Unwelcome Mat Is Out for Big Tobacco

When tobacco lawyers checked into their hotels for the state’s anti-tobacco mega-trial, they were greeted by in-room copies of Minnesota Monthly with a beaming Jeanne Weigum on its cover.

The magazine had named Weigum its 1997 Minnesotan of the Year, which must have given the tobacco folks pause. Unlike most people saluted in such a manner, Weigum is not an industrialist, philanthropist or cultural icon. She is a veteran anti-smoking activist.

These days a friendly forum for Big Tobacco is nearly impossible to find. But Minnesota is especially hostile, and Weigum’s standing suggests what cigarette-makers are up against in the biggest and most crucial courtroom battle in their history.

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The smoking rate among adults here is just under 21%, according to U.S. government data, a lower rate than all but three other states.

Minnesota was years ahead of the rest of the country in cracking down on illegal tobacco sales to children. Police departments ran stings with health groups and undercover teenagers to bust wayward merchants. Its protections for nonsmokers are not as sweeping as California’s, but, in 1975, Minnesota became the first state to pass a clean indoor air act.

As the third week of the tobacco trial ended here Friday, the area was bathed in high temperatures inching into the 30s, with nights in the teens--about as toasty as it gets this time of year. Yet, even in the frozen heart of winter, smokers usually are forced to shiver outside as they get their fix.

At the federal courthouse where the trial is taking place, a pitiless sign tells them where they can go. “Smoking area: Sides of building.”

“The prevailing consensus is ‘Let them suffer,’ ” says Steven E. Schier, chairman of the political science department at nearby Carleton College.

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People in the Twin Cities seem excited about the pending sale of the Minnesota Vikings professional football team to best-selling author Tom Clancy, who was pictured Friday on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press with a cigarette and a smile of immense satisfaction on his face. If tobacco dealers hope that augurs a warming trend in attitudes toward smoking, they should not count on it.

According to Schier, Minnesota has the “moralistic” political culture that is found in a few northern states that were heavily settled by Scandinavians.

“They’re unusual states in that lifestyle is a public-policy objective,” he said. They have a “big concern about abstract principle--what is right and good--and [a willingness] to use the government to pursue those ends. And one thing [that] is not good, it’s been decided in Minnesota, is smoking.”

Weigum, a psychotherapist who is president of the Assn. for Nonsmokers-Minnesota, says the state’s clean indoor air law was as much the catalyst as a result of anti-smoking sentiment. She said that by showing people they did not have to breathe other people’s smoke, it raised public expectations. Since the law was passed, the state’s tobacco control movement has achieved other firsts.

Minnesota was the first to ban “sampling,” or the free distribution of tobacco products.

With cigarette-makers almost universally under attack, industry officials say any difference in political climate is one of degree.

But for tobacco corporations, Minnesota seems uniquely difficult. Of the 40 state attorneys general who have sued tobacco companies, Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey III is the most hard-line, and he’s the only one campaigning against the proposed nationwide tobacco truce pending in Congress.

That Humphrey is, in large measure, preaching to the choir became evident last month during jury selection.

“I think it would be impossible for me to ever come up with a conclusion that the state is entitled to nothing,” one prospective juror said. “It would just be a matter of how much.”

To be sure, smoking maintains a foothold among blue-collar circles and the young. And the resurrection of cigar smoking is evident at local watering holes. But the professional classes, says Schier, are “about the most anti-smoking group of Americans you could identify.”

Some conservatives and others see a joyless side in this. One commentator, recalls Schier, described Minnesota as “the state in which absolutely nothing is allowed.”