T obacco is a crop with many enemies, not all of them human. In the Coastal Plains region of eastern North Carolina, the heart of the state’s flue-cured tobacco production, growers deal with a leaf-damaging soil bacteria colorfully named Granville wilt. If you let them, various aphids will feast on tobacco leaves as they grow. And then there are the suckers—flower buds, sometimes smaller than an inch, that sprout like warts from the bottom to the top of a 6-foot-tall stalk. These wannabe flowers have to be destroyed repeatedly or they’ll rob nutrients from the true cash crop: the sugar- and nicotine-rich leaves at the plant’s highest point.

With so much labor involved, and the end result a cigarette, it’s contradictory to add organic farming practices and layers of compliance paperwork to the equation. But that was the gambit Santa Fe Natural made in 1996 when it opened its first plant in Oxford, N.C., an old tobacco town 35 miles north of Raleigh, then three years later moved to a larger facility.

New Mexico remains a state of mind; the company’s products haven’t been made there since Drake and the Marions’ Cuisinart days. Over the years, the farm-to-lung journey of a pack of Natural American Spirits carved a serpentine path from the fields of North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky to manufacturers in Lower Manhattan, South Miami, and St. Petersburg, Fla., before the cartons arrived in Santa Fe to be put into circulation back across the country.

“By adding the new plant we can also make sure our products never have any chemicals added, because chemicals will never even be brought into this building,” then-Santa Fe Natural Vice President Michael Little told the Herald-Sun of Durham, N.C., in 1999, when the $4.5 million plant outside Oxford was christened.

I was eager to speak with Little, because Sommers and Park had extolled his blending skills as if speaking of a Michelin-starred chef. Before Sante Fe Natural hired him away, Little, known as “the source,” was a master blender at Maclin-Zimmer-McGill, a leaf distributor then based in Richmond, Va. Now he’s president of Santa Fe Natural. Reynolds refused to make him available, and my entreaties through Sommers went nowhere.

Given his relationships, Little filled an urgent need. Sommers was best kept as the “ideas” person behind the organic wave in the tobacco fields. He didn’t like traveling to rural North Carolina. “Too Southern,” he told me.

By the late ’90s, many laid-off tobacco industry workers and growers were wondering how long they could continue. The government was reducing the amount of tobacco farmers could grow. Big Tobacco was breaking with a storied tradition by acknowledging its sins, tacitly, in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), in which the four largest cigarette manufacturers—Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard—settled lawsuits brought years earlier by state attorneys general over smoking’s drain on publicly funded health-care systems. The tobacco companies would pay billions annually, in perpetuity, to 46 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories. The industry further pledged to reform its advertising practices, ceasing billboard ads and eliminating cartoon characters, such as Joe Camel, aimed at hooking kids.

No longer an outlier, Santa Fe Natural had to sign on to the MSA, too, but it was able to cut a deal to pay less because it was a younger company. Sommers watched as Big Tobacco redirected its advertising efforts. “What they did with the billions they were saving on now-forbidden advertising was go to retailers and say, ‘We’ll spend this money to put our cigarettes in this position on your shelf,’ ” he said. “You think we could match up to those guys?” Instead, Sommers kept talking up a cigarette filled with organic tobacco and made with “totally chlorine-free paper and biodegradable filters.”

Alex Watkins was an early convert to Santa Fe Natural’s organic program, becoming a supplier of PRC tobacco (“purity-residue clean”) in 1996. “I got in for the money,” he said. “I thought it was the future. I wasn’t making enough on the conventional side to feed my family.” He was standing next to a 5-acre field in Oxford bordered by rows of buckwheat and wilted, chewed-up sunflowers. That was a good sign—it meant the sunflowers had attracted leaf-eating aphids away from the tobacco plants, an alternative to spraying. The leaf’s journey starts in the ground and ends in a hot metal box, or “barn,” where the heat is cranked up to 165F so the tobacco dries in a way that preserves the leaf’s natural sugars and nicotine.

Watkins now has 300 acres of organic-certified land. “People just like that word,” he said. “And they feel so much safer smoking. I mean, look, you’re still sucking smoke in your lungs. Is it good for you? Hell no. But you ain’t gonna stop people from smoking. They enjoy it. But I guess they got a sense of feeling that it’s supposed to be better for you. Because, you know, it don’t have any chemicals. Whatever eases your mind, I guess.”

Attorneys at Jones Day, the global firm defending Reynolds in the consumer-fraud class action, had recently been in touch with Sommers. A prolific writer of memos as a CEO, he said he’d been thinking about asking them to return his files so he could write a memoir. That might be difficult just now.

Far more than in government circles, the individual and class-action litigation industries are where tobacco control simmers. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was given oversight of the tobacco industry with the passage of the Tobacco Control Act in 2009. Last summer the agency sent a letter to Reynolds and Santa Fe Natural warning the companies that the descriptors “natural” and “additive-free” constituted a false marketing of a “modified risk product,” a violation of federal law. (Cigar and cigarette retailer Nat Sherman and ITG Brands, maker of Winston “additive-free” cigarettes, also received letters.) The warning “is a milestone and a reminder of how we use the tools of science-based regulation to protect the U.S. public from the harmful effects of tobacco use,” Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, said at the time.

More than a year later, there’s been little movement. In correspondence between the agency and Reynolds, released to the Minnesota Public Health Law Center under the Freedom of Information Act, a compromise is hinted at, but the details are redacted. The FDA declined several requests for clarification.

“Now we are 11 months since the warning letters were issued, and the public knows nothing about what happened,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. It sees no visible sign of change from Reynolds in terms of how the product is marketed. “Reynolds has two growth products,” he added. “Newport menthol, which is targeted to and used by the poor and African Americans, and American Spirit, where they’re clearly targeting people who are concerned about their health.”

Neither Myers nor anyone else who’s seen the tobacco industry adapt to an ostensibly harsher regulatory and cultural environment expects Santa Fe Natural Tobacco to be brought to its knees anytime soon. In the 1960s, after the first Surgeon General’s report linking smoking to fatal disease was published, Big Tobacco created cigarettes advertised as light and low-tar. Sales boomed for decades, until the companies were found to have conspired in burying research showing that such cigarettes were no safer than full-flavored ones. The legacy of this? Marlboro Lights were rebranded as Marlboro Gold.

Court dockets are still crowded with injury and fraud cases against the major cigarette manufacturers. Consider the case of Engle v. Liggett in Florida. In 2000 a jury awarded a class of smokers $145 billion in punitive damages for injuries resulting from cigarette addiction. Ten years later, the state Supreme Court decertified the class, while permitting individuals to sue based on fact-finding from the original trial. The thousands of lawsuits that have emanated from this ruling (dubbed “Engle progeny” cases) motor on in Florida state courts. The Minnesota Public Health Law Center estimates that the Engle cases, which began in 1994, will be “fully resolved by the year 2075.”

Nationwide, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts against tobacco companies make periodic headlines as if from a distant, perpetual war. On the regulatory front, FDA oversight ensures that no new “additive-free” cigarette can reach the market, all but protecting Santa Fe Natural Tobacco’s dominance of the category. Scott Schlesinger, lead plaintiffs’ attorney in the consumer-fraud class action against Santa Fe Natural Tobacco, doesn’t expect “pre-litigation litigation” to end until 2018. He called the modern-day tobacco industry “a law firm that sells cigarettes.” Schlesinger should know. He’s based in Florida, where he tries Engle progeny cases. On the phone, it wasn’t hard to get him going about Natural American Spirit, a brand he called “this fabulously successful continuation of the health reassurance fraud that goes all the way back to 1953.”

He seemed particularly eager to challenge the “additive-free” claim for the company’s menthol cigarettes, Natural American Spirit Green and Dark Green. “I’m certain that when you put the menthol in the filter, they know full well that it volatilizes, it goes from a solid to a vapor, and it distributes throughout the packaging and is present in the tobacco,” Schlesinger said. “What difference does it make if you light the end of the cigarette and suck it, and the tobacco mixes with the menthol in the filter and you get menthol that way.” He started to yell. “You’re not ingesting tobacco, you’re inhaling smoke. The smoke contains the smoke and the menthol. Which is an additive, which is a deceit to tell anyone it contains no additives. It contains a tremendous additive—menthol.”

When I asked Sommers about the menthol, he said, “The flavoring was from organic menthol crystals that were in the filter, not in the tobacco. It was pure mint.”

We were sitting on his deck, and the mountain air was pleasant. If Reynolds’s motion to dismiss is denied, the fraud trial will unfold in Albuquerque, an hour’s drive from the rail yard where Sommers mailed out his first cartons of American Spirit some 30 years earlier. He ticked off the color palette of the natural world that inspired his packs—the turquoises and tans and oranges and maroons that came to mean additive-free or organic, filter or non-, mellow or full-bodied, light or ultralight. At one point, Sommers introduced a nontobacco blend using American Indian-themed herbs such as yerba santa, horehound, mullein, and corn silk. The product didn’t take.

Editor Miranda Purves Development James Singleton