Conclusion
Thanks to the strong leadership that Ken Kizer showed at the Department of Health Services, the Proposition 99 program got up and running quickly. The media campaign was developed rapidly—so rapidly that it was on the air before the tobacco industry and its political allies could stop it. Rather than offering traditional anti-smoking messages, the media campaign set an aggressive tone that confronted the tobacco industry
In contrast, the schools failed to make effective use of the money to develop and implement specific programs for reducing tobacco use. The justification was based on a broader desire to reduce high-risk behavior among students, but the schools never produced convincing evidence that this program worked. This failure to develop effective tobacco control programs stemmed partly from the unique financial and political problems that the schools faced in post-Proposition 13 California and partly from a lack of leadership or even interest in tobacco control within CDE.
These two different approaches to spending the money that Proposition 99 made available were reflected in how these two communities reacted to potential controversy. The DHS programs often sought to create controversy as a way of engaging the public and increasing the visibility of the tobacco issue. The schools sought to avoid controversy. DHS sought to build a local network of people and institutions seeking to confront the tobacco industry and stimulate social change; the schools were trying to survive.
All the pressure was amplified by the size of the amount of money that Proposition 99 had suddenly made available and the knowledge that AB 75 would last only twenty-one months before the Legislature would have to pass a new law to continue authorizing the Proposition 99 programs. Joel Moskowitz, the project director for one of DHS's early evaluation contracts, observed, “The Legislature basically had set this whole thing up for failure anyway with the short enabling legislation. …When they passed AB 75, the word had gone out that this program was going to end with the demise of AB 75. The Legislature was going to rip off the money. I think that many people believed that, on the health side as well as the education side, the Legislature wasn't real serious about this program, just because of the short period of the enabling legislation.”[42]
Nearly two years before AB 75 passed, the health groups had originated the idea for a sunset provision in Senator Diane Watson's SB 2133 to ensure experimentation, evaluation, and accountability in the new programs
At the same time that tobacco control advocates were struggling to get the programs up and running and develop some idea of what worked and what did not work, the tobacco industry was already developing a sophisticated understanding of the damage that the media campaign and the local programs were doing and could do. The industry also recognized that the schools would not be a problem.
The fact that AB 75 would end only twenty-one months after it passed created unanticipated political problems for the people implementing the programs. It would take the Legislature several months to pass new authorizing legislation and additional time to launch the new Proposition 99 programs, which meant that proponents would be back in the Legislature debating the future of Proposition 99. This situation would create tremendous political problems for tobacco control advocates interested in defending the fledgling programs.
No one understood this reality better than the tobacco industry and its allies who wanted to see Health Education money diverted to medical services.