Ashes to Ashes (109 page)

Once more the industry confected a front group, this time called San Franciscans Against Government Intrusion, and argued, in a campaign that cost more than a million dollars, that the workplace smoking regulations would drive people apart; the San Francisco
Examiner
agreed, telling readers that city-supervised smoking was “a recipe for antagonism and frustration” and that the issue was more properly a matter for resolution between workers and employers.

Given the compact political arena and saturation media attention, CNR and its allies figured that a war chest of $150,000 would be adequate to win, but they never reached that sum. The size of the antismoking kitty mattered less, though, than the passion brought to the effort and the message CNR was broadcasting against the cigarette makers. “These sleazebags were pouring money into our state so they could keep on killing hundreds of thousands,” one activist said, summing up the spirit of their cause, “and everything they said was a lie.” The antismoking television ads showed a cowboy, who was decidedly not a Marlboro Man, riding to the top of one of the city’s picturesque hills, dismounting, and asserting, “Tell the cigarette companies to butt out of
San Francisco.” The smoking control effort, little abetted by the health voluntaries, was assisted by large, progressive local employers like Bank of America and Levi Strauss, which had already instituted workable separate smoking and nonsmoking areas, and by local NBC affiliate KRON-TV, which had aired the anti-Marlboro documentary,
Death in the West
, the year before and now drew attention to the industry’s artifice by insisting that its commercials bear a tag line identifying the real sponsor and not just the front group. For all that, the industry barely missed buying yet another victory; the law was upheld by only 1,259 votes.

Though narrowly endorsed at the polls, the San Francisco ordinance provided a major lift nationwide for the nonsmokers’ rights movement and established three precepts to guide its advance: (1) The tobacco companies could be beaten, especially at the local level, where they could be verifiably cast as predators. (2) A focused and limited antismoking law was more workable and useful than a weak, broad one. (3) The industry’s endorsement of “common courtesy” as a substitute for smoking restrictions was a code term for continued knuckling under to inconsiderate smokers, since most nonsmokers preferred to avoid a confrontation. The key to clean indoor air was to create, by statute, an environment empowering nonsmokers. The idea was taking hold throughout California, not only in liberal cities like San Francisco but also in conservative places, from San Diego in the south to Ukiah in the north. Of the eighty-nine cities and counties in the U.S. with tough work-site smoking regulations by the end of 1985, three-quarters were in California.

Spearheading this effort was CNR, the grassroots complement to John Banzhaf’s ASH, which operated within a narrow federal orbit. What was most needed in view of the limited reach of the national smoking control laws was intensified local effort, field hands and voices to form a genuine social movement dealing with a life-and-death issue. Surgeon General Koop served as a national beacon for the cause, and the reports issued in his name drew ever-widening respect. But the movement took flight only when animated by passionately devoted leaders like CNR’s Glantz, as compulsive a worker as he was a talker, who dreamed up most of his group’s arresting ideas, had a mind both inventive and encyclopedic, raised a lot of its money, wrote its pithy newsletter (usually including his picture), and loosed its fiercest rallying cries. The trouble with having such an immensely productive leader, though, was that he could turn into a thorny autocrat and be as much an impediment as an inspiration. “Stan decided everything,” recalled one of Glantz’s not unadmiring colleagues, “and to him everyone else was incompetent.” When a few full-timers were brought in to give CNR more programmatic coherence, Glantz seemed unable to trust them or delegate responsibility and soon had the staff rattled by his constant directives. It was not until the emergence of a pair of
young recruits, who had joined CNR in a junior capacity in 1984 when each was twenty-seven, that the operation turned less chaotic, expanded its mission, and changed its name to Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights (ANR).

Michael Pertschuk’s long-running wrestling match with the tobacco companies was at best a mixed incentive for his son, Mark, a graduate of American University law school, who had joined CNR’s office in Berkeley to assist with its legislative and lobbying efforts. Endowed like his father with abundant brains, humor, and integrity, Pertschuk
fils
was inclined to turn confrontational when dealing with base adversaries and meretricious arguments. He stood up to Glantz and after a couple of years was willing to tell CNR’s directors that if the organization was going to go national and function efficiently, its charismatic leader would have to stand aside. Glantz, to his credit, seemed to understand that despite only good intentions, he was driving everyone else crazy, and the leadership passed to Pertschuk and an associate, the incendiary Julia Carol, a passionate foe of smoking.

While Pertschuk operated as legislative strategist for the country’s largest nonsmokers’ rights organization, Carol served as its spiritual den mother, nurturing its rank and file and preaching that the struggle was not between smokers and nonsmokers but between the rest of society and the rogue vendors of cigarettes. “The majority of the public now sees the industry as pond scum,” she would remark, but reserved the larger portion of her fervor for cheering on and guiding those around the country she lovingly called “the movement people,” the ones who had long operated out of their living rooms or garages to put the antismoking crusade together stick by stick. “They aren’t all real good at saying less instead of more,” she wrote of them in a 1989 internal memo on grassroots activism, “ … [and] they’ll run miles for you at the drop of a hat, but they’ll also tell you you’re full of shit if you say something they don’t agree with. … They need to be appreciated. They need to be energized.” And Julia Carol was gifted at energizing people, getting them to write individualized letters—never form ones—to officeholders when a smoking control bill was approaching a critical point in the legislative process, and helping GASPs and other allied groups around the country understand when and how the tobacco lobbyists were trying to cut the heart from pending measures.

Decisive in CNR’s conversion into a national program was the appearance at the end of 1986 of the Surgeon General’s report on ETS, which gave state and local legislators courage to enact smoking restriction laws that science now approved. Requests for help on how to get smoking control measures passed flowed in to CNR’s busy little shop from all over the country, and the younger Pertschuk and Carol were quick to urge use of the Surgeon General’s document as a vital weapon. “All you had to do was hold up the report,” they recounted, “and say [to opponents], ‘Go argue with him,’ and the point was made. The report didn’t just give us a weapon—it ended the debate.”

But even before the report was issued, the movement was in full stride: thirty-five states had by then restricted smoking on public transit, thirty-one in elevators, twenty-nine in cultural and recreational facilities, twenty-seven in schools, nineteen in libraries; twenty-two had segregated smokers in public office buildings, and nine in private ones. The trend would intensify, and helping orchestrate it at the other end of the country from ANR’s humming headquarters in California was a larger and better-financed suite of offices in Washington with the deceptively tame name of the Advocacy Institute. Brainchild of co-founder Michael Pertschuk, who declined to cash in on his priceless experience as a Senate committee staff director and FTC commissioner and become a gilt-edged hired gun for industry, the institute was created from foundation grants, private gifts, and rare human resources to serve as a strategic think tank for public-interest causes trying to move federal lawmakers and regulators. Primary item on the Advocacy Institute’s agenda was the war on tobacco. Pertschuk and his staff, functioning as the Smoking Control Advocacy Resource Center (SCARG), networked globally by telephone, computer, and print bulletins with health advocates now on the move everywhere to challenge the dominion of the cash-rich cigarette makers.

VI

AFTER
California, the most avid antismoking campaign in America was being carried on in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, particularly in the Boston area with its concentration of leading medical and educational facilities. The effort had begun in the early ’Seventies with a group composed largely of Harvard and MIT faculty people loosely linked to John Banzhaf’s ASH, which they had helped establish with their names and seed money. But since ASH devoted itself to combating tobacco in the federal arena, the Massachusetts contingent formed an independent GASP, funded by charitable crumbs from the wealthy suburban complex that included Newton, Brookline, and Cambridge. The shoestring operation survived with the help of a vital gift from Boston’s Deaconess Hospital: office space, a telephone, and a photocopy machine. Mainstay of the effort was another young attorney, soft-spoken Edward L. Sweda, Jr., who, while attending Suffolk Law School, lost his father to colon cancer and asked himself, “What could I best do to fight the disease?”

Sweda’s attention was drawn to the tobacco industry, whose executives, he came to feel, were “a greater danger to society than any of the criminals I encountered in my practice.” To combat them, he helped local GASP and other antismoking units around the state agitate for tobacco control ordinances, of which the easiest to gain acceptance for were separate sections in restaurants. But some communities were receptive to farther-reaching measures, like Newton,
the first town in Massachusetts to put through workplace restrictions on smoking, and Amherst, which banned the free sampling of cigarettes and smoking advertisements on public transit facilities. In his quarterly newsletter and speaking engagements, Sweda called for lower health insurance premiums for nonsmokers; he helped organize suits against store owners who were lax about selling cigarettes to underage smokers, and he lobbied the Boston Red Sox to take down the Marlboro sign looming over the right-field stands at Fenway Park—“the most notorious pro-cancer billboard in Massachusetts,” he called it—and Boston University to stop leasing its facilities to the Virginia Slims tennis tour. The Red Sox said no, but the university, after resisting for two years, agreed.

In bone-chilling cold outside the Worcester Arena and in summer heat in front of the Newport Casino in nearby Rhode Island, Sweda picketed cigarette-sponsored events while wearing a black-hooded Grim Reaper costume made to fit his lanky build. As he marched, one hand wielded a wooden scythe with which Death cut down his harvest, and the other hoisted placards with earnest but inoffensive messages like “Virginia Slims and Tennis Don’t Make a Match.” Handing out leaflets at a Marlboro-funded country music festival, he told the hovering media, “The only appropriate music at a cigarette-sponsored event is Taps’.” And he was not above utilizing a bit of hyperbole to press home his point, as in a Massachusetts GASP pamphlet containing the assertion inside that “if you work near smokers, your lungs suffer the same harm as if you smoked up to ten cigarettes a day”—a gross overstatement.

Sweda’s chief preoccupation was his eight-year struggle to get a clean indoor air act through the state legislature. Ranged against him, so far as he could determine, were five full-time and eight part-time tobacco company lobbyists. By 1986, Sweda had managed to win a vote in the House two years running but was stymied by Senate President William Bulger, of South Boston, who once made the loutish remark “I don’t give a damn about nonsmokers’ rights,” and kept the smoking control bill from reaching the Senate floor. That autumn, the counterculture weekly Boston
Tab
, in a front-page expose, stated that the tobacco companies had given Bulger $10,000 in campaign gifts and speaking honoraria. The disclosure had its effect, and at the very end of the following legislative session in January 1988, Bulger stepped aside and let the people’s will prevail. “Victory!” the GASP newsletter exulted in reporting the new statute that banned smoking statewide in retail food stores and mandated separate smoking and nonsmoking sections in government buildings (the state legislature alone excepted), airport waiting rooms, restaurants with seventy-five or more seats, health and child-care centers, and state-owned college dormitories. A collateral bill barring student smoking in all public schools was achieved with the help of youngsters whom Sweda recruited as junior lobbyists.

By the end of the year, the Massachusetts GASP could claim, besides the state control law, antismoking ordinances in fifty-four communities across the state, a membership of 2,000, a full-time executive director—not Sweda, who remained a volunteer—and an annual budget of $50,000, about the salary of one of the tobacco industry’s array of lobbyists.

VII

AT
Boston’s Northeastern University, an antismoking project was born in 1984 devoted to fulfilling the tobacco industry’s worst fears by trying to foment product liability suits that would drain their deep corporate pockets. Such suits were to be patterned after those then bringing ruin to the asbestos industry, whose companies, like the cigarette manufacturers, had long known the health risks of their product but had minimized, denied, or suppressed the information, thereby exposing many to injury and death. But the potential stakes in tobacco litigation loomed vastly larger.

The agent provocateur behind this effort, dubbed the Tobacco Products Liability Project (TPLP), was Richard A. Daynard, a slender, bearded Northeastern law professor of no luminous achievement but a powerful yearning, as he turned forty, to put his steel-trap mind to social use. A graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Law School with a doctorate in urban planning from MIT thrown in, Daynard had specialized in consumer protection law and come to the conclusion that the perils of smoking dwarfed all other consumer concerns—only the threat of nuclear holocaust struck him as a greater menace to humanity—yet none was being more nonchalantly grappled with by society.