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LLOYD Vernon Jones had tobacco farming in his blood. He had lived all his life on an 18-acre plot of land in North Carolina, where he lovingly provided the care and attention needed to nurture his delicate and unpredictable tobacco plants to maturity.
In late summer he picked the leaves and hung them from tiered poles in the curing barn where they turned a pale, then golden, brown. In the autumn, he drove them to the tobacco auction warehouse.
Farmer Jones followed a ritual that had gone virtually unchanged for three centuries, since English settlers first started growing tobacco in neighbouring Virginia.
In the early 1980s, the British connection was renewed in a surprising manner. An official from the American tobacco giant Brown & Williamson (a wholly owned subsidiary of Britain's BAT Industries) turned up unannounced at Jones's farm near the small town of Wilson. B&W offered to rent Jones's smallholding to grow experimental tobacco plants that had been crossbred to produce twice as much nicotine as normal.
The company's offer for Jones's land and his labour was more than it was worth - especially at a time when the tobacco market was becoming as fragile as the plants Jones would be asked to grow. Consumption of cigarettes was falling and the backing of a big corporation was attractive. Jones eagerly signed up. He was so pleased with the deal 'his eyes were bugged out like a stomped-on toad', recalled his wife, Martha.
Through the 1980s, Jones planted five new varieties of Nicotiana tabacum, the common tobacco plant, but only two lived to maturity. The company codenamed them Y1 and Y2. Y1 turned out to be the sturdier and performed better during the curing process. Y2 turned black in the drying barn and smelled like old socks. The company was very pleased with Y1 and took it away, Jones didn't know where, and he didn't care.
It wasn't until 1994 that the mystery of Y1 began to unravel and details emerge of how B&W had secretly been using the plant to adjust nicotine levels in cigarettes in the United States and elsewhere.
Y1 would become a key piece of evidence for US plaintiffs trying to show how companies manipulate nicotine levels, and it would...