Lawmakers Try to Gut Apparently Successful Anti-Smoking Campaign

Even as state lawmakers squabble about funding for Florida’s innovative program to cut teen smoking, a survey of 20,000 middle school and high school students suggests the edgy, guerrilla-style advertising campaign has worked. Smoking rates among teenagers have declined by more than 2% in the last year, the state health department survey found.

But those results did not prevent the acting director of the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program from being fired this week, a day after about 40 teens staged a clamorous demonstration in the state Capitol to protest a House committee’s decision to scrap the $70-million campaign.

Florida Health Department Secretary Bob Brooks said the dismissal of Peter Mitchell was unrelated to the demonstration. “I just felt it was time to make a change,” he said.

But the firing set off a round of political sniping in Tallahassee on Thursday and alarmed anti-smoking activists who see the program as a model for the whole country.

“What’s going on there is absolutely criminal,” Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, said of efforts to gut the program. “In nine months, they have gotten better results on reducing teen smoking than anyone in the world.”

Glantz, a member of California’s Tobacco Education Research and Oversight Committee, said Florida’s youth-driven anti-smoking effort is “the model campaign, which I’ve been trying to get California to adopt.”

Backers of the pilot program, funded from Florida’s $13-billion settlement with the tobacco industry, have questioned Gov. Jeb Bush’s commitment to the campaign, the first in the U.S. to be financed by a settlement with Big Tobacco, and begun last year under the Democratic administration of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles.

A Bush spokesman said state Democrats are using the campaign to create political controversy, pointing out that the governor budgeted $61.5 million for the anti-smoking measures next year, a 12% cut. The Senate had earmarked $50 million for the campaign.

Some Florida Democrats charged that Mitchell had been made the scapegoat for the protest by teens involved with the anti-smoking initiative.

“This is troubling,” state Senate Democratic leader Buddy Dyer said. “The House has zero-funded a program that has proved very successful. . . . This is a long-term type of campaign. If we close it down now, we squander close to $70 million.”

Dyer said many wonder if Big Tobacco is behind a push to shut the program down. Tobacco lobbyists have denied pressuring legislators. But tobacco companies are a major source of soft-money political donations in Florida, as in other states. Republicans, who for the first time this century control the House, Senate and governor’s office, received about $300,000 from the tobacco industry last year, and the Democrats about $125,000.

According to the Florida Department of Health, the number of teens who said they were smokers dropped from 23.3% to 20.9% in the year ended in February, a decline that translates to about 31,000 middle school and high school students who decided not to smoke.

The biggest drop was among middle school students: Cigarette use fell from 18.5% to 15.1%, the survey found.

Overall tobacco use, which includes cigars and smokeless tobacco, among high school students dropped from 35.5% to 33.3% over the last year. The number of high school students who said they had never used tobacco and did not plan to rose by 25%.

“Thus far, the results show the program is working,” Bush said in a statement. “Fewer teens are smoking. More will live healthier and longer lives.”

In the weeks before the release of the survey, however, many Republicans in the Legislature expressed doubt about the campaign’s effectiveness. State Rep. Debby Sanderson, chairwoman of the House budget health committee, said she was unimpressed by the aggressive TV spots and billboards, created by teens working with a Miami ad agency, that use ridicule and parody to make smoking seem uncool.

One 30-second spot aired during the Super Bowl added a laugh track to footage of tobacco executives telling U.S. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) in congressional hearings that they did not believe smoking was linked to cancer.

Sanderson, a Fort Lauderdale Republican, said she was also unimpressed by Tuesday’s young demonstrators, who crowded into the hallway outside her office and shouted for her to come out.

Said Jared Perez, 18, a high school senior from the Tampa area who took part in the protest: “We did offend her. But that was kind of the purpose. We don’t want to be rude, but we care about this program and we’re going to fight for it.”

The irreverent anti-smoking ad campaign, called Truth, has received international attention since it began last spring with full-page appeals in major U.S. newspapers attacking the movie industry for glamorizing tobacco use. But the ads are only a part of the overall program.

Almost two-thirds of the $70-million first-year budget was invested in educational partnerships with teens in all 67 Florida counties, youth cessation programs and an advocacy group called Students Working Against Tobacco. That group now has 8,000 members.

“There are adults who may not understand our strategy,” Perez said. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter what adults think; it’s not aimed at them.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.