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Q: TELL ME ABOUT THE INTIMIDATIONS ON YOU.
Glantz: Well, the tobacco companies had been after me for years. The work I've done on passive smoking and heart disease, and showing that second hand smoke kills 53,000 people a year. This work has done them a huge amount of damage in terms of promoting the enactment of smoke-free workplace, and other environments, other kinds of smoking restrictions. So, they have had their front groups--smoker's rights groups--they set up that publish magazines and newsletters. They are constantly attacking me, and after every barrage of personal attacks against me in the American Smoker's Journal or the American Smoker's Alliance or these other publications from these groups, I then get a series of hate mail. I have had hate mail, hate faxes, hate phone mail, hate e-mail, hate phone calls. I mean the police department here intercepts some of my mail now, and it's a drag. I mean I can sympathize with Jeff Wigand. They're after him much harder than they've ever been after me. They sued the University of California because of the documents being here in the library. My personnel records get frequent subject to Freedom of Information Act requests from time to time. My grants, just one of them was just recently (Unclear) by a concerned citizen who in the letter says, I have no ties to the tobacco industry, but in fact has been working with a group called California for Smoker's Rights, which was set up by our R.J. Reynolds. And probably the most serious assault was working through the American Smoker's Alliance which was set up by Philip Morris and something called the One Thirty Ten Club, which operated out of a post office box, in a small town in Kentucky. But it turns out the guy who runs it, his address is Central Park West, New York City, orchestrated a major campaign to working through the Republican Congress to get...NCI forced to terminate the funding of my research grant, part of which paid for our analysis of Brown & Williamson documents.
Q: COULD YOU JUST EXPLAIN THAT TO ME?
Glantz: One of the things you do when you are a professor is that you apply for research grants which are then given to the university to support your work, and the National Cancer Institute has given me a grant to study how the tobacco industry works to protect its interests and to keep people smoking. And that's legitimate cancer control research, because the leading form of cancer is lung cancer, almost all of which is caused by tobacco. Well, working through front groups like the American Smoker's Alliance where it was established by Philip Morris and the One Thirty Ten Club which operated out of a post office box in a little town in Kentucky, but turned out to be run by a guy whose address was on Central Park West in New York City. A whole campaign was orchestrated in conjunction with the Republicans in Congress, and particularly in the House of Representatives, to force the National Cancer Institute to terminate the funding of my National Cancer Institute research grant. And that grant, among other things, was paying for the costs associated with our analysis of the Brown & Williamson documents. There was a huge fight that dragged on for months and months where, and this was unprecedented to terminate an already funded grant, gone through peer review, was rated in the top 10% of all grants awarded by NIH, but I'm happy to say that because the health groups rallied, and particularly the American Cancer Society, the tobacco industry was pushed back and the grant is continuing. But it seriously disrupted my work. I mean at one level, the tobacco industry failed in their efforts to terminate what I was doing, but they did hassle me mightily. They caused a lot of effort to be spent by people in the health community, in the academic community, defending the grant, and disrupted the work for several months while we were trying to keep the thing alive. And that's what they do to everybody. I mean that's what they do to journalists. If you are a journalist and you do a story on tobacco that they don't like, you'd know your editor's going to get a letter from some big shot at the cigarette company. You may be demanded to prove certain things. There are a lot of things you can do short of suing somebody. And people know, if you do a tobacco story you are going to get hassled. And given that there's ten million other things out there to do, it's human nature for a lot of people to just go do something else. In addition to the work I do on tobacco, I have a laboratory, and we do research on cardiovascular function, on your pericardium, you probably don't even [know you have a pericardium. No one's ever hassled me about that work. The tobacco companies don't care about that. It's good science. I enjoy doing it. I think it's making a contribution, but it's much easier to do that work, than to do the tobacco work.
Q: TELL ME ABOUT THE ADS IN CALIFORNIA, BEING PULLED.
Glantz: Well in 1988, the voters of California passed an initiative called Proposition 99, which increased the tax on tobacco and said that some of the money was supposed to go for anti-smoking education. And much to my astonishment, the State Health Department developed an incredibly intelligent and aggressive campaign. And the cornerstones of this campaign were 3 messages: Nicotine is addictive, second-hand smoke is dangerous for non-smokers, and the tobacco companies are out to get you. And these are the 3 most powerful messages for dealing with kids. And our previous governor took a hands off posture towards this campaign, and let the Health Department do his job. Pete Wilson has been much more meddling, and particularly since he decided to run for President, and with his Presidential campaign chaired by Craig Fuller, the Vice-President of Philip Morris. Well Philip Morris makes Marlboro cigarettes, the cigarettes two-thirds of all kids who smoke, smoke. And it is not in Philip Morris's interest to have an effective tobacco control program run by the State of California. And so the governor has started messing with the campaign, and the old ads which went after the industry, which talked about nicotine addiction have been disappearing. And in fact, there were 2 very important ads that have simply been banished. One of them is called nicotine (unclear). And what the State did was it took the very famous hearing, the defining moment at the Waxman Hearings where the 7 dwarfs, the 7 tobacco executives stood there and said, 'Nicotine is not addictive,' and they turned that into a 30 second spot, which combined these three messages: that the tobacco companies are out to get you, nicotine addiction, and passive smoking, into probably the most effective tobacco control spot ever made, particularly for reaching kids.
Well, that was on the air for a while. The tobacco companies complained. The Director of Health Services who used to work for the tobacco industry, who actually campaigned on behalf of the tobacco industry against Proposition 99, shocked everybody by writing back a very strong letter defending the ad. He was called on the carpet by the governor's office for doing that, and a bit later the ad was simply pulled off the air and the department has been told, never, never to allow that ad to be aired again. It is the kind of thing you'd expect in Stalinist Russia. The most recent incident is another ad called Insurance which points out that 2 of the biggest insurance companies in California are owned by tobacco companies, and they give non-smoker discounts. It is a brilliant ad, again, a very effective ad for reaching both the general public and children in particular. That ad was submitted for final approval to the governor's office, well probably 8 or 9 months ago. It has never been approved. And the ad was simply killed to avoid offending the tobacco industry.
And if you look at the kind of junk that the state is now producing, it looks like Philip Morris did it. You know, it looks like, if you go down the street here and look at the material they are putting out on youth access, and don't sell cigarettes to kids, it looks like the Philip Morris Action on Access campaign. And I think that there are many ways that the tobacco industry keeps the public from being adequately informed. One is trying to intimidate the media. The other is buying politicians the way they've bought the Governor of California.
Q: AND OTHER POLITICIANS?
Glantz: And other politicians? He's not the first. No. And I think against that backdrop, Bill Clinton's willingness to allow the FDA to move forward and to try to impose some meaningful regulations on tobacco products as nicotine delivery devices, is a tremendously courageous thing to do. And you know, to bring the whole thing full circle, and it's been reported in the press that our work helped convince Clinton to do that. It happened just at the time that he had been deciding to go with some rinky-dinky voluntary agreement, or to allow Kessler to move forward, our papers came out, and I've heard from several people that he actually read them and was very moved by them. And I think it's an example of how knowledge is power.
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