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Excerpts from UP FOR GRABS: Groups are jockeying for a piece of the state's tobacco settlement, but anti-smoking forces will get none.

By Alan Judd, The Atlanta Journal [08/22/99]

Everyone seems to be angling for a piece of Georgia's $ 4.8 billion settlement from the tobacco industry.

Tobacco farmers want reimbursement for the financial hardships they think the settlement will cause. Republican legislators want to pay for tax cuts. Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes wants to split the money between economic development in tobacco-producing counties and health care programs.

Just one group is staying out of what may become the biggest political fight of next year's legislative session: the people who run the state's anti- smoking program. There's nothing in it for them.

The state sued the tobacco industry to stop a generations-old cycle of smoking and illness that kills an estimated 10,000 Georgians a year.

But now, as officials await the first of 25 annual payments from the tobacco industry, the first of which will arrive no later than next June 30, it appears that smoking prevention will continue to get the same amount of state money it has always received: none.

Just 19 states are using even a small part of their shares of the national tobacco settlement on tobacco control. Among them are three tobacco-growing states --- North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. But most states, including Georgia, are spending or planning to spend their settlement proceeds on other purposes.

The fact that the state's smoking-prevention and public-health officials aren't involved in that decision illustrates the dichotomy between the reasons the state filed the lawsuit and the political realities surrounding the windfall that the lawsuit's settlement provided.

"With the tobacco settlement, we've got a historic opportunity," said Kristen Betts of the American Cancer Society's Georgia chapter. "Our state sued to prevent this from happening in the future and to help people who are victims of tobacco use currently. If we do anything else with (the settlement money), that is just a missed opportunity --- and a real shame."

A chance for 'larger changes'

If Barnes sees the settlement as an opportunity to fight smoking, he isn't saying so.

The governor, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had said for months that the state should spend all the tobacco money on health care. This summer, though, he changed his position and suggested that while two-thirds still should go for health care --- paying for existing programs and providing medical coverage to uninsured Georgians --- the rest should make up for economic losses in rural areas that depend on tobacco production. Last week, Barnes appointed a 21-member advisory committee on rural development, and its chairman, Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, said the panel will help the governor decide how to spend the settlement.

For now, though, Barnes is "really not going any further than health care and rural economic development," said Joselyn Butler, the governor's spokeswoman. "That's it."

Perhaps it should not be surprising that smoking prevention is missing from Barnes' mix. The concept has never been popular in Georgia, the nation's sixth-largest tobacco-growing state. The tobacco industry has long been a powerful force in the Capitol, anti-smoking activists say, and campaign- finance records show that the industry donated $ 51,752 to Barnes last year.

Several states launched well-funded anti-smoking campaigns even before the $ 206 billion national tobacco settlement was reached last fall. But Georgia did not. During the past 15 years, other states nearly tripled the average excise tax on cigarettes, from 14 cents a pack to almost 39 cents, hoping that higher prices would reduce smoking, especially among teenagers. But Georgia's cigarette tax has remained the nation's fifth-lowest: 12 cents a pack, the same rate since 1971.

Despite its history, Georgia now has a chance to initiate what Terry Pechacek of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called a " comprehensive, sustainable and accountable" anti-smoking effort.

Georgia, according to a recent CDC report, could effectively fight tobacco use by spending between $ 41 million and $ 107 million a year --- about one- fourth to one-half of the payments the state will receive annually from the tobacco industry. By the end of the current fiscal year, the state will receive about $ 216 million, and it is scheduled to collect $ 169.9 million in 2001, $ 204 million in 2002, $ 205.9 million in 2003, $ 171.9 million a year from 2004 to 2007, $ 175.3 million annually from 2008 to 2017 and $ 196. 5 million a year from 2018 to 2025.

Such a program, the CDC said, would discourage young people from starting to smoke, help current smokers stop, restrict non-smokers' exposure to secondhand smoke and fight disproportionate smoking rates among ethnic and racial minorities.

"Most states are not spending very much," said Pechacek, the associate director of science for the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health. "Most states are spending nickels and dimes per capita. What our research is showing is there is a relationship between the level of investment and the impact on the health indicators of youth smoking rates and adult smoking rates and environmental smoke exposure. Larger investment leads to larger changes."

The stakes are high, he said. The CDC estimates that 400,000 Georgia teenagers will become long-term smokers --- and that 130,000 of those will die prematurely of tobacco-related diseases.

'Truth' gets results

Florida began taking action in 1998, spending $ 70 million of its $ 840 million annual tobacco payment to wage what might best be described as guerrilla warfare against the tobacco industry.

Hoping to attract the attention of young smokers or potential smokers, teenagers recruited by the state --- members of what they dubbed the "Truth Squad" --- helped develop a series of edgy television commercials. One featured a group of teenage girls making harassing telephone calls to magazines that run tobacco ads. Another showed two teenage boys, one wearing a hidden camera, driving up to a cigarette plant and asking to see the mythical Marlboro Man; the spot concludes with one of the boys noting, almost parenthetically, that the actor who played the role died of lung cancer.

The idea behind the ads was to make not smoking seem as rebellious --- as cool --- to young people as smoking has been to generations of teenagers before them.

"They've come up with some real innovative ideas," Wayne McDaniel, acting director of Florida's Office of Tobacco Control, said of the "disrespectful" teenagers and their ad campaign. "And they have been willing to put their names and efforts on the line to show us it can be done."

More important, though, health officials say, are the results: In the campaign's first year, smoking rates dropped from 27.4 percent to 25.2 percent among Florida high school students and from 18.5 percent to 15 percent among middle-school students. Those figures represented the largest annual decline among those age groups in any state since 1980.

The politics of tobacco

Persuading lawmakers to spend tobacco-settlement money on smoking prevention, Moore said, requires a high-profile advocate --- a governor, an attorney general or a legislative leader. Georgia has no such advocate.

Rather, lawmakers will hear compelling arguments from people who have their own ideas about how to spend the money.

State Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin, for instance, will tell legislators that tobacco farmers deserve a share of the settlement to replace money they --- and their communities --- are losing because of declining cigarette smoking. He'll seek part of the settlement even though Georgia growers will draw from a separate $ 5.15 billion account the tobacco industry is providing to tobacco-producing states.

Republican legislative leaders will argue that before using the settlement money for any other purpose, lawmakers should dedicate part of it to a tax cut.

In Georgia, as in most other states, anti-smoking activists say, the grab for the tobacco money demonstrates that spending decisions will be based not on public health concerns, but on politics.

"Historically, politicians said they were concerned about tobacco but lacked the resources to address the problem," said Matthew Myers, executive vice president of the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids. "Now that the resources have been provided, they've had to run for cover to find another excuse. . . . We won't see serious, nationwide action until the body politic demands it. We're closer to that today than we have ever been in our history. But what has happened in the statehouses this year demonstrates we're not there."

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