Whole New Pack of Buddies for the Cigarette Industry

The will of most Californians is unambiguous regarding the health risks associated with tobacco use. But public opinion is apparently a trifle to the cigarette companies and their new legislative charges in Sacramento.

In 1988, California voters passed Proposition 99, imposing a tax of 25 cents a pack on cigarettes to help fund research on the health risks of cigarettes and to bankroll a statewide education campaign to reduce smoking. In 1994, by an overwhelming margin, voters rejected Proposition 188. That industry-sponsored measure would have overturned AB 13, California’s landmark workplace smoking ban, and imposed weaker restrictions on smoking generally.

But this is not the Legislature that passed AB 13. There is perhaps no more revealing illustration of that change than the fact that virtually every member of the current Assembly Health Committee--that body charged with protecting the health of Californians--takes campaign contributions from the tobacco industry.

Committee chairman Brett Granlund (R-Yucaipa) alone has accepted at least $44,500 from the industry, and he entered the Assembly just in January 1995. Granlund’s predecessors routinely refused such contributions; they correctly regarded such donations as conflicting with the appearance and substance of their legislative responsibilities.

This February, Granlund introduced a bill to make cigarette vending machines more accessible, weakening a new state law that bans these machines everywhere except in bars. That bill cleared a key hurdle Monday, winning a unanimous vote in the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee.

Granlund is not alone in his eagerness to do the tobacco industry’s bidding. Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) is open about having similar intentions. “Some of the legislative changes [to limit tobacco] swung the pendulum too far in one direction,” he says, and he plans to oppose new anti-tobacco bills and support rollbacks of some restrictions now in place. The Assembly, for instance, is considering a measure that would weaken the workplace smoking ban, which Gov. Pete Wilson signed into law. The new bill, extending Cal-OSHA’s deadline for setting safe standards for secondhand smoke in bars, appears to have significant support. Pringle also professes to be offended by the state’s aggressive education campaign on the negative aspects of tobacco, created under Proposition 99. “Taxpayer dollars should not be used to bash an industry,” the Orange County assemblyman grumbles.

Granlund, like Pringle, prefers to cast his gratitude to the tobacco industry in the noble language of the free market. “I am a free-enterprise, no-tax smoker,” he says. “Those [anti-smoking] people don’t have a right to tell everybody else how to live.”

This is sinister nonsense. Each year the deaths of 400,000 Americans are attributed to the fact that they smoked or, as nonsmokers, were involuntarily exposed to secondhand smoke. The gilded rhetoric of individual rights in Sacramento now threatens to bury worthy efforts to protect Californians against a well-heeled killer.