Tobacco Harvesting In Downtown Portland

The other day I was walking through the heart of downtown Portland, on Fifth Avenue near Yamhill Street. I used to LOVE to walk through downtown anywhere, in any city in which I lived or was visiting. Not anymore, or perhaps more accurately, not for the same reasons. For me, downtown strolling has become more of a spectator sport than anything else.


First of all, I have no good reason to BE downtown in my own city. I don't trade there, and can get my quotidian needs met quite nicely in my own or nearby districts. Add in the downtown facts that parking is impossible and expensive, the streets are dirty, driving there wastes gas, it's noisy, too many streets are torn up, and it takes forever to get anywhere. I know, I know......most of these issues would be addressed by my use of mass transit. But generally speaking, I don't "do" mass transit. With few dire exceptions, "Baby, I can drive my car."

But there I was, downtown. Nice day, sunny and all. As I am walking by the entrance to a large office building, I notice a couple of guys who appear to be homeless standing by the ashtray attached to the wall. It's a silver ashtray, with one of those old-fashioned trays where you crush out your cigarette, then push a little lever and the tray opens and dumps the spent butt into the receptacle.

These guys are just kind of shooting the breeze, while one of them is going through the ashtray, and pulling out the butts. When he finds one, he "field strips" it. This is an old Army term, meaning that when you are finished with a cigarette and you are outdoors, you scrape the tobacco end of the butt on the bottom of your boot and pocket the filter. The paper and remaining tobacco, being biodegradable and all, blow off into the breeze like they were never there. Despite how many people the armed forces train their recruits to kill, they are VERY persnickety about keeping the ground free of cigarette butts and other litter!

So the guy is "field stripping" each butt he finds, but instead of freeing the paper and tobacco strands, he empties the tobacco into his own pouch, I assume to use later in rolling his own, and dumps the filter back into the little ashtray.

At least now I have some idea why, no matter how poor the guy holding the sign at the end of the freeway exit looks, he ALWAYS seems to be smoking a cigarette. Now I hafta rearrange my thinking. The cigarette thing was always one of my prime rationalizations for not giving these guys (and, increasingly, gals) any money: if they can afford Camels, they can afford NOT to be sticking these pathetic signs in my face and making their 25-words-or-less case as to why I should be a drive-by donor. (Besides, they are lousy writers, partly because they don't know the first thing about market segmentation. I am NOT their demographic! I am not in that highly prized 18-34 age group, and I am not gonna be moved by appeals based upon 1. patriotism - they are all apparently veterans, and, what with their much-in-demand-right-now experience, ought to be down at the recruiting office arguing their way into a cool college-loan-see-the-world-as-a-member-of-the-Army-Of-One-signing-bonus deal, instead of thrusting a ragged sign with a poorly-drawn flag in my face, or 2. pets, or 3. shitty clothes or hair, or 4. durable medical devices like walkers or wheelchairs, or 5. the WORST ONE OF ALL, bad spelling and punctuation.)

Upon encountering this guy, I did what any concerned citizen with half a heart would do: called a cop. This guy was obviously evading federal tobacco taxes by doing what he was doing. And to all you bleeding hearts out there who are gonna try to tell me that the original cigarettes he was salvaging were ALREADY taxed, I say this: we are a nation at war and we need all the tax revenue we can get right now. And just because the richest people in our country pay the least taxes, proportionally speaking, DOES NOT excuse this guy's hubris in evading his rightful tax burden.

Plus, on one of my few strolls downtown, on a sunny Friday afternoon, when I am striding along in the temperate breeze minding my own business and basically feeling like the world is my oyster and for a rare, fleeting moment when my antidepressant seems to be doing its job, I don't appreciate seeing such a thing. Smoking is a filthy habit, the guy is killing himself, god knows whose lips have been on those filters, and this does not make a pretty picture.

They took him away. I think in jail, you get free cigarettes, don't you? You should, anyhow.