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:

Miller, who is now staff director of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, doubts Brown played a major role in the diversions, but doesn't completely absolve the CMA. "Clearly there was collusion early on [between the CMA and tobacco]," Miller says. "It's hard to say who is Steve Thompson and who was Willie Brown. They were very close and they both loved the CHDP. In my negotiations, the speaker was not a prominent player."

Despite the industry's best efforts, about $230 million in Prop. 99 money still went where it was supposed to go -- funding the creation of the state's Tobacco Control Program. The money would be split several ways, funding community and school education efforts and the anti-tobacco media campaign. Just over $14 million was slated specifically for the anti-smoking media campaign -- that is, producing and airing advertisements to discourage smoking.

In addition, the Tobacco Education Oversight Committee (TEOC) was formed with the first Prop. 99 funding bill to appease the public health organizations and anti-tobacco advocates in the Legislature. The TEOC, which would be responsible for monitoring the Tobacco Control Program, declared a goal of reducing smoking in California by 75 percent by 1999.

The education program would become the tobacco industry's worst nightmare. Cigarette tax money was used to shape one of the most ambitious advertising campaigns ever launched against smoking.

About a dozen tobacco industry executives are congregated in a dim, smoke-filled boardroom, discussing in raspy two-pack-a-day tones their need to maintain the industry's bottom line by recruiting new smokers to replace the 3,000 who quit or die daily. "We're not in this business for our health," one silver-haired exec wheezes. Sinister chuckles erupt from around the table. And the TV screen fades to black.

Titled "Industry Spokesperson," the ad was the first Prop. 99-funded TV spot to hit the airwaves, on April 10, 1990. It launched a series of tough anti-tobacco messages aimed at exposing the manipulative nature of the tobacco industry.

The anti-tobacco ad campaign was the most visible health education expenditure of Prop. 99 funds, and was the largest such paid, public health media campaign in the country. With Prop. 99 money, the state was able to hire well-respected ad agencies to produce spots slick enough to compete with the tobacco industry. California's anti-tobacco ads continue to be highly touted, and are now being launched internationally by the United Nation's World Health Organization.

Along with local and school programs, the media campaign's aggressive, tobacco-attacking strategy proved initially successful. From 1989 to 1995 smoking among California adults declined steadily from about 27 percent to nearly 16 percent. But by 1996, the number of adult smokers in the state had risen to 18.6 percent. Annual reports by the TEOC attributed the increase in smoking in part to the continued diversion of Prop. 99 money.

Though it had been on track in the beginning, the state's Tobacco Control Program was no longer going to meet its goal of reducing smoking by 75 percent by 1999. As early as 1993, the TEOC beseeched the Legislature to follow the will of the voters and fully fund anti-tobacco education, to no avail.

"Unless full funding is restored ... this program will simply disappear or be so racked with erratic and abrupt funding shifts that the momentum will dissipate," the TEOC's 1993 annual report said.

Though the tobacco industry had successfully redirected some of Prop. 99's health education money in 1989, it had only won a small battle. The Legislature would continue to hand out Prop. 99 money in a budget session every two years, so the industry had to maintain its vigilance. The anti-tobacco media campaign would remain a major battleground.

When the first anti-tobacco media ads aired in April 1990, the tobacco industry immediately counterattacked by spending over a million dollars a day on its own advertising.

On April 11, 1990, the day after the state ad campaign was launched, Tobacco Institute President Sam Chilcote circulated a memo that bemoaned the industry's inability to eliminate the education money completely. "Despite Herculean efforts, our goal of completely eliminating the media dedication was not met," Chilcote writes. "But through our work, the media component was sliced to $14.3 million for fiscal year 1989-90."

Still, the industry hoped to do better the second time around, when lawmakers again carved up the state budget in 1991. A strategy to kill -- or at least tone down -- the advertising campaign began to emerge in industry documents. Three key allies were sought: California legislators, the governor, and "third-party allies" like medical organizations, or minority groups that the industry thought might be offended by ethnically targeted ads.