Smoke Free Movies: Averting a Million Premature Deaths

Dr. Glantz, the American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control, conducts research on a wide range of topics ranging from the health effects of secondhand smoke (with particular emphasis on the cardiovascular system) to the efficacy of different tobacco control policies. Dr. Glantz conducts research on a wide range of issues ranging from the effects of secondhand smoke on the heart through the reductions in heart attacks observed when smokefree policies are enacted, to how the tobacco industry fights tobacco control programs. His research on the effects of secondhand smoke on blood and blood vessels has helped explain why, in terms of heart disease, the effects of secondhand smoke are nearly as large as smoking. Consistent with what would be expected from the biology of secondhand smoke, he demonstrated a large and rapid reduction in the number of people admitted to the hospital with heart attacks in Helena, Montana, after that community made all workplaces and public places smokefree. His work in this area was identified as one of the “top research advances for 2005" by the American Heart Association. He was one of the people who first argued that controlling youth access to tobacco products was not an effective tobacco control strategy and was on of the first people to identify the importance of young adults (not just teens) as targets for the tobacco industry and efforts at smoking cessation and tobacco use prevention. Dr. Glantz is Principal Investigator for the $20 million 5 year Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science “Improved Models to Inform Tobacco Product Regulation,” that was funded in September 2013 as part of a first-of-its-kind tobacco science regulatory program by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. The center’s overarching theme is the development of improved models to inform tobacco product regulatory strategies that integrate 1) economic impacts of tobacco use on health costs, 2) risk perceptions, perceived acceptability, consumer responses to pro-tobacco marketing and anti-tobacco messages and other social determinants of tobacco use, and 3) rapid changes in risk due to tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure as manifest in cardiovascular and pulmonary dysfunction. The center also includes two developmental projects (one on behavioral models and one on cardiovascular and pulmonary disease models), three Cores (Administrative, Informatics and Analytics, and Biomarker), a postdoctoral training program and a process for selecting future developmental projects. He is author or coauthor of numerous publications related to secondhand smoke and tobacco control, as well as many papers on cardiovascular function and biostatistics. He has written several books, including the widely used Primer of Biostatistics (which has been translated into Japanese, French, Russian, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, and Primer of Applied Regression and Analysis of Variance). In total, he is the author of 4 books and nearly 300 scientific papers, including the first major review (published in Circulation) which identified involuntary smoking as a cause of heart disease and the landmark July 19, 1995 issue of JAMA on the Brown and Williamson documents, which showed that the tobacco industry knew nicotine was addictive and that smoking caused cancer 30 years ago. This publication was followed up with his book, The Cigarette Papers, which has played a key role in the ongoing litigation surrounding the tobacco industry. His book Tobacco Wars: Inside the California Battles chronicles the last quarter century of battles against the tobacco industry in California. He also wrote Tobacco: Biology and Politics for high school students and The Uninvited Guest, a story about secondhand smoke, for second graders, and Bad Acts, the benhind-the-scenes story of the Department of Justices' massive lawsuit against the tobacco companies under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act . He is now running two educational projects, SmokeFreeMovies.ucsf.edu, which is working to end use of movies to promote tobacco, and TobaccoScam.ucsf.edu, which is countering tobacco industry efforts to coopt the hospitality industry. Working with the UCSF Library, he has taken the lead in making over 80 million pages of previously secret tobacco industry documents available to the entire world via the internet. This effort has help create a whole new area of scientific investigation based on tobacco industry documents. He served for 10 years as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and is a member of the California State Scientific Review Panel on Toxic Air Contaminants. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2005. He has traveled widely and lectured on scientific and policy issues related to clean indoor air, smoking in the movies, and effective tobacco control strategies. His work has attracted considerable attention from the tobacco industry, which has sued the University of California (unsuccessfully) twice in an effort to stop Prof. Glantz' work.