Stanton Arnold Glantz, Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), American Legacy Foundation Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control, and Director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Glantz's research focuses on the health effects of tobacco smoking. Glantz is active in the nonsmokers' rights movement and has advocated for 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 UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center Tobacco Program. He is the father of journalist Aaron Glantz and tobacco control leader Frieda Glantz.
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After initially training as an aerospace engineer, Glantz took up postdoctoral positions in cardiology at Stanford University and then in cardiovascular research at the University of California, San Francisco, where he has worked since 1977.[3]
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.
Glantz conducts research on a wide range of issues including the effects of secondhand smoke on the heart by studying reductions in heart attacks observed when smoke-free policies are enacted, and how the tobacco industry fights tobacco control programs. His research on the effects of secondhand smoke on blood and blood vessels concludes that, in terms of heart disease, the effects of secondhand smoke are nearly as large as those of smoking. One such study demonstrated a large and rapid reduction in the number of people admitted to the hospital with heart attacks in Helena, Montana,[4] 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 one of the first people to identify the importance of young adults (not just teens) as targets of the tobacco industry and efforts at smoking cessation and tobacco use prevention.
Glantz 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 secondhand smoke as a cause of heart disease and the landmark 1995 Journal of the American Medical Association summary of the Brown & Williamson documents, which showed that the tobacco industry knew nicotine was addictive and that smoking caused cancer 30 years ago.[5] 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[6] chronicles the last quarter century of battles against the tobacco industry in California. He also wrote Tobacco: Biology and Politics[7] 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, Glantz 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.[8] This effort has helped create a whole new area of scientific investigation based on tobacco industry documents.
Glantz has been a leading researcher and activist in the nonsmokers' rights movement since 1978, when he helped lead an unsuccessful state initiative campaign to enact a nonsmokers' rights law by popular vote. In 1983, he helped successfully defend the San Francisco Workplace Smoking Ordinance against a tobacco industry supported attempt to repeal it by referendum. The San Francisco victory represented the first electoral defeat of such a tobacco industry sponsored referendum, 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 evidence that smoking in the movies recruits adolescent smokers and proposes solutions for reducing this effect.
Glantz was also an opponent[9] 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 acceptance of weak regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.[10] The tobacco industry turned against and defeated this compromise, and defeated 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—were implemented by the Tobacco 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 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (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.