As Youths Light Up, Health Activists Fume Over Bidis

Ask 16-year-old Anna why she smokes bidi cigarettes and she’ll glance down at her clunky platform sandals, look up knowingly and smile: They’re the latest trend.

They give a real buzz, adds 15-year-old Erika, with her pierced navel and lace-trimmed tank top. Strawberry bidis are best, say the two friends, lounging at a Starbucks after a day at the Huntington Beach pier. Or maybe the vanilla ones.

“A cigarette calms you down,” Anna said. “Bidis have a nice rush to them. I think it’s the closest thing to illegal drugs you can buy legally.”

Actually, like all cigarettes, the imported bidis cannot be legally sold to those under 18. But that hardly seems to be impeding some teenagers.

Bidis, which resemble marijuana joints and come in flavors like mango, wild cherry and chocolate, have become so popular among urban youths that alarmed health experts are warning that they are more dangerous than regular cigarettes.

Later this month, a study expected to be published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report will show that bidis contain five times the tar and three times the nicotine of name-brand cigarettes.

Anti-tobacco activists also fear that their candy-like appeal will lure youths into smoking, as did the now-outlawed Joe Camel.

“I think bidis have the potential of being a very serious health threat,” said Cassandra Welch, manager of state government relations for the American Lung Assn. “They’re obviously targeting a younger generation of smokers--first-time smokers. It’s a way to get them hooked into a lifetime of addiction.”

Bidis (sometimes spelled beedies or beadies) are hand-rolled, often unfiltered cigarettes filled with finely flaked tobacco bundled in a fuzzy leaf and bound tight with a colored thread.

Imported from India, the stubby sticks are about half the diameter of major-brand cigarettes. But, public health officials warn, bidis can pack twice the cancer-causing punch.

Caught off-guard by the trend, public health officials from Massachusetts to California are scrambling to produce accurate data on bidi usage and find ways to warn teenagers about their health dangers.

Arizona has specifically banned the sale of bidis to minors. Federal trade officials are cracking down on bidi packages without warning labels.

Bidis are “gaining rapid popularity among urban youth in the U.S.,” said Dr. Howard Koh, health commissioner of Massachusetts, whose Public Health Department is about to publish a study of bidi use among 650 urban teenagers that cites a “disturbingly high” level of bidi smoking.

“This is a problem for communities,” Koh said. “It’s a problem for urban youth. It’s a problem for communities of color.”

Despite the concern, teenagers say bidis are easy to procure: You can get them as party favors or buy them at swap meets. Some convenience and tobacco stores sell them for $2.50 to $4 a pack, up to a dollar less than conventional brands. Some teenagers and young adults mistakenly believe bidis pose less health risk than such cigarettes as Camels or Marlboros because they’re “natural.”

Youths from the Huntington Beach pier to Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood appear blithely oblivious to the health risk. Trend-seekers, including college students, hip-hop devotees, neo-hippies, surfers and skaters, view them as an exotic conversation piece--nothing like their father’s Winstons.

“I think they’re quite pernicious in a number of ways,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles County’s director of public health. “They have not been [sufficiently] on the radar screens of those involved in tobacco control efforts.”

An informal survey of teenagers at four San Francisco high schools last year found that 58% had puffed a bidi and 31% smoked them regularly. The cigarettes were particularly popular among ethnic minorities, and easier for underage buyers to obtain than regular smokes. Most bidi packages lacked surgeon general’s warning labels, according to the San Francisco study, conducted by teenagers associated with the city’s Department of Public Health.

Stung by the recent media attention, officials with Moorpark-based Kretek International, one of the country’s largest bidi distributors, declined to discuss concerns about teenage bidi smoking and attendant health risks. In a written statement, marketing director Shawn Ulizio called bidis a growing but still small “niche market.”

“All bidis sold by Kretek International are legally sanctioned by the U.S. government and include government-mandated health warning labels as well as all applicable federal, state and local tobacco taxes,” Ulizio wrote.

As tobacco products, bidis are illegal for minors to buy; Arizona legislators recently took the additional step of specifically banning bidi sales to youth and increasing penalties for illegal sales.

Concerned Los Angeles public health officials expect to add a bidi question or two to their upcoming tobacco survey of 3,000 homes; the state is doing likewise. In Orange County, alarm about the bidi craze prompted one mother to warn other parents about them in a widely distributed PTA newsletter.

Starting this fall, thousands of Ventura County sixth-graders will be warned about snuff, cigarettes and bidis in a tobacco education class. The message: No matter how appealing the bidi packaging, the smokes are still tobacco. Whatever the form, tobacco is dangerous.

Long-term studies in India show that bidi smokers have twice the lung cancer risk of smokers of filtered cigarettes. That is partly a result of the nonporous nature of the tendu, or ebony, leaves that serve as bidi wrappers, said Dr. Samira Asma, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. To keep the sticks lit, smokers must take deep drags more often.

Hand-rolled by women and children, bidis have been smoked in India for more than a century. Sold there for pennies a pack, bidis are known as the “poor man’s cigarette” in India, said Asma, a native of India.

Bidis have cluttered shelves in ethnic markets in the United States for two decades or more, but have only gained in popularity in the 1990s. Recently, they have been riding the wave of Indian chic, which ushered in mendhi body art and sari-print fashions, she said.

While exact numbers of U.S. bidi smokers are not known, imports are trending upward, said Darryl Jayson, vice president of the nonprofit Tobacco Merchants Assn., an industry trade group in Princeton, N.J.

In 1998, he estimated, 76.6 million bidi cigarettes with an import value of $642,000 were shipped to American distributors. In the first four months this year, 28.3 million bidis arrived, valued at $308,000. It is difficult to say precisely how many bidis enter the country, because they are lumped into several different tariff codes. The bidis are a mere fraction of the United State’s $51-million cigarette market, Jayson said.

“It is growing, but compared to the overall market, it’s still less than a droplet,” he said.

El Don Liquors in Huntington Beach now stocks five flavors of bidis--and sells them for the same price as name brand cigarettes: $4.25 for a pack of 20. Assistant manager Dave Pluma believes kids buy them just because they’re different.

Cal State Fullerton student Tania Isaacs, 23, was initially wooed by the dessert-like taste of bidis. She has since realized the health risks.

“It’s been a while since I smoked one,” she said, almost wistfully. “When I found out all the bad stuff that’s in them, I quit.”