THE SKIN TRADE

Everyone's Talking About Legalising Cannabis, So The Makers Of Rizlas Must
Be Delighted, Right? Well No, Actually. Or If They Are, They're Not Letting
On. Oliver Burkeman Explains Why

Later this month, at the cutting-edge music venue 93 Feet East on Brick
Lane in London's east end, hundreds of revellers will gather for a club
night. The usual acts will make an appearance: Blak Twang in the Bad Magic
Main Room; West London Deep and Alvin C in the Nucamp Balearic Bar.
Significant quantities of alcohol will be consumed; numerous roll-ups will
be smoked; cheap, sugary carbohydrate-rich snacks will be made available to
satiate the dancers' late-night hunger pangs.

To the casual observer, it will look like any other London club night. But
there will be one significant difference. In a cultural climate when the
consumption of soft drugs in recreational settings has become so accepted
as to be rendered banal - so accepted, indeed, as to become a topic of
sober reflection in Tory leadership contests - a dim view will be taken of
such practices at Sizzler: anyone found smoking cannabis in their roll-ups
can expect stern treatment from the management. Because Sizzler is
sponsored by Rizla, the country's leading manufacturer of rolling cigarette
papers, and Rizla - to quote the corporate line, repeated so often as to
have achieved a strange kind of religious truth in the tobacco industry -
has nothing whatsoever to do with cannabis.

There can be few products that rely so completely for their commercial
success on such a monumental effort of self-denial - a refusal to accept
the obvious usually reserved for "defensive" weaponry systems, or telephone
bugging devices ordered from Sunday-supplement catalogues, complete with
official warnings that they can be used for anything except bugging
telephones. "The vast majority of Rizlas are used for hand-rolled tobacco,"
Gareth Davis, the chief executive of Imperial Tobacco, which owns Rizla,
has said. And that includes king-size papers, so impractical for smoking
tobacco and so well-suited to making a joint. But Davis is implacable.
"Most smokers of cigarettes smoke king-sized cigarettes," he says, "and
it's the same with the hand-rolled market."

The problem is that his company's bottom line repeatedly affirms the
opposite. One representative study, in the mid- 1990s, found a 16% growth
in sales of papers during a period that saw an 11% decline in sales of
rolling tobacco. In an attempt to resolve this dissonance, Rizla has
developed a complex counter-mythology, addressing each awkward point:
king-size papers are particularly convenient for lorry drivers, the story
has gone in the past. And packets seemingly not being used for pure-tobacco
cigarettes may just as well be being used to sponge out saliva from under
the keys of clarinets.

"When we were running the campaign on legalisation, we called Rizla to
suggest that they might like to put a free packet on the front of the
Independent on Sunday," says Rosie Boycott, the paper's then editor. "They
refused flat out. They played ignorant, saying they had no idea about the
dope connection."

Liz Buckingham, Imperial's group communications manager, is having none of
the suggestion that cannabis accounts for anything but a minuscule
proportion of Rizla use. "I disagree with that totally," she says. "There
are somewhere around 4.5m people who roll their own cigarettes in the UK -
people who exclusively roll their own and those who sometimes smoke them
and sometimes smoke factory-made cigarettes. Anything else is really very
small."

Dudley Brewer, Rizla's marketing director, has concurred, saying rolling
papers are so popular because "roll-your-own gives smokers incredible value
for money in comparison with factory-made cigarettes. It allows for
individualism, and control." And that is all.

But what once might have looked like coyness is fast beginning to seem
outdated. The home secretary, David Blunkett, has called for an "adult,
intelligent debate" on the state of the laws on soft drugs; the civil
liberties group Liberty is defending a man at a south London crown court on
the grounds that arrest for possession of a small amount of cannabis is in
breach of his right to privacy. Only in such transitional times as these
would a company feel compelled to persistently deny the fierce loyalty its
product engenders. There is a passionate public attachment to the
ubiquitous green, red and blue packets, with their trademark cross (the
name is from the French word riz - rice - and its founders, the Lacroix
family); and it is an attachment that infects many who might otherwise be
expected to be deeply hostile toward tobacco conglomerates such as
Imperial, which also owns the cigarette brands John Player and the
aggressively marketed Lambert and Butler.

"The whole thing about Rizlas is that they've made marijuana a sociable
thing - you can't share a pipe like you can share a spliff," says Ken
Lukowiak, an ex-soldier and the author of the memoir Marijuana Times. "I
recall being in Kenya, where there were no Rizlas - we had to use army
toilet paper instead. But in Belize, in the army shop, they sold Rizlas. We
made huge amounts of money buying and selling them at inflated prices...
the good thing about Rizlas is that there is always one, somewhere in the
house. You know that Joni Mitchell lyric, 'You don't know what you've got
till it's gone?' That's how I feel about them."

An entire culture steeped in nostalgia and complicated rules of etiquette
has grown up around the unobtrusive packets. "An international
institution," Joe, a 25-year-old bar manager, calls them. "I remember the
first packet I ever bought, from a newsagent next to a funeral parlour,
which is quite symbolic really. I asked for about five packets of sweets
before I muttered, 'Rizlas, please.' It was just like buying condoms."

"In my years as an experimental drug user I could never buy king-size," re
calls Elaine, a publisher. "It's something about the shopkeeper knowing,
and you knowing - everyone knowing what they will be used for. I still
can't get over the fact that they sell them at all: it's like we're all
colluding in a crime. I had a partner whose favourite sentence was, 'Can I
have some king-size Rizla?' He used to make me practice asking for them,
but I just couldn't do it. In that moment of transaction, I feel sorry for
the shopkeeper: it's the silent subtext, like porn. It's like asking for a
magazine from under the counter: you get a wry smile. It's such a private
thing, even if everyone is at it." But her loyalty, like that of so many
others, remains unquestioned. "I would only ever use Rizla."

The company has an exquisitely complicated relationship with such public
affection. Events like Sizzler, and Rizla's website, and its range of
branded clothes - shirts, underwear, a durable all-weather "rolling jacket"
- - all promote an ethos of slacking and lounging that chimes perfectly with
the dominant themes of cannabis culture; students, a brand manager at Rizla
has pointed out, "are very much our target audience". But Buckingham
"refutes absolutely" the suggestion that Rizla actively caters to cannabis
users, insisting that the product is aimed at "legitimate roll-your-own
smokers".

Overall, the result is a commercially risky strategy, argues Clive Bates,
the director of the anti-smoking lobbying group Ash: "The whole feel is
very subversive, very countercultural, but these companies already have one
of the worst reputations imaginable, and they spend a lot of their effort
trying to position themselves as legitimate purveyors of a legal product.
Flirting with the illicit drugs argument has a lot of dangers for them in
public-relations terms."

But for the moment it seems to be paying off. Imperial Tobacco announced a
rise in profits for the first half of this year of 6%, to ?223m, despite
Britain's rapidly declining tobacco market. There may be something more to
Rizla's brand investment strategy, too: as cigarette companies consider the
prospect of decriminalisation or even legalisation of marijuana, Rizla
finds itself in a strong commercial position to capitalise on an increase
in cannabis use. "That amount of brand-building and promotional activity
can't really be sustained by a product that's as cheap as cigarette
papers," says Clive Bates. "They could make a Rizla-branded cannabis
cigarette; a brand which reaches a countercultural mentality is going to be
an enormous asset."

Meanwhile, as politicians prevaricate, 43.8m papers roll off Rizla's
machines in Pontypridd and mainland Europe every day; and in newsagents and
supermarkets across the country, hundreds of transactions take place that
render current cannabis legislation not scandalous, nor even ridiculous,
but profoundly irrelevant.

"They're usually between 18 and 30, and they come in with a big smile on
their face when they ask for them," says Francesco, behind the cash
register at Princess Newsagents on Charterhouse Street in central London.
"Rizlas have always been a steady sale." Further up the road, another
newsagent reports sales of 225 packets a day, 25 of which are king-size.
"Local labourers and manual workers buy the small ones, because they smoke
roll-ups," he says. "It's the posh people, the office workers, who buy the
king-size ones." He smiles. "I don't know what they use them for."

• Additional reporting by Polly Curtis