No Smoking at the Regents

Despite the one-time endorsement of a past ex-officio Regent (see picture at left), the new headline is “UC Regents endorse Perata’s tobacco tax measure.” (Well, we did name the UCLA hospital after him.)

Excerpt from news item below:

Josh Richman, September 16th, 2011

The Regents of the University of California have endorsed the tobacco-tax-for-cancer-research ballot measure co-chaired by former state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, perhaps seeing a windfall of research dollars in their future. In a public hearing Wednesday, Perata – a 2010 Oakland mayoral candidate who now lives in Orinda – had told the Regents’ Committee on Educational Policy how the idea for the California Cancer Research Act was born at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences based at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay Campus. …

The ballot measure will appear on the June 5 presidential primary ballot.* The Legislative Analysts’ Office calculates it could save more than 100,000 Californians’ lives from smoking-related deaths as well as generating over $855 million annually for medical research into cancers and heart disease, smoking education programs, and tobacco law enforcement through a $1 excise on tobacco sales, a tax that hasn’t been adjusted in California since 1998. A separate study by the University of California projects that the CCRA could save California up to $28.2 billion in healthcare costs between 2012 and 2016.

The tobacco industry is ponying up big bucks to oppose the measure…

Full story at http://www.ibabuzz.com/politics/2011/09/16/uc-regents-endorse-peratas-tobacco-tax-measure/

*Note: Whether this measure will appear in June or November depends on what Gov. Brown does with a bill now on his desk that would shift all initiatives to November. Legislative Democrats passed that bill because another proposition scheduled for June which they oppose would be more likely to pass in June – when mainly Republicans will turn out for the primary – than in November.