CAPE DOCTOR SEES IRONY

Dr. Stanley Sides recognizes the irony of his situation: He's a blood and cancer specialist who owns a tobacco farm.

Sides, whose practice is located in Cape Girardeau, is one of hundreds of physicians and health care workers across the country who own the rights to grow tobacco.

"I'm a doctor who grows tobacco," he said. "I didn't buy the farm for that reason."

Sides' farm, located on the edge of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, produces 3,200 pounds of tobacco a year.

He first purchased property on the edge of the national park in 1969 with the goal of protecting caves on the property.

In 1991, he bought the adjacent tobacco farm.

"When you buy a farm over there, the right to grow tobacco comes with the deed," Sides said.

And for more than 20 years, a local man had been sharecropping tobacco on the property Sides bought.

The doctor says he couldn't see kicking the elderly farmer, now 84, and his livelihood, off the property.

"That's something he really wanted to continue doing, so we've continued to sharecrop with him the tobacco that's raised on the farm," Sides said.

"As long as this farmer still wants to sharecrop the tobacco on this farm, we'll continue to do it, as long as there's the support in the market," he said.

But Sides doesn't plan to go out and look for another sharecropper.

He says he has enjoyed learning about the tobacco industry and its history.

Sides said he really doesn't feel guilty about raising a crop whose end products cause cancer.

"When I see patients that come in with tobacco-related cancers, I don't judge my patients and how their cancer came about," Sides said. "I try to help treat them, but I don't judge them because they've developed cancer and pass judgment on them because of their smoking. I just try to help them."

Tobacco has a long history in Kentucky, but it may not have much of a future, he points out.

"With all the litigation and all the bills being introduced in Congress, I really doubt that raising tobacco has all that much of a future," he said. "The concern is what will happen to all these family farms in Kentucky that can grow very little else. You can't grow row crops. If you want to grow corn, if you want to grow wheat, you should probably go to Illinois."

And there's the money in the tobacco trade, Sides said, not just the money to be earned growing from it, but tax revenues collected on tobacco and tobacco products, and of course, on the lawsuits being filed against tobacco companies.

"There's a large group of attorneys that are poised to make huge rewards from these tobacco settlements," he said.

If tobacco is outlawed in this country, it will be grown somewhere else, Sides said.

But if tobacco is singled out as a harmful crop, he says, what about other crops that produce potentially dangerous products?

"I worry that the same attorneys going after tobacco will start looking at the hops and barley (for beer) farmers," he said, adding alcohol contributes to about 100,000 deaths a year in the United States. "I'm just not sure where it will stop, all the litigation."