Company admits to growing high-nicotine tobacco

In the first charges arising from the Justice Department's 3-year-old tobacco investigation, a criminal information was filed in Washington against DNA Plant Technology Corp. of Oakland. The company agreed to cooperate with the investigation, and no date was set for its plea.

Last year, 18 Brazilian farmers admitted to The Associated Press they are growing high-nicotine leaf by the ton, many for more than five years. The AP reported the high-nicotine tobacco - called fumo louco, or crazy tobacco, by the growers - was the offspring of a genetically altered plant created in U.S. laboratories for Brown & Williamson.

The government said the goal of the plot between B&W and the biotech firm known as DNAP was to develop a reliable source of high-nicotine tobacco.

The Food and Drug Administration considers nicotine addictive - the key to hooking smokers. Tobacco companies dispute nicotine's addictiveness, but the FDA has begun regulating the industry on the ground that cigarettes deliver an addictive drug. Photo and age IDs are required before some cigarette sales. FDA cigarette advertising regulations await resolution of a court challenge.

In the court documents filed yesterday, the Justice Department charged that DNAP and B&W secretly devised a scheme to improve high-nicotine tobacco in Brazil and other countries because federal regulations ban commercial growing of high-nicotine tobacco in the United States.

The government charged the tobacco company contracted with DNAP in 1983 and gave it a strain of flue-cured tobacco, code-named Y-1, that was about 6 percent nicotine. That's twice the level or most tobacco.

The contract specified one goal as altering tobacco's chemical composition in ways that ''could include production of lines with elevated nicotine content,'' court papers said. In April 1985, an expanded contract listed the first goal as ''(d)evelopment of commercial high-nicotine varieties'' of tobacco.

DNAP was charged with a misdemeanor count of conspiracy to violate the Tobacco Seed Export law, which until its repeal in 1991 prohibited export of tobacco seed without a permit.

01-08-98