[h=1]The skin trade[/h]
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]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
Special report: drugs in Britain[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Thursday 12 July 2001
The Guardian
[/FONT]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."
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