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Implementing the Tobacco Control Program
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Encouraging Diversity

Beginning with AB 75, tobacco control programs were required to focus on certain target populations, especially pregnant women, minorities, and youth. Public health groups viewed these subpopulations as important


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targets because pregnant women who stop smoking early nearly eliminate the excess risk of delivering a low-birth-weight infant and because the tobacco industry was targeting minorities and youth in its advertising. In agreeing to focus on youth and pregnant women, tobacco control groups may have played into the hands of tobacco interests. After all, Nielsen, Merksamer had recommended the Child Health and Disability Prevention (CHDP) and Maternal and Child Health programs as good candidates for the diversion of Health Education Account funds.[25] The industry appears to accept tobacco prevention programs focused on pregnant women and youth because they have limited impact on cigarette consumption. At any given time, there are not many pregnant women, so messages directed at this group will not be relevant to most of the population. And primary prevention programs directed solely at youth are of limited effectiveness because they may inadvertently reinforce the belief that smoking is an acceptable adult behavior.[26]

Fortunately, TCS never interpreted this focus narrowly, and the result was a campaign that addressed the general population while including these groups. The effort to create an inclusive program brought a wide range of community-


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based organizations into the program, such as the Asian American Health Forum, the Watts Health Foundation, the California Healthy Cities Project, the East Los Angeles Health Task Force, and KCET Public Television.

For public health professionals working at the state and local level, it was a challenge to reach minority populations because health departments tended to be made up primarily of white, middle-class people. The LLAs addressed this problem by encouraging groups that were already working in the target communities to apply for LLA grants to fund tobacco control activities in those same communities. While this approach often worked, it ignored the need for capacity building around the tobacco issue. As a result, as the program evolved, the LLAs developed more directed strategies to involve these community groups. One county eventually created a “Tobacco 101” orientation that a group had to complete before they were eligible to receive grants from the health department. Eventually TCS also funded Ethnic Networks, which provided resources and networking capacity to community-based programs funded either directly by TCS or by the LLA to serve African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos on a statewide basis.[27]

As the thrust of the LLA programs began to shift away from cessation to community-based, policy-oriented work, the reliance on community-based organizations (CBOs) also meant that these groups had to be educated in the new paradigm and away from cessation classes. According to one LLA director, leaders of these community organizations often reacted skeptically: “`Why the hell should I be interested in this? I know that tobacco's bad, so what?' Moving them more toward looking at this issue globally, how does it impact them, what can they do about it. And again giving them the skills then to say, `Okay, now that I know that this is bad, what do I do?' Trying to get the CBOs to understand that they had to have an ongoing relationship with the community, to get them to understand why it's important to have smoke-free environments’ (emphasis added).[28] While there were difficulties in involving the new constituencies in tobacco control in California, community activities were to emerge as one of the strongest and most innovative aspects of the California Tobacco Control Program.

Peter Hanauer, a veteran of the Proposition 5, 10, and P campaigns, was impressed with the difference that this outreach made in the tobacco control movement:

Things had changed. I walked into a meeting in San Francisco,…this was sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, and I had been used to going to meetings with almost all white males, a few women occasionally, a token black occasionally. I walked into this meeting and it was like every spectrum of San Francisco society was represented there. …And I was overwhelmed when I walked in there and saw all of these people from all the different minority communities, who were up in arms because they had come to realize that the industry was preying on them, that the industry was not the good Samaritan that it pretended to be.[29]

While the original goal of involving community organizations had simply been to reach their constituencies with tobacco control messages, this effort was having much deeper effects. In particular, it was beginning to undermine the acceptance that the tobacco industry had built up over the years in these communities by providing financial support for community groups.

The effort to create diversity through grants, however, was more successful than creating diversity through volunteers. The LLAs were required by TCS to create a diverse coalition to help with their programs. But there were almost universal problems in trying to keep a coalition active and involved. In two of the fifteen counties where interviews were conducted, the coalition was an active body, involved in program design and local politics. Dynamic chairs from outside the LLA provided a great


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deal of leadership. In the other counties, the coalition was more reactive, made up of paid staff from other public agencies, the voluntary health agencies, and grantees.

TCS's push for coalitions brought mixed reactions from the LLAs, as did some of TCS's other actions. In the early days, life for the LLAs was chaotic, and people at the county level had mixed feelings about the TCS. In general, the directors of the larger, urban LLAs seemed to be happier with TCS than the smaller, rural ones. One LLA director from a large county made this comment:

They [TCS] were very, very supportive. And TCS has always been profoundly advanced in terms of policy, Carol Russell [who headed the local programs unit] especially. They could not have been better. They funded teleconferences through ANR [ANRF, American Nonsmokers' Rights Foundation]. They had workshops directly. I mean, they just did everything they could; they understood early on how important this was. And they began to encourage us to move away from changing individual behavior more into the community norm and changing the environment.[23] [emphasis added]

Those working in the rural areas, however, felt from the beginning that the TCS program was not designed with them in mind. One blunt LLA director said,

They [the staff at TCS] are very controlling, very, very strong. …TCS has a very strong hand in what we do and what we don't do and how we do it. They want it on the paper in a certain way. They want us to do X, Y, Z and only X, Y, Z. And don't be interjecting any of your own creative problems into it. You do what you are told, you accept our money, and you play with our money within our realms. …They have no sense or feel [of] what is going to happen in a rural environment. We've never been asked by TCS, not to my knowledge have we ever been asked for input on what our areas of priority should be.[24]

A number of the rural LLA directors, when they were interviewed in 1998, were still stung by early accusations that they were racist when they protested that the targeted groups excluded the vast majority of their population, which was white.

The other major complaint from the rural areas had to do with the concentration of the media campaign in the major media markets. According to one LLA director, “When the media campaign was all over the state, that really was good, that was just so helpful and so beneficial. And then they started cutting down on…media coming up into this area, based on…population. …California does extend 300 miles north of Sacramento, and I was really indignant about [it] when they cut the media. And I still think it's a big loss to us.”[30] In another rural county, the LLA director wished that the advertisements at least existed in a format that could be shown in the local movie theater.[24] In general, there was a feeling that not a lot of creative thinking had gone into reaching the rural markets. This problem was aggravated by the dominance in some rural areas of out-of-state satellite television and other media.

Some of these tensions between the field and TCS would remain throughout


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the program, reflecting the struggle between local-level program autonomy and state-level control. On March 12, 1993, TCS hosted a Statewide Projects Meeting in San Francisco, where the LLAs again expressed a desire for TCS to provide more leadership and less project supervision.[31] Despite these problems, the local programs funded by Proposition 99 emerged as a key element in its success. They quickly evolved away from traditional smoking cessation efforts to a variety of approaches designed to change the social environment—through passage of local clean indoor air ordinances and other efforts to counter directly the influence of the tobacco industry in their communities. In addition, TCS directly funded some service delivery projects whose scope was multicounty and sometimes statewide. In one innovative project, a tobacco-free race car brought a tobacco-free message to racetracks, a venue where pro-tobacco messages, both on the cars themselves and around the track, had gone unchallenged. The involvement of minority groups and other new players deepened and strengthened the statewide constituency that was working actively to reduce tobacco consumption in California. In California's war against tobacco, the media campaign provided the air cover and the local groups provided the ground troops.


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