Nearly two dozen former U.S. health officials teamed up on Tuesday to demand that major cigarette companies keep paying for a campaign designed to prevent children from smoking.
But the companies rejected the appeal and launched their own attacks against states for diverting tobacco-firm money intended for use in no-smoking efforts under a 1998 legal settlement.
“By failing to continue funding this campaign, the tobacco companies condemn millions of children to premature death and disability,” Joseph Califano, who was secretary of health, education and welfare from 1977 to 1979, told a news conference by the group of former health officials.
Because they have lost market share, the tobacco companies are no longer obligated to contribute $300 million a year to a campaign against teen and child smoking, known as “truth,” which was established under terms of a 1998 settlement to lawsuits by 46 states.
Companies made their last payment this year to the fund. But the bipartisan group, which includes all living former secretaries of health, all former surgeons general, and all former directors of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asked that the contributions continue.
“A child who reaches age 21 without smoking, abusing alcohol or using illegal drugs is virtually certain never to do so,” said Califano, who is leading the new group.
The organization is called the Citizens’ Commission to Protect the Truth. It has set up a Web site at www.protectthetruth.org to try to collect 1 million signatures to persuade the tobacco companies to keep funding the effort.
The companies said they would not.
Not a penny more
“We have fulfilled our financial obligations, which were substantial,” said R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc. spokesman Seth Moskowitz. “They were mutually agreed upon and we are not going to make any more payments.”
Lorillard Tobacco Company, part of Loews Corp., launched its own counter-attack. Lorillard vice-president Steve Watson accused anti-smoking advocates of “taking the low road and attacking the tobacco companies, rather than looking at the real issues relevant to reducing smoking.”
He questioned states’ use of the money.
Under the 1998 settlement, the four major tobacco companies agreed to pay $206 billion over 25 years to compensate governments for the cost of caring for sick smokers.
Effective campaign
They also agreed to spend $300 million a year to fund what became the anti-smoking campaign, but only as long as they controlled 99.05 percent of the cigarette market.
That market share has shrunk due to higher retail cigarette prices.
Califano said the campaign has worked.
“In the two years following the launch of “truth,” cigarette smoking among high school students fell from 28 percent to 22.9 percent -- a drop of more than one million smokers,” he said.
Organizers of the effort to save the anti-smoking campaign acknowledged that cash-strapped state governments have been using money from the agreement to shore up their tattered budgets and to fund programs from education to health care.
“Too many of the states, unfortunately, are using little, if any, of the money to fund anti-tobacco or other public health initiatives,” said William Sorrell, Vermont’s Attorney General and president-elect of the National Association of Attorneys General.
