UCSF's Stanton Glantz earns lifetime achievement award

The American Public Health Association (APHA) Alcohol and Tobacco section has selected Stanton Glantz, PhD, to receive its 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award for his tobacco control research and advocacy work to reduce tobacco use. Glantz, a UCSF professor of medicine, is director of UCSF’s Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, which supports research on tobacco industry practices, health effects of smoking and secondhand smoke, and other issues related to smoking and tobacco.

Glantz receives the award November 18 during the annual APHA meeting, held this year in San Francisco.

Also November 18 - at the scientific session of the meeting - Glantz and his colleagues are scheduled to present the results of a study showing that curtailing smoking in bingo parlors does not reduce profits from these games. Groups opposing smoking restrictions in the gaming environment claim that smoking restrictions will reduce revenue.

Glantz has been both a leading tobacco control scholar and advocate of nonsmoker’s rights for more than 20 years. In 1983, he helped the successful defense of the San Francisco Workplace Smoking Ordinance against a tobacco industry attempt to repeal it by referendum. This represented the first electoral defeat of the tobacco industry and is now viewed as a major turning point in the battle for controlling where cigarettes can be smoked.

He is the author of three books and more than 150 scientific papers, including the first major review that identified involuntary smoking as a cause of heart disease, and the landmark July 19, 1995 issue of JAMA that showed the tobacco industry knew 30 years earlier that nicotine was addictive and smoking caused cancer.

At the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, Glantz directs SmokeFreeMovies.ucsf.edu, which seeks to end the use of movies to promote tobacco. He also directs TobaccoScam.ucsf.edu, which counters tobacco industry efforts to engage the hospitality industry in support of smoking.

Glantz has been a UCSF professor since 1977. An expert on statistics, he is the author of the Primer of Biostatistics, which has been translated into five languages.