Suit Seeks to Redirect Use of Tobacco Tax : Health: Plaintiffs say money intended for smoking research and education was illegally diverted to balance the state budget. The Wilson Administration contends the funds were allotted properly.

Charging that the governor and Legislature illegally diverted $129 million intended for tobacco research and education programs in order to balance the state budget, the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Assn. filed suit Tuesday to restore the money to its original purpose.

The two nonprofit health groups, joined in their suit by four legislators and four private citizens, contended that legislative leaders and Gov. Pete Wilson “in a back room deal” violated the terms of Proposition 99, the anti-smoking ballot measure that raised the tax on a pack of cigarettes by 25 cents.

That 1988 initiative specified that 20% of the added revenues go to anti-smoking education efforts and 5% to research on tobacco-related disease.

But in order to fill a $5-billion gap that was facing the state this year, Wilson and the lawmakers cut deeply into the Proposition 99 programs to pay for a variety of health programs for California’s poor, including health checkups for youngsters, examinations for pregnant women and infants and medical services for physically handicapped children and those with inherited diseases.

Hit particularly hard was the special tobacco research account, which provides funding for research into smoking-related diseases and for studies of ways to prevent or stop smoking. The budget deal provided $8 million for research over the next two years while diverting $56 million to health care programs.

The suit, filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, asks that the state’s top financial officers--Wilson, state Treasurer Kathleen Brown and Controller Gray Davis--be ordered immediately to halt all payments from research and health education accounts for health care programs.

“The issue is whether the legislators and the governor are above the law and can appropriate taxpayers’ monies to purposes to which they were never intended,” said Paul Knepprath, a spokesman for the American Lung Assn.

Earlier this year, two other groups, the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights and Say No to Tobacco Dough, asked the court to return $166 million in cigarette tax money they claim was illegally diverted to health care programs in earlier years.

Wilson’s press secretary, Sean Walsh, contended that the Proposition 99 money has been appropriated properly.

Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento), who wrote the bill that divided up the Proposition 99 tobacco tax revenue, argued that the use of money was permissible.

Isenberg agreed that the last-minute compromise could be characterized as a political “back room deal.” But he argued that the divvying up of the tobacco tax revenues was a political compromise from the time the initiative’s various sponsors--including health groups, doctors, hospitals and environmentalists--”first sat down and said, ‘Let’s raise the tax on cigarettes,’ and decided how the money should be spent.”

Isenberg pointed out that at no time was all the added tobacco tax revenue targeted for anti-smoking purposes. The proposition, for example, provided for 5% for wildlife habitat protection.

But the health groups that filed suit contend that the Legislature cannot tamper with the 5% set aside for research and the 20% for anti-smoking education. The groups say that the budget compromise provides only 0.8% for research and 13% for education.

Knepprath said that the parties to the suit would push for a speedy resolution of the case but said any action would require a full-fledged court hearing. “It’s unclear how quickly the courts will be able to act on this,” he said.

However, the shrinkage in spending on education and research programs has already had an impact.

Local health officials throughout the state have been forced to cut back on education programs aimed at discouraging smoking.

The impact on the scientific research has been even more dramatic.

“There’s been tremendous damage in the continuing delay in funding for important research,” said Charles L. Gruder, director of the University of California’s Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. Under Gruder, the university has established an elaborate system for evaluating and funding Proposition 99 grants to public and private research facilities throughout the state.

“It takes tremendous time and energy to launch research projects and sustain them,” Gruder said. Uncertainty about funding for tobacco research will inevitably force the best researchers in the field to consider directing their work to other areas, he said. “The whole idea of Proposition 99 is to redirect attention to smoking-related disease. . . . If the money is so ephemeral, if there’s no permanence at all, they may go on to study other things.”

One of those researchers is Dr. David Burns, a lung specialist at UC San Diego. Burns has been conducting a detailed statistical study designed to determine why some smokers develop lung cancer and others do not. African American smokers are 50% more likely to die of lung cancer than are white smokers, for example.

Burns argues that uncovering the reason behind those differences may provide a new understanding not only of lung cancer but of how cancer develops in general.

But the Proposition 99 research cut has brought a halt to the $85,000-a-year study.

Burns has already been forced to lay off the full-time statistician who was working with him on the project. If it is ever funded again he will have to find and train someone new, which could take several months.

And Burns’ own university salary was partly paid for by the state grant. He must now look for other grants to make up the difference.