Kamal Sonabane knew. One more chew of smokeless tobacco and she’ll pass out. It was a scorching April afternoon in the midst of another intense heatwave in India. With no job to go to, the farm worker had already chewed tobacco five times that day. “Even addicts avoid doing this in extreme heat because of the risk of fainting,” she says.
Still, Sonabane repeated the familiar ritual of adding slaked lime to tobacco leaves and putting the mixture in his mouth. “I would have collapsed due to the heat wave or increased stress,” she says, sitting in her two-room brick house in Badur, Maharashtra, India. Worried about money, work, and the extreme heat, she turned back to cigarettes.
Climate change is making agriculture difficult in Maharashtra. This also affects day laborers who are hired when agricultural support is needed. “Every few months, farmers report damage due to heat waves and floods,” said Shubhangi Patil, a community health worker who serves Sonabane’s Kolhapur district. When crops fail, income becomes even more unstable, and farmworkers “resort to drug use to forget about their problems,” Patil said. Patil said this is a widespread problem across the region.
Nor is this a phenomenon limited to India or countries with predominantly low- and middle-income populations. Studies in other regions have found that groups are responding to climate change pressures by increasing their intake of alcohol and other substances, which can have negative health effects.
Sonabane, a landless farm laborer in his mid-60s, has been toiling in the fields of Kolhapur for more than 25 years. Ten years ago, she says, she didn’t chew smokeless tobacco. “I used to despise it,” she says. “I can’t go more than a few hours without it today.”
She said the weather started getting worse in western Maharashtra in 2019. “The region has experienced two floods, unbearable heat, incessant rain, hailstorms and drought in the last three years,” Sonabane said. According to the state of Maharashtra, 36 million hectares of sugarcane, onions, rice and other crops have been lost in the past five years, leaving farmers facing huge losses. Faculty of Agriculture. Sonabane said crop damage occurs so frequently that it is now difficult for farm workers to get even eight days of work a month.
Without the resources to cope with the stress of unemployment, Sonabane stumbled upon a solution to ease her anxiety with smokeless tobacco, which costs just 10 rupees ($0.12) a pack. Like cigarettes and vapes, chewing tobacco contains nicotine, which excites the central nervous system. Users say it feels uplifting. Improves concentration. and relieves anger, tension, and stress. Kolhapur-based clinical psychologist Shalmali Ranmare Kakade, referring to commonly abused substances such as tobacco and alcohol, said, “They desensitize you to sadness, sadness, and negative emotions for a while. ” he says.
However, nicotine is also highly addictive, and heavy tobacco users experience these positive effects. It may just be the result to prevent withdrawal. Repeated chewing of tobacco can also cause various types of cancer, including those of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and bladder.