Turning Over a New Leaf : Activism: Victor Crawford once lobbied for the Tobacco Institute. Now he fights against it. What changed his mind? He’s dying of throat caActivism: ncer--a result of decades of heavy smoking.

Victor Crawford’s story is sadly familiar, that of a man who started smoking in his early teens and now is dying of cancer.

But Crawford stands out among the thousands who share his predicament, because he is a former lobbyist for the Tobacco Institute and has turned on his former client--speaking out against youth smoking and the tactics of the industry.

“I’ve got to make some amends,” the 62-year-old Maryland lawyer said in an interview. “And I have heard back from my former employers that they don’t think it’s quite kosher to bite the hand that fed you--and they have a good point. . . . It’s just that I think my point’s more important.”

Besides, “What are they going to do, give me cancer?”

A veteran Maryland state senator, Crawford later cashed in as a lobbyist, helping the tobacco industry gut public smoking curbs. Wearing a wig to hide the baldness caused by cancer treatments, Crawford earlier this year returned to his old statehouse stomping grounds to urge support for tough workplace smoking rules.

He joined former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in radio ads calling for a higher federal tax on cigarettes to discourage youth smoking.

“I don’t work for the tobacco industry anymore,” he said in one ad. “I was diagnosed with throat cancer, caused by smoking. It’s too late for me, but not for our kids.”

Crawford also weighed in against California’s Proposition 188, warning that the industry-drafted measure to repeal local ordinances would “set the anti-smoking movement back 30 years.” It was defeated in November.

And while struggling to maintain his law practice, Crawford has made time for activists and officials seeking advice in the smoking wars. Mississippi Atty. Gen. Mike Moore, who has sued tobacco firms to recover state health-care costs, was a recent visitor.

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Tall and gaunt, with a trial lawyer’s instinct for theater, Crawford betrays little self-pity, and seems more angry at himself than the cigarette makers.

“What the hell, it’s my own fault,” he said. “I was well-paid, and paid right on time. . . . I took their money, and I knew it was bad, (but) it was the great American Dream--who cares as long as you’re making money?”

Crawford’s dramatic conversion has made him something of a hero to the anti-smoking cause.

“This is his finest hour,” said Bruce Adams, a member of the Montgomery County, Md., county council and a tobacco foe who previously fought Crawford over anti-smoking legislation.

“Here’s a guy who has obviously suffered tremendously . . . and anyone could completely understand if he wanted to be doing things for himself,” Adams said. Yet, “He decided he was wrong and he spoke out.”

For their part, industry officials seem loath to criticize. “He has the right to say what he believes,” said Brennan Dawson, spokeswoman for the Tobacco Institute.

Calling Crawford a “dear friend,” Bruce C. Bereano, a veteran lobbyist for the institute in Maryland, said he understood “what (Crawford) is doing and why. . . . It is not a reckless, knee-jerk reaction.”

But “I guess the way to put it is, I wish he were not doing it,” Bereano said. The institute “was his client once, and I just have different views about . . . a lawyer having a client (and) taking a conflicting position with that client subsequently.”

Crawford, Bereano said, also may be “being used by groups and the media in terms of their own public policy agendas.”

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Crawford, a Democrat, served 16 years in the Maryland legislature before retiring in 1983. He resumed a full-time law practice and began lobbying for a few white-hat clients.

But Crawford knew the big bucks came from rich, embattled industries. “I was on the lookout for that, and when (the Tobacco Institute) first approached me (in 1986), I said sure, I was real, real interested.”

During the next six years, Crawford went to battle against smoking restrictions. The industry was determined “to fight everything, stall everything . . . (to) buy time until the Third World countries are flooded,” he said.

When the argument seemed hopeless, as it often did, Crawford changed the subject--portraying his adversaries as “health Nazis” bent on destroying freedom of choice.

“You never attack the message. You attack the messengers,” Crawford said. “You can’t attack the message . . . because it’s obvious. I mean, for example, ‘Is it addictive?’ Ask anybody who smokes a pack or more a day, especially if they started in their teens, to just stop and see what they go through. . . .

“Even now, after all I’ve been through, I’d still love a cigarette. Sitting here, drinking a cup of coffee, a cigarette would be so great. And if that’s not an addiction, I don’t know what is.”

When Crawford was a kid, Bogart and Cagney were chain-smoking heroes of the silver screen. “You weren’t a real man unless you smoked,” he recalled. And so he did--starting with cigarettes at age 13 and later switching to pipes and cigars.

Crawford learned he had throat cancer in January, 1992. “Victor,” he said the doctor told him, “You’re right out of a medical textbook--you’ve got a lesion on your throat, and it’s from smoking.”

Surgeons saved Crawford’s voice, but removed the lymph nodes and all the muscle from the left side of his neck. He had radiation treatments and thought he was doing pretty well--until he learned last year that the malignancy had spread.

Crawford was disgusted that he, like so many others, had fallen into the trap of believing it could not happen to him.

“It’s always the other fellow,” he said. “How do you get an 18- or 19-year-old to charge up a hill to a machine-gun nest? It’s the other guy who’s going to get it.” Then, when it happens to you, “you feel like a bit of an ass.”

At the oncology center, seeing the suffering of fellow patients, he also thought, “Did I help cause some of this? Sure. Am I now paying the price for it? Sure.”

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Still, Crawford did not experience a lightning conversion. He did not want to make a spectacle of himself, nor be seen as disloyal. For a long time pride and caution held him back. But for a remarkable encounter, he might never have spoken out.

Crawford practiced t’ai chi ch’uan, the Chinese exercise regimen, and on Saturday mornings joined other t’ai chi devotees in a park. Another in the group was Michael Pertschuk, former head of the Federal Trade Commission and co-director of the Advocacy Institute, an anti-smoking group.

Pertschuk knew Crawford only as one of the more flamboyant practitioners of t’ai chi. Otherwise, the men were strangers. Then one Saturday in the fall of 1993, “I noticed he had gotten very thin, and I thought, ‘uh-oh,’ ” Pertschuk recalled.

Several in the group went to breakfast that morning, and Pertschuk and Crawford talked for the first time.

“I used to be a tobacco lobbyist,” Pertschuk remembered him saying. “Now I’ve got throat cancer, and I guess I got my just deserts.”

It was the wildest coincidence. Like others in the anti-smoking movement, Pertschuk had marveled at how well the industry had kept its minions in line. A business so large and controversial would be expected to produce its share of moles and defectors--yet rarely had any come forward. If insiders were carrying around delicious secrets or a sense of guilt, they had kept them to themselves. And yet here was Victor Crawford, voicing such regrets.

Crawford, however, was not ready to go public. “He wasn’t sure he wanted to turn on people who had been good to him, people he had worked with,” Pertschuk said.

But later, at Pertschuk’s suggestion, Crawford agreed to an off-the-record meeting with the writer of a profile on tobacco executives. After they talked last winter, the writer, Roger Rosenblatt, urged Crawford to step into the light.

“Washington is full of these nameless, faceless, well-placed sources who are journalists talking to each other,” Crawford recalled Rosenblatt saying.

Crawford gave permission, and his story became the powerful conclusion of the article, which ran last March in the New York Times Magazine.

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Crawford since has been much in demand. “Suddenly, here I am, sort of like Topsy. I seem to have growed,” he said. But “somebody’s got to do it, and I seem to have been elected.”

“The wonderful thing (Crawford) does is to expose their hypocrisy in a way that no one else can,” Pertschuk said. “He’s got incredible courage, and he just faces cancer and death with an insouciance that I hope I have. But beyond that, this has given him meaning.”

With his sense of irony and self-effacing wit, Crawford seems like a man who would be tickled by the turn his life has taken, if only his prospects weren’t so dim.

He talks of his treatments with taxol, an experimental cancer drug derived from the bark of the yew, found in the dwindling old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.

In the past, when Crawford read about an endangered minnow or weed blocking a highway project, he thought the world had gone mad. His attitude adjustment has been such that he now gives to the Sierra Club.

“I like to say that I owe my life to the spotted owl,” Crawford joked. “There’s nothing like being directly affected.”