I really don’t keep up w too much of ADH politics for a couple of reasons. One is because I no longer volunteer for a local community tobacco prevention coalition. The other is because it fairly typically makes me ill.
Such is the case learning that the 2015 RFPs for tobacco prevention have tweaked themselves to not only demand ownership of all work product and materials, (That really grates on an unpaid media volunteer) but also has dismissed the Coalition for a Tobacco Free Arkansas and the youth YES teams to find some party they can control as one entity.
First, for as long as I have had any understanding of the MSA funding for which pittance is still left for actual tobacco prevention there has been a need for a distinct legal separation between lobbying and advocacy. It has always been the tactic, in Arkansas since ethics complaints in Fayetteville in 2004, for pro- tobacco forces to claim state funds were used to lobby for policy change. Since then tobacco free challenges have made great effort to distance advocacy from lobbying. I was there in Fayetteville when Dr. David Bourne suggested that advocates abridge their freedom to speak when Huckabee was threatening to pull ADH funding for tobacco prevention. This is the point of having a statewide coalition keeping accounting that distinguish lobbying efforts from any ADH funding. That degree of separation is integral to making policy change efforts immune to industry, and significantly legislative complaints, that public money was used to lobby. Policy change is essential to actual population based measured tobacco free change.
Like I said, I dunno what is going on within TPCP but it does not portend much tobacco free success and has the potential of discarding years of sincere educated and sophisticated advocacy protecting Arkansas’ dedication of MSA dollars. Micro managing organizations that have worked hand in glove with previous TPCP bureacrats neglects a tremendous learning curve that the tobacco industry depends on.
We expect more from the Arkansas Department of Health than petty politics but unfortunately, at least when it concerns tobacco, that has not been the case.
