CONFIDENTIAL PAPERS EXPOSE DEALS OF CIGARETTE-MAKERS

Variety of tactics used to neutralize state medical group

Confidential documents have disclosed that U.S. cigarette-makers seduced
and trumped the California Medical Association in a battle to block tobacco
taxes 11 years ago.

The documents, released in connection with a lawsuit against tobacco
companies by the state of Minnesota, offer insight into the
behind-the-scenes deal-making of Sacramento politics, and show just how
serious a threat American cigarette-makers saw in California's tobacco
control program a decade ago.

One memorandum by tobacco industry lobbyist A-K Associates Inc. describes
how the group helped scuttle a 1987 attempt to put a tobacco tax measure on
the ballot, even using personal relationships with legislative aides to spy
on the opposing camp.

``This document is just incredible. It confirms all our worst suspicions,''
said Cynthia Hallett, associate director of the Berkeley-based anti-smoking
group Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.

The memos were uncovered by Edith Balbach, an assistant to University of
California at San Francisco Professor Stanton Glantz, who sent her to
peruse thousands of documents released under a settlement between
cigarette-makers and Minnesota.

Memos show that tobacco lobbyists were in daily contact with the state's
largest doctors' organization and believed they neutralized the CMA by
sidestepping its elected leaders and by threatening to support
``anti-medicine initiatives.''

The lobbyists claim to have met ``personally'' with 13 key leaders of the
CMA, including its then executive director Bob Eisner. ``We turned our
attention almost full time to dissuading CMA from joining the fray,''
according to the memo.

In what appears to have been a deft move of inside politicking, A-K
Associates said it ``arranged'' to have the CMA's governing council to
clear any requests for political contributions with its Finance Committee.
``This effectively took the tobacco initiative issue out of the hands of
the current CMA leadership and placed it in the hands of the ``old guard,''
the memo explained.

The maneuver ``placed a huge roadblock in front of people like Dr.
(Frederick) Armstrong, the current CMA president, who is an avowed
anti-tobacco crusader,'' the memo said.

It was a strategy that A-K Associates called ``immensely successful'' at
the time, after the doctors group decided to ``tokenize'' its support for a
tobacco tax initiative with $25,000, instead of the $1 million it allegedly
had initially pledged.

``Our initial goal was to contain the California Medical Association, who
had already pledged $1 million to qualify the initiative,'' the memo
explained. ``With this kind of resources, there is no way the initiative
could be kept off the ballot.''

The memo also describes a ``game plan'' to keep the CMA out of the
initiative fight. ``This included possible counter anti-medicine
initiatives and legislation, as well as the use of A-K's considerable
contacts within organized medicine.''

Steve Thompson, chief lobbyist for the California Medical Association, said
he has no idea how accurate the memo is because he did not join the group
until 1992. ``I don't know how much of this is just (tobacco) lobbyists
feathering their nests. I do know that the CMA never pledged $1 million.''

Tom Konovaloff, president of A-K Associates, said it is his firms policy to
never comment ``about clients past or present.'' He said he has not
represented tobacco interests in Sacramento for several years.

One year after the A-K memo was written, California voters passed
Proposition 99 that added 25 cents to a pack of cigarettes to raise money
for anti-smoking and other health campaigns.

Subsequent documents suggest that the tobacco industry worked with the
doctors' lobby on campaigns to divert money from anti-smoking programs to
medical-care programs for the poor after voters passed the initiative a
decade ago.

Tobacco Institute president Samuel Chilcote, Jr., in an April 1990 memo,
noted that representatives of county governments and ``physician groups''
had expressed interest in ``working with us so that they may receive monies
that are currently earmarked to the media `education' campaign.''

``These avenues,'' the Tobacco Institute president wrote, ``continue to be
explored with the California State Association of Counties and the
California Medical Association.''

1998 San Francisco Chronicle Page A13

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)