DeLoach says his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather were tobacco farmers and he remembers working in the fields at age five  IN-DEPTH SPECIAL: Tobacco under attack MESSAGE BOARDS: Big tobacco lawsuits

July 8, 1999
Web posted at: 9:41 p.m. EDT (0141 GMT)

From Correspondent Aram Roston

METTER, Georgia (CNN) -- Wednesday's jury verdict in Florida opening the tobacco industry to millions -- perhaps billions -- of dollars in damages has sent ripples of uncertainty through tobacco-growing regions.

At the farm of Dennis Anderson in Candler County, Georgia, it is harvesting season, with specialized machines plucking ripe tobacco leaves. If all goes well, Anderson's crop should sell for about $1 million.

He's convinced the jury verdict will hurt him. And like other farmers, he believes the industry shouldn't pay for the suffering of people who made the choice to smoke.

"Everybody should be responsible for their own actions," he says.

Lamar DeLoach is a fourth-generation tobacco farmer who has worked in the fields since he was 5. He says the Florida verdict is another nail in the coffin of what he sees as his heritage.

'Demonizing our industry'

"It's the demonizing of our industry," he says. While acknowledging that smoking can be dangerous, DeLoach believes recent legal attacks on tobacco are motivated by greed, not the desire to improve public health.

Although farmers are not directly touched by the litigation, they are part of the same web as the tobacco industry. Anything that affects the industry eventually reaches the growers.

Last year, when the tobacco companies reached a civil settlement with dozens of states that sued to recover the costs of smoking-related illnesses, the companies agreed to pay $5 billion to a fund to compensate farmers.

In the wake of Wednesday's verdict, farmers now worry they won't see that money -- that it may be diverted to the plaintiffs in the Florida class-action suit.

But from an economic standpoint, tobacco farmers say they have little choice but to continue to grow their crop. A single acre of tobacco can sell for up to $4,000 -- about four times the price of an acre of cotton and more than 25 times the price that an acre of soybeans would fetch.

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