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:

"They said, 'You are going to agree to it, and if you do not, we're going to administer the Tobacco Control Program to death,'" Miller recalls indignantly. "They said, 'We'll find the most incompetent bureaucrats and put them in charge and this program will never achieve anything, so you decide.' There was not a lot we could do in that circumstance. It was that heavy-handed."

"It was portrayed as budget woes, but we know that it was really tobacco influence," adds Najera.

With the second Prop. 99 funding bill, the tobacco industry was even more successful than it had been the first time in persuading lawmakers to divert Prop. 99 revenues. More than $112 million over three years was taken away from anti-tobacco education and used instead for medical care programs.

The second rerouting of Prop. 99 money was easier than the first, because the groundwork had already been laid, says Balbach. "The debate the [public health organizations] should have used was that we must follow the will of the voters," says Balbach, currently Tufts University's director of the Community Health Department. "But the debate became 'take care of sick children or fund tobacco education,' and it's hard for the [public health organizations] to win that one. There were powerful allies on the sick children side of the debate."

But the second diversion would also be the last. Fed up with the Legislature's -- and governor's -- willingness to listen to tobacco lobbyists instead of voters, anti-smoking activists began going to court. Ultimately, three lawsuits were filed, the first by Sanders, one at Sanders' urging by a coalition of public health organizations including the American Lung Association and American Cancer Society, and one by the Americans for Non-Smokers' Rights.

Though they would meet with varied success in the courtroom, the suits did accomplish their goal of derailing future diversions of Prop. 99 revenues.

Stanton Glantz is shoveling a salad into his mouth at the cafeteria in one of the many UCSF buildings that line Parnassus Avenue. With a stocky frame and a shock of silver, mad-scientist hair, the UCSF cardiology professor is unassuming. He wears an unpressed shirt and trousers, and pickled beet juice runs down his chin as he speaks.

This image of a disheveled, too brilliant academic is an ironic contrast to the picture of a fiery anti-tobacco activist for which Glantz is known best. As the tobacco industry's admitted nemesis, Glantz has pledged his life to crusading against Big Tobacco, contributing to research that secondhand smoke causes heart disease and publishing extensively on tobacco influence in politics. Brash and outspoken, Glantz began critically observing the tobacco industry in 1978, and has become a one-man spokesperson for national anti-tobacco activity, endearing himself to the media by consistently delivering punchy, hard-hitting quotes on anything anti-tobacco.

Glantz is perhaps best known for penning The Cigarette Papers, a book that used confidential tobacco industry memos to expose 30 years of sinister activities by tobacco company Brown & Williamson. The documents were the first wholesale airing of tobacco insider memos.

Having watched tobacco politics for so long, Glantz was certain that Big Tobacco was behind the Prop. 99 diversions all along. But it took nearly 10 years for Glantz to get hard proof.

In April 1998, word spread that 39,000 pages of confidential tobacco industry memos were being made public through a lawsuit that the state of Minnesota had filed against the tobacco companies. Glantz was just putting the finishing touches on a book about California tobacco politics to be published by the end of 1999. Spotting a chance to unearth more clues on the industry's political scheming, co-author Edith Balbach immediately booked a cheap flight to the records depository in southeast Minneapolis. When she returned to San Francisco four days later, she brought back dozens of memos that confirmed what she and Glantz had suspected all along - that the tobacco industry had orchestrated the diversion of Prop. 99 money.

Glantz gave copies of the memos to an attorney he knew in Oakland -- Lee Sanders, who had already filed his lawsuit against the state seeking to restore the diverted Prop. 99 funds. Piecing the memos together, Sanders found powerful ammunition for his claims of a conspiracy, charging that California legislators, plied with tobacco dollars, were puppets to tobacco industry interests.