Tobacco industry activity in Texas

This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch funded from 2006 - 2009 by the American Legacy Foundation.

An army of tobacco industry lobbyists worked hard in Texas in spring of 2009 to battle a clean indoor air law and a new formula for taxing spit tobacco. The industry employed 40 lobbyists, seven of whom are former state legislators, to beat back the popular proposals. The smoking ban had gained hard-won support from the state's restaurant association, and enjoyed support among voters, who had already approved public smoking laws in 28 cities within the state. More than half of the Texas House of Representatives had signed on as co-authors of the bill. The other bill would have taxed spit tobacco by weight rather than by retail price, raising an extra $9 million to be put towards paying down the student loans of 450 doctors in exchange for them working in medically underserved areas of the state. Some Republicans argued against the smoking ban by casting smoking as a property right, an industry argument aimed at re-directing attention to secondhand smoke onto a non-health-related topic to help defeat smoking bans. Lobbyists ultimately succeeded in watering down the clean indoor air bill by inserting a slew of exceptions to undermine the intent of the bill, a strategy also linked to the industry: a 1986 Philip Morris strategy document about defeating smoking restrictions states, "Most state and local laws are very stringent when initially proposed. In most cases we are able to water down the final product [so that] penalties are often minimal and the restrictions negligible." Lobbyists stalled the spit tobacco tax measure by blocking it from getting added to the agenda for consideration.

Sourcewatch resources

• Karl Rove (Tobacco industry lobbyist in Texas)

External resources

• Project Smokeout - Web site that reviews secret and internal communications from tobacco industry executives, managers, field personnel and surreptitious "Grasstops" in Texas to expose the penetrating role, and in many cases, dominating influence national tobacco companies and tobacco entities exerted across the region.

• Meredith L. Nixon BA, Stanton A. Glantz Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco Tobacco Industry Political Activity and Tobacco Control Policy Making in Texas: 1980-2002 May 1, 2002. Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Tobacco Control Policy Making: United States. Paper TX2002.

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