer, just wants to make a buck. “I’d like people to see all the people coming to my farm and say, ‘Hey, maybe she does have something going on over there. Maybe we can make some money too.’ ” Thus the landscape in Tennessee’ post-tobacco era isn’t much different than the years when tobacco reigned supreme. But expect change to come as soon as next spring. Gov. Bredesen doesn’t know this yet, but he’s going to be called upon to lead the anti-smoking movement in the state. A group of anti-smoking representatives from the American Cancer Society and American Lung Association, among others, have been meeting for several weeks to plan how to approach Bredesen. They expect the first meeting with one of his aides later this week. The group wants two things: an increase to the state’s 20-cent-per-pack cigarette tax, one of the lowest in the nation. A tax increase would have passed this year with Bredesen’s blessing except that the state suddenly found a surplus of revenue, halting legislative discussions of most proposed tax increases. The group also wants either a statewide clean indoor air act or a state law allowing cities and counties to pass their own ordinances. Since the early 1990s, a pernicious state law, no doubt written by the tobacco companies, prohibits municipalities from applying their own laws on smoking in restaurants and private office buildings. Expect tobacco lobbyists to shrill loud and long in trying to kill any movement on clean indoor air. The last thing they want is a former tobacco state like Tennessee to further stigmatize their products as, at best, annoying, and, at worst, lethal. With Bredesen on board, look for the house leadership, namely Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, to quickly fall in line with the anti-smoking agenda—as counterintuitive as that might seem. Naifeh represents two counties in West Tennessee where cotton, not tobacco, has traditionally been the cash crop. But the 67-year-old Democrat nevertheless has been neck-deep in the pro-tobacco camp. He’s married to Betty Anderson, a former RJ Reynolds lobbyist, and until the mid-1990s, Naifeh was a wholesaler of merchandise to convenience stores, whose main source of revenue is beer and cigarettes. One legislator recalls that as recently as the early 1990s Naifeh offered free smokes out of a cardboard box to people who dropped into his office. Naifeh denies he uses the House committee system to quash bills he doesn’t like. “I’ve always said,” Naifeh says, “that whenever 50 members of the House and 17 members of the Senate want to ban smoking, it will be done. In fact, I voted for the bill that prohibits smoking in public buildings.” But Republicans and Democrats alike say the practice is commonplace. “Make no mistake,” says one House Dem, “this is a top-down institution.” During a short telephone interview, Naifeh goes on to recount recent history—the decline in the number of families growing tobacco and what it has meant to the average farmer’s pocketbook. He talks about the prevalence of smoking cessation programs and how the legislature is likely to be influenced by the decline in tobacco. As he begins to talk about clean indoor air, he turns surly, as if debating his own mind, his libertarian leanings betraying him. He borrows a page directly from the tobacco lobbyist’s playbook by taking clean indoor air to the edge of absurdity. “Some people won’t be happy until smoking is illegal,” the speaker says. “We should make it illegal and be done with it.” His brother owns a grocery store where shoppers are prohibited from smoking. “He has that right,” Naifeh insists, “but there might be another grocer who allows smoking, and that’s his right. It’s an issue of individual business owners having some prerogative how they want to operate. Do we want to outlaw smoking in the whole country or in Tennessee? Congress might have to give us some guidance.” Or maybe Gov. Bredesen. When Naifeh is asked whether the governor’s involvement in the anti-smoking movement might influence his thinking, Naifeh responds, “It could be a factor. I’m not quite there yet. Everything takes time. We took a great, giant step when we did what we did for state buildings.” But even Naifeh isn’t completely blinded by ideology, greed or nostalgia. He, too, can sense the end of the tobacco empire. The veteran lawmaker is smart enough to know he shouldn’t waste political capital on a dead issue. “You can look on the horizon,” he says, “and see there’s changes coming.”