Proposition 99 has never cost the state a dime. The 1988 initiative raised cigarette taxes by 25 cents a pack and placed the proceeds in a half dozen dedicated accounts. Most of the $550 million generated each year supports medical services for the poor. But the law reserves 5 percent of the revenue for tobacco-related research and 20 percent for educational programs to discourage smoking. The most visible is a $16 million-a-year media campaign designed to counter the cigarette companies’ better-funded promotions. The ads portray the manufacturers as greedy and amoral, accusing them of “the selective exploitation of minorities, the seduction of the young and the promotion of suicide.” The tobacco industry (which fought furiously to defeat Proposition 99 at the polls) denies those charges and dismisses the ads as so much political rhetoric. “They don’t provide information,” says Brennan Dawson of the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s public-relations arm. “They spend taxpayers’ money to attack a legal industry.”
There is little question that Proposition 99 has helped discourage smoking in California. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, documented a 17 percent decline in the state’s smoking rate between 1987 and 1991 (from 26.8 percent of all adults to 22.2 percent). The national smoking rate declined by just 8 percent over the same period. The tax itself clearly deserves much of the credit; the sharpest drop occurred after the price of cigarettes jumped and before the ads started running. But state officials credit the new educational efforts as well. According to state Senate staffer John Miller, half of the California survey respondents who quit smoking in 1990 said the ads influenced them and 35 percent cited the ads as their primary motivation.
Even so, Wilson is asking the legislature to kill the ad campaign and divert $90 million from the initiative’s other research and education programs over the next two budget years. Administration officials insist the move is a temporary necessity, not an attack on Proposition 99. “We’re in a fiscal crisis,” says Kassy Perry, a spokeswoman for the governor. “The alternative is to cut medical services to the poor. That’s what we’re trying to avoid. If someone has a better idea, we’d love to hear it.” Critics counter that the action will do little to close the state’s multibillion-dollar deficit and may ultimately exacerbate it, by saddling the health system with more cigarette related illness. They also contend that since the funds raised by the initiative are not general revenues, the governor has no legal authority to move them around. The American Lung Association, which spearheaded Proposition 99, is now suing to have the media campaign reinstated. A California judge has given Wilson until April 24 to win legislative approval for his plan. If the governor prevails, the nation’s largest antismoking effort could end up in ashes. But the cigarette makers shouldn’t rest easy yet. Lawmakers in several states and Congress are working to devise similar programs. And as California’s record makes clear, education can be strong medicine.
