Ashes to Ashes (138 page)

The smoking control movement, starved for funding nationwide and surviving through the dedication of a handful of workers, suddenly found itself awash in California gold. The twenty-five-cent tax increase produced $150 million to educate state residents on the perils of smoking and help them quit—a figure fifty times as high as the total for those purposes in the other forty-nine states. And the money, astonishingly, was put to effective use. Three hundred public-health officers went on the payroll statewide to train and oversee local health workers in tobacco control programs set up in each of California’s fifty-eight counties and 1,000 school districts. Nothing like this had ever been attempted. A fourteen-month advertising campaign budgeted at almost $30 million and supervised by California’s Department of Health Services was launched in 1990; conducted in eight languages, it involved 69 television stations, 147 radio stations, 130 newspapers, and 775 billboards. Antismoking activists had feared that these public-service ads would prove bland and stingless, but they displayed imagination and wit, and contained scalding criticism of the cigarette companies, whose executives were portrayed in them as cynical and manipulative. Perhaps the most notable of the commercials showed a simulated, smoke-wreathed conference of tobacco officials, one of whom was saying that they had a multibillion-dollar problem on their hands: “We need more cigarette smokers. Pure and simple. Every day 2,000 Americans stop smoking, and another 1,100 also quit. Actually, technically, they die. That means that this business needs 3,000 fresh, new volunteers every day … .” The unseen speaker then gave a laugh and added, “We’re not in this for our health.” Some of the commercials were beamed at ethnic communities, like one in Spanish that said simply, “Our children grow up wanting to be like us. … Don’t let them inherit our bad habits. For your family’s sake don’t smoke.” Youngsters in the black community were appealed to with an antismoking recitation in rap, which went in part: “We used to pick it/now they want us to smoke it … /tobacco blacks it’s killin’ many/the ages start from fifteen to twenty/cancer it be givin’ /keeping brothers from livin’ /six feet under the ground/they are diggin’ … /cigarettes are killing black men/faster than whites.”

Such a head-on assault alarmed the cigarette makers, not least of all because of how it vilified them as well as their product. Asserted the Tobacco Institute’s
veteran spear-carrier, Walker Merryman, “This is a very nasty, scandalous personal attack on people in the tobacco industry,” and he went on to complain that the state government of California was spending millions of the public’s tax dollars on “a propaganda campaign”. The shoe was plainly on the other foot now, and it fit. The California antismoking attack was indeed personal—that was part of the point of it—for if Rose Cipollone, to cite one of hundreds of thousands who succumbed annually to smoking-related diseases, had exercised her
personal
choice in electing to smoke and paid the price for it, so, too, did tobacco industry executives make a
personal
choice in devoting their careers to the manufacture and marketing of a product known to be a grave health menace. Why should these highly paid businessmen have been immune to the consequences of their actions and have escaped public scorn? And if California’s antismoking ads were tax-funded propaganda, then what was the tobacco industry’s own advertising—and wasn’t it being paid for in part by tax-deductible dollars that amounted to a public subsidy in the billions?

The effects of the big cigarette tax rise and the antismoking drive it paid for were immediate and sensational. California smokers began quitting at twice the national rate, and by 1991 the percentage of smokers in the state had dropped from 25 to 21, one of the lowest figures in the nation. Indeed, the anti-smoking effort was proving so successful that the industry began putting on the heat every way it could to undermine the program. One result was that the state’s new governor, Pete Wilson, with the connivance of tobacco industry friends in the legislature, acted to plug his budgetary shortfall by commandeering some of the cigarette tax revenues—a move that antismoking forces went to court to challenge. But Wilson soon proved to be no friend of the tobacco industry. In 1993, he issued an executive order banning smoking in all buildings owned or leased by the state, and the following year signed one of the most restrictive smoking control measures in the nation. Philip Morris moved at once to try to blunt the sweeping bill, which marked the end of the tobacco lobby’s long dominance over the legislature in Sacramento, by spending millions to mount a referendum on what was styled the California Uniform Tobacco Control Act, a euphemism for snuffing out all local smoking laws and replacing them with a single, statewide, and much-watered-down measure. With a 71 percent vote against, California voters that fall kept the nation’s most populous state in the antismoking vanguard.

VI

AT
the national level, the smoking control effort languished. Eighteen years were to pass between the first significant federal regulatory measure—the 1970 broadcast ban on cigarette advertising—and the next one—a
ban on smoking by airplane passengers on flights of two hours or shorter. And even then, the new restriction was something of a fluke, a nearly spontaneous display of congressional pique that cut across party lines and traditional alliances.

Reagan appointees at the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation had been sitting on the idea of an in-flight smoking ban for several years when spadework to take the concept out of the hands of the deregulators and present it to Congress for enactment was begun by Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, which viewed midair smoking as a classic instance of nonsmokers’ victimization. But ANR, while growing in numbers and effectiveness, was still small and far away from Washington, so it leagued with the Coalition on Smoking or Health and the 50,000-member flight attendants union, which saw itself as uniquely vulnerable to the smoke in the recirculated air that crews had to breathe throughout their workweek. The in-flight smoking ban got nowhere, though, until the spring of 1988 when a stalwart advocate arose in the person of U.S. Representative Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat in his third term in the House.

A Springfield attorney and skilled parliamentarian, Durbin without warning tacked on an amendment to an appropriations bill being considered by the House transportation subcommittee, on which he sat, calling for a cutoff of federal funds to any airport servicing planes that did not impose a smoking ban on domestic flights of two hours or under. Durbin’s amendment failed in subcommittee, five votes to three, and was buried by a twenty-three-to-eleven tally when he proposed it to the full Appropriations Committee. And since the idea had no backing from the House’s Democratic leadership, it was left for dead, and the tobacco lobby breathed easy.

But Durbin heard informally from many House colleagues, who were among the nation’s most frequent fliers, shuttling between Washington and their home constituencies almost every weekend, that his proposal appealed to them. No one had to lecture them on the unpleasantness of ETS, and no bombardment of technical data from tobacco lobbyists could convince them that the stuff, however much filtered in flight, was harmless. Durbin went to his friend Claude Pepper, chairman of the House Rules Committee, and obtained a procedural waiver so that his amendment could be brought directly to the House floor for a two-hour debate and vote. He had four days before the scheduled airing to gather a majority for the ban.

ANR’s directors, Mark Pertschuk and Julia Carol in Berkeley, went to work on their membership list of 15,000, telephoning and sending express letters to try to generate an instant cascade of appeals by nonsmokers to their congressmen. The whole network of GASP units across the country was similarly mobilized, and by the time Durbin took the House floor to push his amendment, the message had been delivered. Throughout his remarks Durbin pointed to
members of the flight attendants union, present in their uniforms in the House gallery, whose health concerns gave the measure an urgency that outweighed the discomfort of congressmen. The ban passed, 198 to 193, and went to the Senate, where, despite a three-month lull during which the tobacco lobby feverishly worked its wiles, the antismoking sentiment was ascendant. Key to this surprising development was New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, chairman of the Senate’s transportation subcommittee, who made clear to his colleagues that the in-flight smoking ban was a priority item for him and that those who bucked him in the matter risked a lean diet of pork when transportation projects in their home districts came up for Senate funding. The measure, to last for two years and then face reconsideration in view of the public’s response, carried by a vote of 84 to 10. The ban, despite the loud lamentations of some smokers, was made permanent in 1990 and was extended to all domestic flights.

Just how remarkable the airborne ban was could be gauged by the congressional response to a report it received, in the same month it outlawed smoking on planes, from a fifteen-member federal study commission, which for three years had been considering the feasibility of manufacturing fife-safe cigarettes. Five of the commission members represented the tobacco companies, which had insisted that cigarettes that burned at low enough temperatures to reduce the ignition hazard when coming into contact with flammable materials could not be produced without the introduction of new and costly equipment. But the federal study commission was able to achieve its goal by no more exotic means than experimental cigarettes with a reduced circumference, a lower than normal density of tobacco, less porous paper, and no citrate additive to speed up burning. The cumulative effect of these features was to drop the ignition temperature to the point where, as the commission report concluded, “[i]t is technically feasible and may be commercially feasible to develop cigarettes that will have a significantly reduced propensity to ignite upholstered furniture or mattresses.”

Even so, the tobacco companies still argued that such a fire-safe cigarette would be burdensome to market because it was hard to draw on—one company man likened it to trying to drink a milk shake through five straws laid end to end—and had an unsatisfactory taste. Another three years ought to be allotted for the manufacturers to test-market the experimental cigarette, the industry said. Cqmmission member Andrew McGuire, head of San Francisco’s Trauma Foundation and the moving force behind the fire-retardant cigarette effort, called this “an unconscionable delay” and pointed out that the tobacco industry had raised precisely the same objections about reduced draw and taste before introducing filter and lowered-tar brands when medical evidence threatened its very survival. But cigarette-ignited fires in the late ’Eighties were taking a relatively low 1,500 lives a year and causing some 7,000 serious injuries
(although McGuire contended that the toll was much higher, citing a seven-year Maryland study that traced almost half of all fire deaths to cigarette smoking). For such a modest reduction in mortality, the industry was reluctant to risk introducing a manufacturing technique that would remind consumers of still one more way that smoking imperiled human life. The tobacco companies had bought political clout, moreover, through sizable contributions to such groups as the National Volunteer Fire Council, which stood with the industry in stressing the need for public education, not a new cigarette design, in the war to reduce fire hazards. Congress caved in and granted the additional delay, stalling any meaningful industry response to the safety need well into the 1990s.

If Congress mostly malingered in the matter of serious strictures on the manufacture, sale, and use of cigarettes, the tobacco industry was the beneficiary of a yet more pleasing indifference by the executive branch during the dozen years that deregulatory fundamentalism prevailed at the Reagan-Bush White House. Neither President lifted a finger to encourage “smoking control legislation, and the ardent antitobacco preachments of the Surgeon Generals who served them were permitted so long as they were understood to be merely prescriptive for healthful private behavior, not a call for action by government. The only detectable difference between the two administrations on smoking policy was that dinner guests in the Reagan White House were still offered cigarettes when the meal was over, while Barbara Bush did not extend that questionable kindness.

Evidence of the Reagan-Bush unconcern about the tobacco issue abounded. In 1987, for example, the FTC shut down the laboratory it had run for twenty years to monitor the tar and nicotine yields of most cigarette brands, ostensibly to save the $750,000 a year it cost to provide the public with the only reliable measurement of those toxic substances. The task was handed over to an industry-run laboratory—the equivalent of assigning the fox to guard the hen coop—with an occasional checkup visit by a government inspector. The FDA and EPA were hardly more vigorous in their policing of tobacco products. In 1990, for example, the two agencies moved swiftly and jointly to order Perrier mineral water off the nation’s retail shelves when it was discovered that each bottle contained minute amounts of toxic benzene. Cigarette packs, meanwhile, which the 1986 Surgeon General’s report stated had up to 2,000 times more benzene than each Perrier bottle, remained exempt from such preventive measures. The EPA had by then formulated nine rules and OSHA had put out six regulations governing pollution by carcinogenic substances believed to claim, among them, a total of 1,000 lives a year, but neither agency had formulated anything to deal with secondhand tobacco smoke, which public-health investigators said took from 3,000 to 5,000 lives annually by lung cancer alone. The EPA did finally undertake reviews to determine if ETS could in fact
be lethal, but would not declare its findings until literally the final hours of the Bush administration. The only Cabinet member who registered concern about smoking in those years was Bush’s HHS Secretary, Dr. Louis Sullivan, an African-American, who would manage an outburst now and then about how unscrupulous cigarette makers were targeting minorities with their advertising and promotion, but he publicly proposed no federal legislation to modify these or any other practices by the industry. When Sullivan did grow bold enough to fashion a government-wide executive order that would have made all federal office buildings smoke-free except for certain designated areas, his proposal sat in the White House awaiting presidential implementation that never came.