Firm Barred From Discussing Anti-Tobacco Ads

State Department of Health Services officials, under attack from anti-tobacco groups and others, have imposed a gag on the Los Angeles firm creating California’s new anti-tobacco advertising campaign.

In the new contract with the Los Angeles advertising firm of Asher/Gould, the Department of Health Services is requiring that the firm obtain written approval before speaking to reporters and other outsiders about the ad campaign.

“[Asher/Gould] can’t talk about things we don’t want talked about because we’ve had too much unauthorized disclosure of products,” Department of Health Services spokeswoman Lynda Frost said Thursday.

There was no such gag language in Asher/Gould’s prior contract, signed in 1994. Provisions have also been added to the new contract that describe in detail security procedures that the ad firm must follow to guard against leaks of drafts of new anti-tobacco commercials.

After failing to produce new anti-tobacco ads in more than two years, the Department of Health Services announced last month that a new batch of anti-smoking ads will begin airing on television at the end of March.

Under the new contract, the state agrees to pay Asher/Gould up to $67.5 million during the next two years, making it by far the single most expensive anti-tobacco campaign ever undertaken by a state.

The provision containing the gag language says the firm “shall not issue any news release or make any statement to the news media” about meetings or decisions, or the status of work on the ads without prior written approval.

Asher/Gould’s president, Bruce Silverman, could not be reached Thursday for comment.

Details about the new contract, signed at the end of January, come three days after the chairwoman of a committee responsible for overseeing California’s anti-tobacco project criticized the health department for refusing to permit her to see drafts of the new commercials.

“What is so secret about this?” asked Jennie Cook, a Wilson appointee who heads the Tobacco Education and Research Oversight Committee.

Sen. Quentin Kopp is similarly frustrated. The independent from San Francisco said Thursday that he has not received a reply to a request for information made more than two months ago to Sandra Smoley, Wilson’s Cabinet secretary in charge of the health department.

Kopp had requested minutes on meetings held to discuss the ad strategy, drafts of scripts and other information related to the campaign.

The department’s refusal to respond to his request is “most peculiar,” Kopp said. “It sounds as if they have a siege mentality.”

Health department spokeswoman Frost acknowledged that officials working in California’s anti-tobacco program, which is funded by a 25-cent per pack tax on cigarettes approved by voters in 1988, are feeling pressured.

“It has come under constant and close scrutiny, from the activists, from the tobacco industry, from television networks,” Frost said. “When you have that many eyes on you, you tend to want to exercise appropriate control over the program.”

Frost traces the crackdown to late 1995, when an ad that had been produced but never aired was leaked to anti-smoking activists who showed it at a news conference.

The ad, titled “Insurance,” pointed out that although tobacco companies maintain that smoking is not proved to cause illness, insurance companies owned by tobacco conglomerates provide discounts for nonsmokers.

At the time, health department officials explained their decision to not broadcast the ad by saying they simply did not like it.

Before the crackdown, California’s Department of Health Services sent advance copies of the ads to academics and health experts for their review. But among the new controls is one that bars Asher/Gould from providing drafts of the ads to anyone other than people directly involved in their production. The provision would preclude the advertising firm from having academics and other anti-smoking experts check the scripts for accuracy unless the state health officials agree.

In an interview Thursday, Stanton Glantz, a medical school professor at UC San Francisco and a leader of the anti-smoking movement, noted that officials in Massachusetts recently sent him scripts of future ads for his critique.

“Did they send it in a safe with armed guards? No,” Glantz said. “They faxed scripts, and said they would appreciate it if I would look at them and let them know what I thought. . . . The thing that is so distinct about it was how routine it was. They dealt with me the way the California used to deal with me, which is as a resource and a colleague.”