Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company (sometimes abbreviated SFNTC) is an American tobacco manufacturing company based in Oxford, North Carolina, best known for its production of the premier Natural American Spirit cigarette brand.
Founded in 1982, SFNTC became a subsidiary of R.J. Reynolds when it acquired the company in 2002. Since 2004, Santa Fe Natural is part of the Reynolds American companies holding.
History
Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company was founded in 1982 by Bill Drake, who had published The Cultivator's Handbook of Marijuana, Robert Marion, an acupuncture student at the Kototama Institute in Santa Fe, and Chris Webster, a Santa Fe entrepreneur and Realtor. Drake had written his second book, The Cultivator's Handbook of Natural Tobacco, and began cultivating a strain of Nicotiana rustica a friend had found on the San Juan Pueblo. The men began mixing surplus bulk leaf tobacco from North Carolina and wild-grown rustica in the basement of Marion's rented house. Startup investments came from Edward Wikes, a plumbing contractor, Robert Wolf, an oil rig roughneck, and Philip Naumburg, an heir to the Elkan Naumburg fortune. Drake purchased a Thomas Nast caricature of a Native American chief smoking a volcano for $250 and began using it as the company logo.
After discovering Drake and Marion had been wasting funds on their “alternative lifestyle”, the board of directors and company investors took control of the company. Wolf became the company's president and began marketing the product to retail outlets on Indian reservations. The company moved into the basement of the Gross, Kelly and Company historic adobe warehouse building in the Santa Fe Railyard. Two similar complaints were filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico on December 22, 2015.