Stanton Glantz

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Stanton Arnold Glantz, Ph.D. is a Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), American Legacy Foundation Distinguuished Professor of Tobacco Control, and Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Glantz is one of the leading researchers of the health effects of tobacco smoking, and a promoter of public health policies to reduce smoking. He is the author of four books, including The Cigarette Papers^[1]. and Primer of Biostatistics.^[2] Glantz is also a member of the UC San Francisco Cardiovascular Research Institute and Institute for Health Policy Studies and co-director of the Comprehensive Cancer CenterTobacco Program. He is the father of journalist Aaron Glantz.

[edit] Biography

Professor Stanton A. Glantz has been a leading researcher and activist in the nonsmokers' rights movement since 1978, when he helped lead a state initiative campaign to enact a nonsmokers' rights law by popular vote (defeated by the tobacco industry). In 1983, he helped the successful defense of the San Francisco Workplace Smoking Ordinance against a tobacco industry attempt to repeal it by referendum. The San Francisco victory represented the first electoral defeat of the tobacco industry and is now viewed as a major turning point in the battle for nonsmokers' rights. He is one of the founders of Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights.

In 1982 he was part of a group of health activists who resurrected the last remaining copy of the film "Death in the West," suppressed by Philip Morris, and developed an accompanying curriculum that has been used by an estimated 1,000,000 students. He helped write and produce the films "Secondhand Smoke," which concerns the health effects of involuntary smoking, and "120,000 Lives," which presents the evidence that smoking in the movies recruits adolescent smokers and practical solutions for reducing this effect.

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,^[3] 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.

Glantz was also an outspoken opponent^[4] of the "global settlement" of tobacco litigation proposed in 1996, in which the tobacco industry was to be granted de facto immunity from further litigation in exchange for payments to the states and accepting weak regulation by the US Food and Drug Administration.^[5] The tobacco industry turned against and defeated this compromise, and defeated implementing legislation introduced in Congress by Senator John McCain (R-AZ), after some public health advocates succeeded in getting the immunity provisions removed. Many of the provisions of the "global settlement" -- but not the immunity or FDA provisions -- we implemented by the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the attorneys general of 46 states and the large tobacco companies. Glantz' analysis of the two agreements concluded that the MSA included most of the desirable provisions of the global settlement without the immunity provisions. In particular, the immunity provisions in the global settlement would have prevented the massive (and successful) federal Racketter and Corrupt Influenced Organization (RICO) lawsuit that the US Department of Justice won against the tobacco industry in 2007 and probably avoided release of most of the tobacco industry documents on the internet.

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 over 200 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 the Journal of the American Medical Association ^[6] on the Brown & 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,^[1] which has played a key role in the ongoing litigation surrounding the tobacco industry. His book Tobacco Wars: Inside the California Battles^[7] chronicles the last quarter century of battles against the tobacco industry in California. He also wrote Tobacco: Biology and Politics^[8] for high school students and The Uninvited Guest, a story about secondhand smoke, for second graders. He is now running two educational projects, SmokeFreeMovies, which is working to end use of movies to promote tobacco, and TobaccoScam, which is countering tobacco industry efforts to coopt the hospitality industry.

Working with the UCSF Library, he has taken the lead in making nearly 50 million pages of previously secret tobacco industry documents available to the entire world via the internet on the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and British American Tobacco Documents Archive.^[9] This effort has helped 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 of the California Air Resources Board. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2005.

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