I’m bad about keeping a blog. Since no one reads it anyway it becomes little more than a journal. But I need to follow up on an opportunity I was given presenting a short bit to the current Arkansas Department of Health Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Program (TPCP) Grantees at their Quarterly meeting at Pulaski Tech recently. The bulk of the day was an Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights training by their Southern States Regional Consultant, Onjewel Smith.
My presentation was little more than a combination of a perspective of how public health has always been short sighted, when it came to dealing with the tobacco industry from as far back as the Frank Statement, and a synopsis of a paper I delivered at the 2009 ASH Wales Conference in Cardiff, Wales. The Cardiff presentation was an overview of successes Tobacco Free Marion County had in reducing BRFSS adult smoking rate numbers making use of a coordinated and comprehensive public relations campaign. CTFA’s Katherine Donald suggested that since my gig came while everyone was eating their boxed lunches I was the Keynote Speaker. I told her that if I ever got around to writing a C.V. it would be.
Dr. Gary Wheeler, acting medical head of TPCP and an inaugural graduate of the Clinton School of Public Service, I cannot brag on Gary enough, helped clarify my language about a Fayetteville bar owner’s complaint to the state Ethics Board. Gary shared that calling attention to using public funds to lobby was a tobacco industry ploy used against federal tobacco free efforts in the 90s. Regardless, it was Huckabee in 2003 who said he wanted tobacco grantees to comply with the “letter as well as the spirit of the law” regarding tobacco prevention. I quote this because he used the same language not 3 weeks later complaining about the legislature recessing rather than adjourning. Huckabee’s actions easily checked progress in tobacco prevention in Arkansas to this day, not excluding his 2006 exemption riddled Arkansas Clean Indoor Air Law. It really is an embarrassment that Huckabee has any kind of national stage in the media today much less a political voice.
But it does explain the murmured response among grant administrators and grantees when I assured them that they could lobby within semantics. Hell, I encouraged them to lobby. CDC Best Practices are all about policy change. And my emphasis on semantics was exactly the same advice Lynda Lehing gave grantees in 2003. There has to be some government employee/ bureaucrat mantra about safety in ignorance. At any rate it was Huckabee’s 2003 call to inaction that was the major prompt for me to speak out and use what I knew about public relations and the media as a voice once removed from Tobacco Free Marion County. And like Ms. Smith inferred, tobacco prevention advocates often find themselves alone in the wilderness. TFMC was no exception. Using the media was a way of making the coalition seem much larger than it actually was. And it can be for any tobacco prevention advocacy today as well.
At some point in the near future I’ll put audio to my presentation and put it on line.
