Smoke Inn Blog Smoke Inn Cigar Talk
Well, I thought I was finished writing about GANGSTAS for a while, but one story seems to beget another. Since I finished off the GANGSTA piece last week writing about how we sent cigars to a boat in international waters, and to various prisons all over the USA, it reminded me of one of the simplest, craziest, most profitable inventions ever that I knew about… at least it was in my field of business.
Obviously, there’s a lot more people incarcerated in prisons smoking cigarettes than smoking cigars, and cigarettes and cigarette tobacco are huge items in the prison commissaries, where inmates can spend the miniscule monies they are paid for various jobs. Yeah, yeah, I know, you think everyone in prison is busy just making license plates. But they get paid for other stuff too—picking up litter on the highways, sorting mail, working in the kitchen and commissary, etc., etc.
But… they don’t get paid very much.
Probably 90% of the cigarette smokers in prison buy rolling papers and cans of cigarette tobacco, and “roll their own”. Rolling their own cigarettes cuts the cost of a pack of cigarettes to about one fourth of what a pack of Marlboros or any ready-made cigarette would cost. So almost all the tobacco sold in these commissaries is the canned Roll Your Own type, and there were several popular brands of this stuff available. I say WERE because of an invention by my friend Joe Rowe that changed everything.
There are industry conventions for the food industry, medical supplies, household goods, books, furniture, hotels, motels, RVs, and yes, the cigar industry too… in fact just about every industry has a trade show. Well, there’s a Prison Show too! That’s where the people who are employed by each state to run the prison commissaries see new items and meet the vendors face to face.
Around 1985 prison after prison started banning canned cigarette making tobacco, but it wasn’t for any health reason, it was because inmates on the upper floors were urinating in the empty tobacco cans and dousing unsuspecting prison guards walking patrol on the floors below!
As these restrictions on the sale of inexpensive cigarette making supplies were being instituted at prisons across the country, actual riots were breaking out, as prisoners were forced to buy ready-made cigarettes at four or five times the price, and therefore only able to smoke a whole lot less! Something had to be done!
Enter my friend Joe Rowe, the President of Lane Limited, which owned the Bugler Cigarette Tobacco brand—the Number 1 selling “Roll Your Own” product. Selling to prison commissaries was such a huge part of the business, that if Lane Ltd. lost the ability to sell into prisons, they were effectively “dead in the water” … out of business. Somehow, they had to convince the prisons to keep selling Bugler!
Now Joe was already in the business of selling many varieties of highly aromatic pipe tobaccos in an array of flavors from around the world, and they were all packed in 5-pound bags designed to keep the aroma of the tobaccos in, and the outside air out. These bags were being made at International Flavors and Fragrances in Parsippany, New Jersey. So, Joe goes over there from his Fairfield New Jersey office just ten minutes away and explains his problem to them in person, and without a moments’ hesitation they say they can make him a spray-in film that will allow moisture to go in one direction but stop it from coming in from the other direction!
KABOOM! problem solved! Joe has the interior base of his cans sprayed with this film and jaunts off to the next prison show with samples of… a little Drum roll please: THE PISS-PROOF TOBACCO CAN!
Now lined with this special film, if a convict urinates in the empty can, it goes right through the bottom and onto his feet! “Yuk, Disgusto!” Then, overnight every prison in the country switches to Bugler Piss-Proof cans, all the restrictions to the sale are removed, and Joe, and all the cigarette smoking inmates in America are happy campers. End of story… well, almost!
The next year R.J. Reynolds acquires Lane Ltd. and Joe’s position becomes “redundant”— a fancy name for saying they don’t need him anymore!
Corporate America, is there anything less American?
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Smoke Inn, its employees, or its affiliates.
