Tobacco War: "d0e1581"

The CMA and the Tobacco Industry

Initiative proponents wanted the CMA involved because, unlike the voluntary health agencies, it had significant political muscle and it was rich and accustomed to spending money for political purposes, including initiative campaigns. The tobacco tax was also appealing to the CMA because it created a new pool of money—$600 million a year—to pay for medical services. From the beginning, however, the relationship between the health groups and the CMA was rocky. Indeed, in 1993, Connelly reflected, “If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have had CMA in the room, because they were more trouble than they were worth.”^[3]

The tobacco industry was also interested in the CMA's deep pockets and saw that keeping the CMA out of the upcoming fight over the initiative was crucial. The industry knew that it would be difficult and expensive to beat the tobacco tax initiative at the ballot box and decided that the best strategy was to block proponents from collecting enough signatures to qualify the initiative in the first place.^[7] Since it costs money to run a signature drive and the CMA was the most likely source of big money, the tobacco industry turned its attention to convincing the CMA to stop supporting the tobacco tax effort. An A-K Associates report explained strategy this way:

Recognizing that the most effective approach to any such battle is to contain and, if possible, take away potential resources from the proponents, our initial goal was to contain the California Medical Association, who had already pledged $1 million to qualify the initiative. With this kind of resources, there is no way the initiative could be kept off the ballot. A game plan was formulated to discourage and keep the CMA out of the initiative. This included possible counter anti-medicine initiatives and legislation, as well as the use of A-K's considerable contacts within organized medicine. Having already expended considerable effort in this area during the Legislative phase of the program we turned our attention almost full time to dissuading the CMA from joining the fray.
We were immensely successful in this regard. CMA, after considerable pressure, decided to “tokenize” the tax initiative campaign with, at best, a $25,000 contribution and the possible use of their mailing list for a solicitation letter. To date CMA has not actually given the proponents any campaign
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money. The decision was made that no punitive action would be taken in regard to anti-medicine initiatives or legislation as long as the CMA maintained this non-participatory attitude toward the tobacco tax initiative. Following are the major activities that have taken place to date:
Met with key organized medicine leaders to continue to dissuade them from actively participating in the proposed tobacco tax initiative.
Generated some well placed and vocal complaining from organized rank and file membership throughout the state to the CMA's Council (organized medicine's governing body in California).
Arranged for the Council to take the policy position that all requests for political issue contributions of either staff or resources must first go to their Finance Committee for approval before the Council can take action. This effectively took the tobacco tax initiative issue out of the hands of the current CMA leadership and placed it in the hands of the “old guard.” This placed a huge roadblock in front of people like Dr. Armstrong, the current CMA President, who is an avowed anti-tobacco crusader and was one of the major witnesses in support of ACA 14 in the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee hearings.
Made multiple trips to San Francisco to meet with “key” CMA executive staff to firm up their opposition to CMA's participation in the initiative.
Arranged for the Golden State Medical Society (statewide black physicians organization) to object to the CMA's participation in the initiative.
Met with several legislators who are anti-medicine for various personal and political reasons to have anti-medicine legislation drafted and leaked to the right CMA leaders.^[7] [emphasis different from original]

Initiative proponents complained that the CMA was not enthusiastically supporting the initiative effort, but they had no idea of the depth of the connections between the CMA and the tobacco industry.