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21 2 Why Matt Myers? Why was Matt Myers the logical person to turn to for a prudent assessment of the Kluger proposition? Because no one working on tobacco control in Washington knew more about what was going on, had worked longer or harder at thwarting the tobacco lobby, or had displayed such sober judgment. For more than fifteen years, Matt had served as the chief strategist and lobbyist for the Coalition on Smoking OR Health, the tobacco control arm of the major voluntary health associations— the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association. It was Matt who had lobbied through Congress the 1984 cigarette-labeling bill creating four straightforward, rotating health warnings. In the context of the mammoth challenges the tobacco companies faced by the late 1990s, this hardly seems a significant advance, but it was the very first time the previously omnipotent tobacco lobby, which battled to stop the bill, was outmaneuvered and out-lobbied in Congress . Before that, no tobacco control legislation passed that didn’t serve the industry’s strategic needs and bear its lobbyists’ stamp of approval. It was only a small step for mankind, but as the tobacco wars went, it was a giant leap forward. In Ashes to Ashes, Dick Kluger recounts Matt Myers’s contributions often, and always with respect. He does not offer a colorful portrait of Matt, as he does of so many other activists whose less sober traits will also grace this book, but he draws out, again and again, Matt’s solid attributes as “a product of the Sixties protest generation whose idealism had been tempered by years on the road as a troubleshooting litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union.” He refers to Matt’s “mental toughness,” his “working seven-day weeks,” his “square shooting ;” he calls Matt a “knowing tactician” and a “skilled lobbyist.” In 1994 and 1995, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, especially its senior program officer for substance abuse control, Nancy Kaufman, 22 Smoke in Their Eyes took a hard look at the strength of institutional support for tobacco control advocacy in Washington and found it wanting. The foundation proceeded to commit $20 million over the next five years (matched by $10 million from the American Cancer Society and smaller grants from the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association ) to the creation of a new advocacy organization focused solely on tobacco control—what would become the National Center for TobaccoFree Kids (the Center), and its namesake coalition, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (the Campaign). To build and lead the Center, they recruited Bill Novelli, a pioneering advertising-agency founder and an innovator and practitioner of strategic communications, with strong management skills. Novelli, in turn, recruited Matt Myers as the Center’s chief legislative strategist and lobbyist. So Matt and the Center were now, indeed, at the center of tobacco control strategy in Washington . In the last few years, I had drifted away from day-to-day engagement . I found myself out of the loop on Matt’s strategic thinking. We hadn’t had a serious conversation about where he—or the movement— was heading for a long time. So first thing on the Monday morning after Kluger’s jarring piece had appeared in the New York Times, I called him. Did he view Kluger’s peace plan as a naïve fantasy, or a harbinger of things to come? I was to be startled for the second time in two days. Matt had undergone, over time, a radical change in his vision of the future for tobacco control—going back more than two years, back to the February 1994 letter that David Kessler had written to the American Lung Association indicating his preliminary investigative determination that cigarettes were being deliberately manufactured and marketed to deliver calibrated doses of the addictive drug nicotine and hence fell within the broad existing powers of the FDA to regulate all aspects of the manufacture and marketing of such “drug delivery devices .” Among the remarkable aspects of that letter was the fact that no previous Food and Drug commissioner had ever put so much as a tentative toe in the waters of tobacco regulation. Kessler was extremely careful to avoid any suggestion that FDA was prepared to take radical action to prohibit—or denicotinize—cigarettes. He spoke only of a regulatory regime that would bring an end to the industry’s overt marketing efforts targeted at the very young. But looming...

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