A brief history of the War on Smokers

What began as an honest concern for the public health has, over the ensuing four decades, become a Holy Crusade, an ideological war against one-quarter of the American public funded with public money. These activities raise important questions concerning the propriety and legality of tax-funded politics--the use of tax revenues by special interest groups to promote one side of a political issue. Such misappropriation of tax dollars has long been recognized as inappropriate. Doing so essentially forces taxpayers to contribute to political causes with which they disagree--a fundamental offense against individual liberty (and constitutional principles). And it degrades democracy, for it is an attempt by government to manipulate and manufacture the will of the people.

In 1964 the Surgeon General's report on smoking and lung cancer was published, followed one year later by the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act which required the Surgeon General's warning be printed on each pack of cigarettes.

Twenty years later, in 1984, the Comprehensive Tobacco Education Act (Public Law 98-474) was passed. This Act created the taxpayer-funded Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health, a partnership between the federal government and the biggest of the non-profits, including the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, and later, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Their stated purpose was to coordinate public and private tobacco research and education programs. This partnership laid the foundation for the non-governmental organizations' involvement in policy making and gave them the power of another branch of government. These unelected and therefore essentially omnipotent groups are still the basis for the War on Smokers and they're more powerful than ever...probably more powerful than government itself.

In 1985 legislation sponsored by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) was passed (over a presidential veto) that gave Congress explicit controls over science funding by the National Institutes of Health (which includes the NCI). Waxman's bill had the support of a large number of specialized private health organizations, including the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association.

On December 12, 1989, the National Cancer Institute, an arm of the federal government's taxpayer funded National Institutes of Health wrote that using activists to reduce public tolerance of smoking was the "state of the science" and the way to go. Later that year, in a booklet entitled "Tips for Kids," the CDC commented that smokers were, in fact, "second-class citizens" and would eventually be treated as such. A side effect of these strategies was to contaminate the pool of jurors who would sit on future lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

Also in 1989, C. Everett Koop as Surgeon General of the United States changed the definition of "addiction" to include smoking, thereby also including things such as TV watching, video games, chocolate, sex, etc.

In October of 1991, the federally funded American Stop Smoking Intervention Study (Project ASSIST) was begun and by 1993, the American Cancer Society (ACS) had prepared its Action Plan, which included raising cigarette taxes, the banning of tobacco advertising, workplace smoking bans, and more.

In 1992, the CDC (which housed the ICSH) began hosting meetings of public and private attorneys, many of whom were heavy contributors to President Clinton's campaigns, who wanted to sue the tobacco industry. These meetings were held behind closed doors, not available to the public or the media.

In 1993, the EPA Report on Secondhand Smoke was published, giving the anti-tobacco crusaders a very big stick with which to beat the industry.

In 1994, after Hillary Clinton's disastrous National Health Plan, the President was searching for a cause Americans could get behind.  Presidential advisor Dick Morris urged Clinton to take on "kids smoking" as a cause. (Although Clinton was at first reluctant, a 'poll' paid for by Dickie Scruggs changed his mind.)

Scruggs, a Pascagoula, Mississipppi, attorney, had a novel idea: a way to sue the tobacco companies that had never been done. He took his idea to his old college roommate, Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore. Trent Lott, Senate Majority Leader and Scruggs' brother-in-law introduced Dickie to Presidential advisor and right hand man, Dick Morris. Morris, who helped Scruggs pick the "right" jury for his lawsuit, Scruggs and Moore began the first tobacco lawsuit which would set the stage for all others to follow. When the industry realized it couldn't win a lawsuit if it was no longer allowed to use the only true defense it had--smokers knew what they were doing and chose to do it anyway--they entered 'settlement' talks. During these talks, Hugh Rodham, Hillary's brother, was brought into one of the law firms who stood to gain the billions in fees, even though he had no plaintiff's bar experience.

Also in 1994, and drawing on the earlier ACS Action Plan, guidelines for a tobacco control program were published in the NE Journal of Medicine which included increased federal taxes on tobacco products,  comprehensive restrictions on smoking in the workplace and in public, bans on advertising and sponsorship by tobacco companies,  government support for conversion of tobacco crops to other crops, financial support for tobacco counteradvertising,  support for personal-injury litigation against the tobacco industry, etc., most of which guidelines are now in place.

In May of 1994, Stanton Glantz received more than 4000 internal documents that had been stolen from Brown & Williamson and its parent company, BAT Industries, by paralegal Merrell Williams, Jr.who called himself  "Mr. Butts." Possession of these damaging documents made Glantz a hot property worth a lot of money in grants and funding.

The anti-tobacco crusaders soon realized that simply telling people their health was at risk was not getting the result they wanted, so they decided to expand the problem--they used the EPA's faulty report to make secondhand smoke a public policy issue. C. Everett Koop, David Kessler, Richard Daynard, James Repace, Stanton Glantz, and other activists enlisted several politicians, notably Henry Waxman of California, to help "prove" that tobacco company executives lied in testimony before Congress about the addictiveness of nicotine. Using modified criteria to call smoking addictive created a new 'social' definition, without which the tobacco company executives could not be said to have lied and the anti-tobacco agenda would not be nearly as strong.

By adding the perjorative label "addiction" to the unapproved habit of smoking, anti-tobacco forces justify intervention--for the addict's own good, of course. If an addict doesn't understand what he's doing or can't keep himself from doing it, that addict is a victim so others can intercede on his behalf. With or without his permission. They can take his money and use it against him, for his own good, and society at large approves.

In July 1995 the Journal of the American Medical Association ran five long articles by Glantz and his co-workers, including Richard Daynard, on the pirated B&W memos, later to be published by Glantz as The Cigarette Papers.

In 1998, commissioned by a Congressional cadre of anti-tobacco legislators in response to the tobacco settlement, ex-FDA czar David Kessler and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop hand-picked representatives from twenty-three organizations to constitute an expert tobacco control panel. Among the representatives are some of the most zealous anti-tobacco activists in the U.S. including  John Banzhaf, Executive Director of ASH; Michael Pertschuk, Co-Director of the Advocacy Institute; John Seffrin, American Cancer Society; Dudley Hafner, American Heart Association; John Garrison, American Lung Association; Julia Carol, Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights; William Novelli, National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids; Matt Myers, Center for Tobacco-Free Kids; Jesse W. Brown, The Onyx Group; Jeff Nesbit, Science and Public Policy Institute; Thomas Houston, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Smokeless States Prog.;Judy Sopenski, STAT; Richard Daynard, Tobacco Products Liability Project.

They met three times and provided to President Clinton and Congress a 60-page document that is one of the most chilling displays of disregard for American tenets in existence today. Defining the choice to smoke as a "chronic disease" and declaring "no value" to the use of cigarettes, the panel proposed an Orwellian "blueprint" for "control" of the problem on a global basis. The commission recommended the immedicate implementation of what clearly must be seen as totalitarian means, backed fully by the power of police state enforcement, to achieve an almost classically totalitarian goal, a kind of mandated behaviorism. Or, to use their own words, "the goal is to change the behavior of smokers." Everywhere in the world. Not only does every single organization represented on the panel (and every individual representative) stand to benefit financially from the proposals in the Advisory Committee on Tobacco Policy and Public Health Report, this blueprint gives the anti-tobacco advocacy groups far more power than they should ever have, including the "freedom and resources to monitor and oversee government enforcement of legislation and regulation...freedom from political "censorship" or constraints, including the freedom to advocate the enactment of tobacco control policies, ...and to challenge the failure of government entities to carry out the law."

To enforce the proposed regulations and bans and to administer all the funding, new federal and private agencies would be created and certain existing federal agencies would be given additional funding and additional regulatory powers. The "blueprint" is, in fact, the quintessence of federal Nannyism with its focus on growth of the regulatory apparatus. What is even more disturbing is its stated aim to extend its regulatory programs throughout the world and use U.S. funding and influence to do so.

An interesting aside: According to a study published in July, l999 in JAMA, the tobacco industry took in $80 million. On those same sales, the federal government took in $222 million and the states took in $293 million. So just who is in the 'tobacco business'?