Opening Pandora's Box

• Drew Beam

  

• Anthony Pidgeon

  

  Oakland attorney Lee Sanders accuses Big Tobacco of subverting the law with its secret diversion plan.

Details:

In 1989 alone, then-Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown received about $126,000 in tobacco campaign contributions. (Brown remains the undisputed champion of California politics when it comes to accepting tobacco donations, according to figures compiled by anti-smoking activists.)

Finally, in September 1989, after more than half a year of legislative debate, a six-member, bipartisan conference committee came up with the final plan for spending Prop. 99 money. The conference committee was chaired by Assemblyman Phil Isenberg, a former Brown aide and chief of staff on the Ways and Means Committee when Brown was chair. The plan included taking about $46 million from public health education over two years and using it instead for medical services for the poor. That left about $230 million in the education budget.

Sending education money to medical services -- and changing the amount spent on health education -- was legally suspect to many legislators, who knew that Prop. 99 had been very specific, says Eugene Erbin, a former staffer to Sens. Lloyd Connelly and Isenberg, both Sacramento Democrats. As early as February 1989, Assemblyman John Vasconcellos of Santa Clara wrote a letter to the nonpartisan Legal Council asking if medical care for indigents, which was usually funded by the General Fund, could be paid for by Prop. 99 money. Deputy Legislative Counsel Charles Asbill responded that Prop. 99 revenues should never be used for programs normally funded by the General Fund because Prop. 99 stated that money must "be used for specified limited purposes."

Still, the bill passed easily through both houses, and was signed by Gov. Deukmejian in October 1989.

In its battle to limit anti-tobacco education funding, the tobacco industry developed an unlikely ally - the California Medical Association. The CMA's interests and the tobacco industry's merged, because the medical association believed that, in those financially strapped times, money would be better spent on the poor and ailing than on airing a bunch of anti-smoking ads on television.

The tobacco industry instantly jumped at cultivating this mutual interest. "There is the feeling that the CMA, though they would probably deny it, did the tobacco industry's dirty work when it came to rerouting health education funds to their account," says Sheryl Magzamen, a postgraduate researcher with the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies. "Because the CMA wanted funds so they can help the people that they help, they took money from the media campaign to do it, which is also what the tobacco industry wanted."

Steve Thompson, chief lobbyist for the CMA, contends that the association did not strike any deals with the tobacco lobby, and was not duped into pursuing tobacco's agenda. The unlikely allies simply had the same goals, he says. Instead of advertising or public education, the CMA wanted health programs that would include warnings about smoking.

"If we believed that providing a health screening that included an anti-tobacco message was better than speculative anti-tobacco education, and if that's something tobacco took advantage of, we can't stop that," Thompson says.

Former Assemblyman Isenberg, who carried the Prop. 99 allocation bill, asserts that uncouth politics had nothing to do with the distribution of funds. "We were trying to figure out how to divide a pot of money and we had left the anti-tobacco, pro-tobacco politics long ago," he says. "The theory that CMA was conspiring with tobacco -- I saw no evidence of that. It was clear that CMA wanted money for health screening. In a rational world, that's not an unethical request."

The program that wound up receiving the bulk of the diverted health education money was Child Health Disability Prevention (CHDP), a program that Brown had pushed through the Legislature in 1973. The CHDP was one of Brown's pet programs, says Stanton Glantz, a UCSF professor and noted anti-tobacco activist, and there is little doubt that Brown's powerful role as speaker had influenced the way the money landed.

Miller, staffer to the staunchly anti-tobacco Sen. Watson, points out that as speaker, Brown could have easily stopped all money from going to anti-tobacco education, but he didn't. A well-known rumor at the state Capitol was that Brown, too, didn't like the idea of kids -- especially black kids -- getting hooked on cigarettes.

Still, the fact that Brown received hefty tobacco campaign contributions, and that the diversion of Prop. 99 money beefed up one of his favorite programs by almost $46 million, is simply too much of a coincidence, says former UCSF researcher Edith Balbach. Add to the mix that Thompson, the chief lobbyist for the CMA, was Brown's former chief of staff and drafted the CHDP legislation in the '70s, and something begins to smell funny.