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"Mild & Pleasant." By lowering prices and increasing demand, counter the manufacturers, HTL should eventually assure tobacco farmers a stable market. The new process will allow growers to sell scarred or storm-torn tobacco which is now unsalable; up to 40% of New England's cigar binder has to be scrapped each year because of weather damage and imperfections. Moreover, the market for high-grade cigarette tobacco has already been hurt by the rise of filter tips (more than 20% of all U.S. cigarette sales in 1955), which, say tobacco experts, generally contain less expensive tobaccos than non-filtered cigarettes. The industry also maintains that homogenized tobacco tastes better. After passing around HTL cigars, growers from Connecticut's Hartford County reported that they were "mild and pleasant."
Nevertheless, a special House-Senate subcommittee is conducting a full-scale investigation of HTL. Led by North Carolina's cigar-smoking, tobacco-chewing Senator W. Kerr Scott (who charged manufacturers with using "trade secrets as a Fifth Amendment"), the committee opened hearings last month, got testimony from a North Carolina botanist that he had found particles of a "dangerous" substance akin to glass fibers in an HTL cigar. But Research Chemist Walter G. Frankenburg, the General Cigar vice president who perfected the first homogenization process, testified that the suspect particles were probably silicate fibers other than glass, added to HTL cigar binder to make it burn more evenly.
"Unfit for Humans." While General Cigar speaks proudly of HTL, most cigarette makers have kept mum on experiments. They are fearful of alarming the public, which has been nurtured on the notion that tobacco should be "pure" and "fine." A rash of anti-HTL bills have already been introduced in state legislatures and Congress; e.g., Kentucky's Representative Frank Chelf has written a bill that would ban HTL products as unfit for human consumption. Nevertheless, most tobacco men expect that synthetic leaf will inevitably be used throughout the industry. As one cigar smoker cracked last week: "HTL/MFT."