Half-Truths Cloaked in Slickness : Pricey mailing is a tip-off to how badly Philip Morris wants Prop. 188

A lot of households in Southern California have received a glossy, poster-size mailing from the attractively named Californians for Statewide Smoking Restrictions, the organization founded to back Proposition 188 on the November ballot. This campaign document is notable on two counts.

First, it clearly cost a lot of money to produce, a tip-off to the very big economic stake that the proposition’s chief sponsor, Philip Morris Inc., has in overturning tough local and state anti-smoking measures. Second, while the mailing talks about restricting access by minors to tobacco, nowhere does it even hint why such restrictions are desirable. Nowhere does it note that smoking contributes directly to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nowhere does it acknowledge that trying to reduce this terrible toll of premature deaths--including most relevantly the deaths of nonsmokers exposed to secondhand smoke--is precisely what the debate over where people should be allowed to smoke is all about.

Proposition 188 reached the ballot because many of the voters who signed petitions to qualify it were clearly misled into thinking that it is something it’s not.

The California Uniform Tobacco Control Act, to give it its formal title, was marketed as a supposedly tough anti-smoking measure. In fact it provides uniformity only to the extent that it would override all the other laws that have been enacted to protect public health in such places as restaurants and workplaces. In place of these valued restrictions, Proposition 188 would permit smoking in various designated enclosed areas if certain ventilation standards were met. The inevitable effect of this weaker standard would be to expose nonsmokers--thousands of restaurant workers especially--to the stench and toxic pollutants produced by tobacco smoke. This would not be a “reasonable alternative” to existing laws, as pro-Proposition 188 propaganda claims, but a heedless assault on public health.

Voters should not be fooled by this slick appeal. The real reasonable alternative to what Proposition 188’s backers want is a resounding “no” vote on Nov. 8.