MIAMI — Even as state lawmakers squabble about funding for Florida's innovative program to cut teen smoking, a survey of 20,000 middle school and high school students suggests the edgy, guerrilla-style advertising campaign has worked. Smoking rates among teenagers have declined by more than 2% in the last year, the state health department survey found.
But those results did not prevent the acting director of the Florida Tobacco Pilot Program from being fired this week, a day after about 40 teens staged a clamorous demonstration in the state Capitol to protest a House committee's decision to scrap the $70-million campaign.
Florida Health Department Secretary Bob Brooks said the dismissal of Peter Mitchell was unrelated to the demonstration. "I just felt it was time to make a change," he said.
But the firing set off a round of political sniping in Tallahassee on Thursday and alarmed anti-smoking activists who see the program as a model for the whole country.
"What's going on there is absolutely criminal," Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, said of efforts to gut the program. "In nine months, they have gotten better results on reducing teen smoking than anyone in the world."
Glantz, a member of California's Tobacco Education Research and Oversight Committee, said Florida's youth-driven anti-smoking effort is "the model campaign, which I've been trying to get California to adopt."
Backers of the pilot program, funded from Florida's $13-billion settlement with the tobacco industry, have questioned Gov. Jeb Bush's commitment to the campaign, the first in the U.S. to be financed by a settlement with Big Tobacco, and begun last year under the Democratic administration of the late Gov. Lawton Chiles.
A Bush spokesman said state Democrats are using the campaign to create political controversy, pointing out that the governor budgeted $61.5 million for the anti-smoking measures next year, a 12% cut. The Senate had earmarked $50 million for the campaign.
Some Florida Democrats charged that Mitchell had been made the scapegoat for the protest by teens involved with the anti-smoking initiative.
"This is troubling," state Senate Democratic leader Buddy Dyer said. "The House has zero-funded a program that has proved very successful. . . . This is a long-term type of campaign. If we close it down now, we squander close to $70 million."
