Tobacco Firms Mimic Grass-Roots Foes, Study Says : Health: Researchers contend that the industry backs smokers’ rights groups to fight proposed ordinances. Industry association denies concealing its role in the battle.

The tobacco industry has engineered a sophisticated, nationwide strategy using front groups, “pseudo-business coalitions” and covert consultants to counter the spread of local tobacco-control initiatives in states like California, a new study contends.

The study, by researchers at UC San Francisco, scrutinized the industry’s use of smokers’ rights groups, restaurant associations, public relations firms, computer databases and glossy publications to stop anti-smoking ordinances in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

To their surprise, the researchers found that the success or failure of tobacco-control proposals depends less on the amount of money spent by the tobacco industry than on the willingness of local health groups, both volunteer and professional, to fight back, as they did successfully in Sacramento.

“Until a few years ago, all the cigarette companies tried to do in California is what they do nationally--campaign contributions and hiring a lot of high-powered lobbyists,” said Stanton A. Glantz, an author of the study.

“In the last few years, they have been trying to copy the grass-roots activities of the genuine grass-roots, nonsmokers’ rights movement.”

The Tobacco Institute, the cigarette industry’s trade association, concedes that it takes part in local anti-smoking campaigns, but denies concealing its role.

Glantz, a professor of medicine, and Bruce Samuels, then a research fellow, examined battles over the 1987 Beverly Hills anti-smoking ordinance, a similar 1990 proposal in Los Angeles and a 1990 Sacramento ordinance banning smoking in public places and workplaces.

In their report, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., they allege that the industry emulated grass-roots anti-smoking groups by encouraging the formation of local “smokers’ rights” groups and activist business groups.

“The industry-created smokers’ rights groups provide a local identity and mechanism for funneling tobacco industry resources into the fight against local legislation without the overt appearance of the tobacco industry,” Glantz and Samuels wrote.

The researchers also found that cigarette companies “have active programs to identify smokers and mold them into a political force”--for example, identifying millions of smokers through rebate coupons and correspondence over the past few years.

Using those names, manufacturers use magazines and newsletters “to recruit and ‘educate’ smokers,” Glantz and Samuels found. Petitions and letter-writing campaigns are encouraged. Toll-free telephone numbers and mass mailings are used to mobilize smokers.

Asked about Glantz’s allegations, Walker Merryman, vice president of the Tobacco Institute, said the industry has made no secret of its involvement in opposing smoking-control measures.

But he denied that the industry initiated smokers’ rights groups.

Rather, Merryman said, the institute had received requests for help from individual smokers and businesses in California and elsewhere. He said the institute provides literature, briefing papers, guidance on political activities and financial assistance on a case-by-case basis.

“I think there is an attitude among most smokers and a lot of business people . . . that enough is enough, that this sort of institutionalized anti-smoking hysteria is threatening the very existence of businesses,” he said.

* In Beverly Hills, the Beverly Hills Restaurant Assn. persuaded the City Council to modify its total ban on smoking in restaurants--a turn of events that Glantz and Samuels attributed to the industry’s effective use of what they described as an industry-backed restaurant group.

* In Los Angeles, a restaurant group that received some tobacco-industry funding fought off the proposed ordinance--a defeat the researchers attributed to the restaurant group, to industry lobbying, and to what they called the relatively insignificant role played by voluntary health agencies.

* In Sacramento, the researchers found that the American Lung Assn. “prompted the ordinance and took an active role in shaping the law and ensuring its passage.” For that reason, the researchers say, the ordinance passed despite active tobacco industry opposition.

“All the money in the world won’t undo the fact that smoking is dangerous,” Glantz said. “. . . If you make that point to mobilize the support, the industry can spend all the money in the world and it won’t matter.”

As for why he studied this subject, Glantz explained in an interview, “When you study disease, you need to study the vector, the thing that carries it. If you want to study malaria, you should study mosquitoes. And if you want to study lung cancer and heart disease, you should study the tobacco companies.”

In an editorial published in the same issue as the study, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, urged health professionals to take the initiative against “the tragically powerful influence of the tobacco industry and its deadly message.”

“This requires that health professionals take an active direct role in the anti-smoking campaign and move beyond the clinical setting to help inform and educate the public before smoking problems start,” Sullivan said.