What were they smoking? How the anti-tobacco movement blew the opportunity of a lifetime. - 'Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars' - book review

Washington Monthly, June, 2002 by John Schwartz

SMOKE IN THEIR EYES: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars by Michael Pertschuk Vanderbilt University Press, $49.95

IN 1997, THE TOBACCO WARS SEEMED TO be turning. The anti-tobacco movement, ever the loser against a wily, deep-pocketed industry, seemed on the verge of winning its most thorough victory since 1633, when Sultan Murad IV ordered tobacco users executed as infidels. The industry was on the run, hemmed in by lawsuits from state attorneys general, class-action lawyers, and a growing number of individual smokers and their survivors. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was gaining in its efforts to regulate tobacco products.

Then, in June 1997, the states and plaintiffs attorneys announced a sweeping settlement with the industry that included regulation by the FDA, including voluntary restrictions on advertising and marketing, and even a possibility of regulating cigarette ingredients that might have led to safer smokes. In return, the industry wanted some form of protection from lawsuits. New laws implementing elements of the settlement began making their way through Congress. It was nothing short of astonishing.

Within a year, though, the momentum had dissipated, and the effort to bring the industry into a new age had imploded. Though a settlement with states would be reached by the end of 1998, the broad initiatives proposed in June 1997 were replaced by relatively toothless reforms and a pile of money, which the states generally have used to fill potholes, meet budget shortfalls, and do anything but treat tobacco-related illness and reduce tobacco use. How did everything fall so far so fast? And why do so many other promising movements end in a tragic fizzle?

Part of the answer can be found in Michael Pertschuk's Smoke in Their Eyes: Lessons in Movement Leadership from the Tobacco Wars. The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission from 1977 to 1984, Pertschuk has spent recent decades training consumer activists through his organization, the Advocacy Institute. In this book, he asks "how a movement propelled toward a moment of historic opportunity by a cadre of passionate, resourceful, and gifted leaders fell victim, in part, to their conflicting visions of the Good."

He enjoyed a prime vantage point to view the shifting fortunes of the tobacco wars and knew all of the players on the activist side. Most of all, he knew Matthew L. Myers, a longtime anti-tobacco activist and a leader of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. The negotiators of the initial tobacco settlement had chosen Myers as an honest broker who could represent the interests of the public-health community at the negotiating table.

Myers wrestled with his conscience over his role, but, ultimately, he entered into the negotiations, seeing them as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to wrestle public health reforms out of the historically combative companies. For his efforts, he was vilified by his own movement for trying to help shape a settlement with the tobacco industry.

You could be forgiven for assuming this book to be an arcana-packed snorefest that settles scores without providing truly useful information. But Pertschuk is a gifted storyteller who understands that the lessons he has wrung out of this nightmarish experience shed light on what's been going wrong with many other movements. Pertschuk, who as a Senate aide in the 1960s pushed cigarette warning labels through Congress in a grueling game of inches, knew how incremental progress against the industry could be, and he thought Myers could help seize the moment and win advances that would have been unimaginable just a few years before.

But the anti-tobacco activists' efforts to strike a deal were bitterly opposed, with the opposition falling into two camps. One, led by such advocates as Stanton A. Glantz of the University of California-San Francisco, argued that the settlement was an industry ploy, which would ultimately be a tobacco win, engineered by the best lobbyists and lawmakers money could buy. These advocates wanted to see the industry driven to bankruptcy. What's more, because they believed Washington was a place where real reforms would always be co-opted, they favored local and state action instead.

The other camp, exemplified by public-health advocates like former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler, believed that good things could happen in Washington, but pushed for ever stronger measures against the industry and higher taxes on tobacco.

Initially, the first group was the loudest, and it pilloried both the companies and Myers, accusing him of betraying the movement to which he had dedicated decades of his life. At one particularly low point, a Nader-related group calling itself Battle Against Sin in Corporate Society picketed the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids, handing out fliers with pictures of Myers and fellow center official Bill Novelli that said they were "WANTED FOR SELLING OUT THE PUBLIC'S HEALTH." They suggested that Myers's group expected to make millions in administering the settlement funds--a lie that lingered long after Myers and the group pledged to refuse any such money.