Pubdate: Thu, 12 Jul 2001
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2001 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Author: Oliver Burkeman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

THE SKIN TRADE

Everyone's Talking About Legalising Cannabis, So The Makers Of Rizlas Must 
Be Delighted, Right? Well No, Actually. Or If They Are, They're Not Letting 
On. Oliver Burkeman Explains Why

Later this month, at the cutting-edge music venue 93 Feet East on Brick 
Lane in London's east end, hundreds of revellers will gather for a club 
night. The usual acts will make an appearance: Blak Twang in the Bad Magic 
Main Room; West London Deep and Alvin C in the Nucamp Balearic Bar. 
Significant quantities of alcohol will be consumed; numerous roll-ups will 
be smoked; cheap, sugary carbohydrate-rich snacks will be made available to 
satiate the dancers' late-night hunger pangs.

To the casual observer, it will look like any other London club night. But 
there will be one significant difference. In a cultural climate when the 
consumption of soft drugs in recreational settings has become so accepted 
as to be rendered banal - so accepted, indeed, as to become a topic of 
sober reflection in Tory leadership contests - a dim view will be taken of 
such practices at Sizzler: anyone found smoking cannabis in their roll-ups 
can expect stern treatment from the management. Because Sizzler is 
sponsored by Rizla, the country's leading manufacturer of rolling cigarette 
papers, and Rizla - to quote the corporate line, repeated so often as to 
have achieved a strange kind of religious truth in the tobacco industry - 
has nothing whatsoever to do with cannabis.

There can be few products that rely so completely for their commercial 
success on such a monumental effort of self-denial - a refusal to accept 
the obvious usually reserved for "defensive" weaponry systems, or telephone 
bugging devices ordered from Sunday-supplement catalogues, complete with 
official warnings that they can be used for anything except bugging 
telephones. "The vast majority of Rizlas are used for hand-rolled tobacco," 
Gareth Davis, the chief executive of Imperial Tobacco, which owns Rizla, 
has said. And that includes king-size papers, so impractical for smoking 
tobacco and so well-suited to making a joint. But Davis is implacable. 
"Most smokers of cigarettes smoke king-sized cigarettes," he says, "and 
it's the same with the hand-rolled market."

The problem is that his company's bottom line repeatedly affirms the 
opposite. One representative study, in the mid- 1990s, found a 16% growth 
in sales of papers during a period that saw an 11% decline in sales of 
rolling tobacco. In an attempt to resolve this dissonance, Rizla has 
developed a complex counter-mythology, addressing each awkward point: 
king-size papers are particularly convenient for lorry drivers, the story 
has gone in the past. And packets seemingly not being used for pure-tobacco 
cigarettes may just as well be being used to sponge out saliva from under 
the keys of clarinets.

"When we were running the campaign on legalisation, we called Rizla to 
suggest that they might like to put a free packet on the front of the 
Independent on Sunday," says Rosie Boycott, the paper's then editor. "They 
refused flat out. They played ignorant, saying they had no idea about the 
dope connection."

Liz Buckingham, Imperial's group communications manager, is having none of 
the suggestion that cannabis accounts for anything but a minuscule 
proportion of Rizla use. "I disagree with that totally," she says. "There 
are somewhere around 4.5m people who roll their own cigarettes in the UK - 
people who exclusively roll their own and those who sometimes smoke them 
and sometimes smoke factory-made cigarettes. Anything else is really very 
small."

Dudley Brewer, Rizla's marketing director, has concurred, saying rolling 
papers are so popular because "roll-your-own gives smokers incredible value 
for money in comparison with factory-made cigarettes. It allows for 
individualism, and control." And that is all.

But what once might have looked like coyness is fast beginning to seem 
outdated. The home secretary, David Blunkett, has called for an "adult, 
intelligent debate" on the state of the laws on soft drugs; the civil 
liberties group Liberty is defending a man at a south London crown court on 
the grounds that arrest for possession of a small amount of cannabis is in 
breach of his right to privacy. Only in such transitional times as these 
would a company feel compelled to persistently deny the fierce loyalty its 
product engenders. There is a passionate public attachment to the 
ubiquitous green, red and blue packets, with their trademark cross (the 
name is from the French word riz - rice - and its founders, the Lacroix 
family); and it is an attachment that infects many who might otherwise be 
expected to be deeply hostile toward tobacco conglomerates such as 
Imperial, which also owns the cigarette brands John Player and the 
aggressively marketed Lambert and Butler.

"The whole thing about Rizlas is that they've made marijuana a sociable 
thing - you can't share a pipe like you can share a spliff," says Ken 
Lukowiak, an ex-soldier and the author of the memoir Marijuana Times. "I 
recall being in Kenya, where there were no Rizlas - we had to use army 
toilet paper instead. But in Belize, in the army shop, they sold Rizlas. We 
made huge amounts of money buying and selling them at inflated prices... 
the good thing about Rizlas is that there is always one, somewhere in the 
house. You know that Joni Mitchell lyric, 'You don't know what you've got 
till it's gone?' That's how I feel about them."

An entire culture steeped in nostalgia and complicated rules of etiquette 
has grown up around the unobtrusive packets. "An international 
institution," Joe, a 25-year-old bar manager, calls them. "I remember the 
first packet I ever bought, from a newsagent next to a funeral parlour, 
which is quite symbolic really. I asked for about five packets of sweets 
before I muttered, 'Rizlas, please.' It was just like buying condoms."

"In my years as an experimental drug user I could never buy king-size," re 
calls Elaine, a publisher. "It's something about the shopkeeper knowing, 
and you knowing - everyone knowing what they will be used for. I still 
can't get over the fact that they sell them at all: it's like we're all 
colluding in a crime. I had a partner whose favourite sentence was, 'Can I 
have some king-size Rizla?' He used to make me practice asking for them, 
but I just couldn't do it. In that moment of transaction, I feel sorry for 
the shopkeeper: it's the silent subtext, like porn. It's like asking for a 
magazine from under the counter: you get a wry smile. It's such a private 
thing, even if everyone is at it." But her loyalty, like that of so many 
others, remains unquestioned. "I would only ever use Rizla."

The company has an exquisitely complicated relationship with such public 
affection. Events like Sizzler, and Rizla's website, and its range of 
branded clothes - shirts, underwear, a durable all-weather "rolling jacket" 
- - all promote an ethos of slacking and lounging that chimes perfectly with 
the dominant themes of cannabis culture; students, a brand manager at Rizla 
has pointed out, "are very much our target audience". But Buckingham 
"refutes absolutely" the suggestion that Rizla actively caters to cannabis 
users, insisting that the product is aimed at "legitimate roll-your-own 
smokers".

Overall, the result is a commercially risky strategy, argues Clive Bates, 
the director of the anti-smoking lobbying group Ash: "The whole feel is 
very subversive, very countercultural, but these companies already have one 
of the worst reputations imaginable, and they spend a lot of their effort 
trying to position themselves as legitimate purveyors of a legal product. 
Flirting with the illicit drugs argument has a lot of dangers for them in 
public-relations terms."

But for the moment it seems to be paying off. Imperial Tobacco announced a 
rise in profits for the first half of this year of 6%, to ?223m, despite 
Britain's rapidly declining tobacco market. There may be something more to 
Rizla's brand investment strategy, too: as cigarette companies consider the 
prospect of decriminalisation or even legalisation of marijuana, Rizla 
finds itself in a strong commercial position to capitalise on an increase 
in cannabis use. "That amount of brand-building and promotional activity 
can't really be sustained by a product that's as cheap as cigarette 
papers," says Clive Bates. "They could make a Rizla-branded cannabis 
cigarette; a brand which reaches a countercultural mentality is going to be 
an enormous asset."

Meanwhile, as politicians prevaricate, 43.8m papers roll off Rizla's 
machines in Pontypridd and mainland Europe every day; and in newsagents and 
supermarkets across the country, hundreds of transactions take place that 
render current cannabis legislation not scandalous, nor even ridiculous, 
but profoundly irrelevant.

"They're usually between 18 and 30, and they come in with a big smile on 
their face when they ask for them," says Francesco, behind the cash 
register at Princess Newsagents on Charterhouse Street in central London. 
"Rizlas have always been a steady sale." Further up the road, another 
newsagent reports sales of 225 packets a day, 25 of which are king-size. 
"Local labourers and manual workers buy the small ones, because they smoke 
roll-ups," he says. "It's the posh people, the office workers, who buy the 
king-size ones." He smiles. "I don't know what they use them for."

• Additional reporting by Polly Curtis
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MAP posted-by: GD