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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

23-Oct-2014

Contact: Elizabeth Fernandez elizabeth.fernandez@ucsf.edu 415-502-6397 University of California - San Francisco @ucsf

California's position as a leader in tobacco control is under threat, according to a new report from the UC San Francisco Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Once a highly successful program and international model, the state's anti-tobacco efforts now appear to be waning due to the decreased spending power of the California Tobacco Control Program, a resurgence of the tobacco industry in state politics, and the emergence of new unregulated tobacco products.

"The combination of weak leadership at the state level, willingness of political leaders to accept tobacco industry money, and inflation eroding the spending power of the California Tobacco Control Program are compromising its effectiveness, which will lead, even in the short term, to more smoking," said Stanton Glantz, PhD, UCSF professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

The report will be published on Thursday, Oct. 23 in eScholarship, which provides open-access scholarly publishing services to the University of California.

The report covers tobacco policymaking and tobacco industry political influence in California from 2007 to 2014 and is the latest in a series of reports on the state dating to 1976. It is part of a longstanding research project that tracks the effect of tobacco programs in protecting public health. To date, 29 states have been studied.

The California report draws from a comprehensive collection of sources including legislative records, campaign contribution data, lobbying reports, media reports, interviews, and peer reviewed journals.

In 1989, the California Tobacco Control Program was established after voters enacted Proposition 99 the Tobacco Tax and Health Protection Act. It has since achieved great success in reducing tobacco use by Californians. From 1989 to 2012, the percentage of adult smokers in California dropped from 22.7 percent to 12.6 percent, and while nearly 2.5 billion packs of cigarettes were sold in California in 1988, only 951 million packs were sold by 2012. Between 1989 and 2008, the California Tobacco Control Program cost $2.4 billion to run but led to a cumulative healthcare savings of $134 billion.

Despite these triumphs, the program is now much smaller and less aggressive than in its early years. By 2014, inflation had reduced the program's spending power to 53 percent of what it was when it began.

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California's tobacco control efforts losing steam, finds UCSF report