Conclusion

At a project directors' meeting held in Palm Springs in June 1998, TCS staffer April Roeseler, in a speech to the directors, commented that TCS's unspoken motto was “we hire people who believe you can never have too much stress.” That probably described the jobs of most project directors as well. For tobacco control advocates, Proposition 99 was to be their opportunity to put in place a model program, with its own funding source, that assured tobacco control advocates would be in the field as continuously as the tobacco industry. That the political process would not give them the freedom to produce that program was frustrating. One LLA director summed it up this way: “We had a pretty clear idea of what we need to do.…I think if the campaign had been allowed to work the way it was designed to work, I think we would be in pretty good shape. If we had a strong media campaign continuously and we had the counties and schools funded continuously, if everybody had been able to work the way it was supposed to, I think it would have been a lot more successful.”^[105] The successes in California were instead achieved only in the face of a hostile tobacco industry, an equally hostile political system, and a body of advocates at the state level who were often slow to act.

The long periods with no advertisements or no new advertisements in the media and the shift away from a hard-hitting campaign to softer,

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youth-focused messages reduced the effectiveness of the California Tobacco Control Program.^[3] The failure to implement a timely educational campaign about California's smoke-free workplace law, particularly the bar provisions, has made it more difficult to implement the law and, indirectly, supported tobacco industry efforts to neutralize the law.

For the campaign to succeed in the long run, it is necessary for the nongovernmental organizations, especially the voluntary health agencies, to be willing to hold those charged with implementing the program accountable. This is often difficult for them to do, since it requires acting against established political powers, not just the tobacco industry. What is clear from the California experience, however, is that there are as many opportunities for political interference with the anti-tobacco education program through administrative actions as there are through the legislative process. Strong action by outside groups is capable of influencing legislation and program content for the better. Lacking such intervention, it is likely that in the long run the tobacco industry will counter the program just as effectively through administrative controls as by stealing the money.