State Backed Off of Airing 2 Anti-Smoking Ads, Documents Show

In at least two instances, the Wilson administration has backed down from airing sharp-edged television ads that directly challenge the tobacco industry, after one major tobacco company threatened to sue.

The administration took the steps even though some of Gov. Pete Wilson’s top health advisors insist that ads aimed at the industry are an especially effective way to combat tobacco use, particularly among teenagers.

The actions are revealed in internal documents obtained by Public Records Act requests. Those documents show that the administration quietly blunted the campaign during the past two years by refusing to air one hard-hitting ad that had been produced, and putting another commercial on the shelf after an initial airing brought threats of a lawsuit from the nation’s second-largest tobacco company, R.J. Reynolds.

The actions alarm anti-tobacco advocates and raise questions about the direction of California’s anti-tobacco advertising program, particularly as the state prepares to embark on an unprecedented $50-million ad campaign.

While California’s tactic of running ads aimed at the tobacco industry has won plaudits from anti-smoking organizations, it has come under repeated attack from tobacco companies and, more recently, from Republican lawmakers.

Earlier this summer, Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle of Garden Grove entered the fray, trying to add language to the state budget barring the use of tax money to attack the tobacco industry.

Although Pringle’s effort failed, Wilson said the speaker raised a “valid point.” At a June news conference, Wilson said: “There is not a necessity to defame people in order to send a very strong message to all Californians that smoking is not a good thing.”

In an interview, California Health Director Kim Belshe said she made the decisions to shelve the ads, citing concerns about a suit from Reynolds over one ad and the tone of the second ad. But she also said the state is not backing down from what remains the nation’s most aggressive anti-tobacco campaign.

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“Look at what we’ve been airing,” Belshe said. She cited the spot featuring a malevolent-looking man pulling fish from a lake as an announcer says the tobacco industry tries to “hook” new smokers as old ones die. The “characterization that we have backed away is simply not grounded in reality,” she said. She and other Wilson aides note that the governor has taken other stands against tobacco, most prominent of which was his decision in 1994 to sign the nation’s toughest indoor smoking ban. Still, representatives of private health groups and anti-tobacco advocates are increasingly critical of the Republican governor.

“There definitely has been a trend,” Mary Adams of the American Heart Assn. said, pointing to the decision to kill the two ads. “I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Please, God, let them do the right thing [with the new $50-million ad campaign].’ Do I think that’s going happen? I don’t.”

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Julia Carol, director of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, who has read the internal documents: “Why do they bother spending taxpayers’ money and then cover up the ads? Could it be they’re afraid of the tobacco industry?”

Californians likely will notice a major increase in the anti-smoking campaign. In the new state budget, Wilson and the Legislature agreed for the first time to fully fund the anti-tobacco ad campaign, earmarking $25 million in the first year, and about $12 million in each of the following two years. The money will come from the 25-cent-per-pack tax on cigarettes imposed by voters in a 1988 initiative.

Using that money, California has run a pioneering ad campaign combating tobacco use throughout the 1990s. The program employs advertising agencies and makes use of such marketing techniques as focus groups to test-market commercials.

“We constantly do formal and informal research,” said Bruce Silverman of Asher/Gould, the Los Angeles ad agency that handles the current campaign. “About the only thing that really impacts young people is when you say to them, ‘You’re being manipulated by an adult industry.’ Young people don’t like to be manipulated by adults.”

Several documents obtained by The Times suggest that despite the decision to kill the two ads, Belshe and others in the Department of Health Services are convinced that hard-hitting ads targeting the industry are an especially effective way to dissuade youths from starting to smoke, and convince adults to quit.

In one rather passionate memo in February 1995, Belshe wrote to her boss, Sandra Smoley, who is Wilson’s health and welfare secretary, urging that Smoley help obtain “the governor’s office approval” for the new ads that were to run in 1996.

“As we must choose between protecting children or protecting the tobacco industry, we really have only one clear choice,” Belshe wrote.

Belshe’s memo called state-funded commercials aimed at the industry and deglamorizing tobacco use “one of the cornerstones of the California tobacco control program.”

As she explained it, the state must target the tobacco industry because “the pathogen of interest--tobacco--is being manufactured and promoted by an immensely profitable industry, and so it is impossible to combat the pathogen without going head-to-head with the industry.”

Belshe wrote that memo shortly after the state’s fight with R.J. Reynolds--and California’s first retreat on its anti-tobacco advertising campaign.

That retreat came in late 1994 and early 1995 when, despite public statements to the contrary, the Department of Health Services ceased airing the television ad entitled “Nicotine Soundbites.”

Broadcast in the fall of 1994, the commercial featured videotape of several top tobacco company executives testifying under oath before Congress that they do not believe nicotine is addictive.

“Do they think we’re stupid?” the ad concludes.

Reynolds’ lawyers responded with letters to the Health Department and television stations that aired the ad, claiming it suggested that the executives committed perjury. At the time, Belshe issued a public defense of the commercial and accused Reynolds of a “strong-arm tactic.”

Despite that public stand, Department of Health Services memos show that by early 1995, the department decreed that the ad should no longer be broadcast.

A memo from the head of the unit that oversees the ad campaign said the state did not want to “make too big a deal about it going away,” because Belshe was “so clearly on record defending it.”

Instead, the memo said, “instructions were to make things quietly go away.”

In an interview Thursday, Belshe acknowledged that the department did not want to “red flag” the decision to stop airing the ad.

“We had to make a decision. Re-airing it would be an invitation to litigation,” Belshe said, adding that rather than get enmeshed in a lawsuit, she opted to use the agency’s money to air other ads. “That was a judgment call. People can disagree.”

Later in 1995, following the fight with Reynolds, the Department of Health Services again was confronted with a decision about whether to run an especially tough commercial titled “Insurance.”

In roughly 60 words, the commercial explains that while the tobacco industry consistently denies smoking is harmful, two tobacco conglomerates also own major insurance companies that grant discounts in premiums to nonsmokers.

As the Los Angeles-based Asher/Gould advertising agency first pitched it, “Insurance” opened with a shot of an office, where a few men are smoking. As the image appears of smoke wafting from the window toward another part of the building that houses the insurance subsidiary, the announcer explains: “Tobacco executives have told you there’s no proof that secondhand smoke is harmful. Or that nicotine is addictive.”

Then, as smoke reaches the part of the building where the insurance subsidiary is, the announcer says: “Yet two tobacco conglomerates also own insurance companies where you get a discount on your premiums if you don’t smoke.” A woman on the insurance side of the company slams the window shut. “Say, what do those tobacco guys know that they aren’t telling you?”

By August 1995, the spot had been filmed, and that’s when it ran into trouble. The script changed little. But the images were different--and stronger.

Shot in black and white, the commercial has an ominous look, sort of like a 1950s thriller. The imposing building is topped by a sign that reads Tobacco Industry. As the narrator recites the script, the camera pans down the outside of the building, offering glimpses into offices. In one smoky office, overweight men smoke and give each other high-fives. In another, a stern-looking woman feeds documents into a shredder.

Finally, the camera reaches the “insurance company,” and the announcer concludes by citing the nonsmoker discounts offered by insurance companies.

Belshe, concerned about the spot’s tone, directed that the scene of the woman at the shredding machine be edited out, and it was. But according to the documents, Health Department staffers seemed baffled by continuing objections. In one memo, a staffer told Belshe that “it would seem rash to proceed with fixing this commercial without first being very clear about what is broken.”

In an interview, Belshe said she and others in the administration decided against airing the ad because of the changes. “I frankly didn’t really like how the ad agency had totally revised its message.” she said. Besides, other ads--which were less strident--already had been approved for the 1996 campaign.

Asher/Gould defended the changes, saying in memos that they were made after people in focus groups who saw earlier versions were confused. Still, the ad agency was pushing to air the spot as recently as January.

“The anti-industry strategy upon which this spot is based is one of the key components of our overall campaign strategy to de-normalize smoking,” Asher/Gould’s memo said. “The spot powerfully exposes the hypocrisy of the tobacco industry and we believe it is more than a shame to keep this message from the public.”

In late 1995, as Belshe and others in the administration reviewed the ad, other staffers urged that a decision be made. At least one warned of problems if the spot did not appear.

“This is the first time since 1990 we have not had a strong, cutting-edge commercial under the ‘anti-industry’ strategy,” wrote Colleen Stevens, who heads the media campaign division within the Health Department. “This strategy has been a hallmark of the California effort and it won’t take long before the anti-tobacco activists notice.”

Indeed, in December, tobacco foes obtained a pirated version of the ad and showed it to reporters at a news conference in Sacramento--a move that brought a rebuke from the Health Department, and seemingly cemented the state’s resolve not to air it.

“The department,” Belshe said in a letter to the anti-smoking activists, “is not going to allow the political threat implicit in this sort of sensationalist appeal to public opinion to deter it from basing its decision on the best interest of the program.”