12-year-olds can't buy cigarettes -- but they can work in tobacco fields

[Jilly_in_VA]

1. Nicotine poisoning

It's not pretty. In east Tennessee, most of the tobacco, IIRC, is grown for cigar wrappers, and a lot of it is grown on small family operations. In those cases, any family member, including children, can work in the tobacco field. Most farmers are relatively solicitous of their kids, however. Most of them. Occasionally we might get one in who was kind of badly dehydrated or even with mild heat exhaustion. It wasn't them we worried about so much.

It was the Hispanic workers on the big farms who suffered. Repeatedly. We'd get several in every summer with acute nicotine poisoning. We knew who the offenders were, but the guys (uniformly young, maybe lying about their ages, with limited or no English) would never say, so nothing could be done. They were all kind of the same, stoic, with fear behind their eyes. The best we could do was treat them, make them comfortable, and send them back out to do the same work, knowing that they, or some of their compadres, would be back before the summer was over.

And don't get me started on the chicken processing plant in town, which was repeatedly busted.