Founder, Fighter, Drive for Clear Air
How Pete Hanauer Helped America Breathe
Pete Hanauer is the form of public well being hero who by no means sought the highlight and didn’t essentially got down to change the world. He, his spouse Harriet, and a bunch of locals needed to eat a meal with out respiration cigarette smoke at an area restaurant. It appeared to them that that they had the appropriate to eat a meal with out inhaling another person’s smoke. Then there have been individuals like Ann Williamson, she joined up as a result of she was affected by working in an workplace the place individuals smoked all day lengthy.
On March 1, 1976, this small group gathered at Tim Moder’s home in Berkeley with what will need to have appeared, to many of the world, like a radical concept: that indoor areas, workplaces, eating places, and public buildings must be locations the place nobody needed to breathe another person’s smoke. On the time, smoking was at an all-time excessive. Workplace employees lit cigarettes at their desks. Film theaters have been full of haze. Eating places didn’t even have smoking sections but, anybody might mild up anyplace, anytime, proper subsequent to whoever was consuming.
It Began With Secondhand Smoke
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, Pete Hanauer, a Columbia Regulation graduate, a authorized editor at Bancroft Whitney in San Francisco, and a dedicated advocate for social justice, linked with a small native chapter of a corporation known as Group Towards Smoking Air pollution (GASP), and after his day job, on nights and weekends, he threw himself into constructing the nonsmoker’s rights motion. He co-founded the California chapter, which grew into Californians for Nonsmokers’ Rights (CNR), which ultimately turned People for Nonsmokers’ Rights (ANR). Pete was the founding President. He labored carefully with Paul Loveday, one other legal professional who was instrumental in creating the authorized framework for smokefree coverage.
On the time there was little analysis on the well being penalties of secondhand smoke publicity. The tobacco {industry} was omnipotent, flush with cash, and deeply embedded in American tradition, an icon that figured massive. Anybody who grew up within the 70s remembers the large advert campaigns, the Marlboro man, and within the 80s Joe Camel.
The founders of ANR didn’t have cash, however they did have individuals energy, readability of goal, and Pete Hanauer’s authorized thoughts. Fifty years later, greater than 13,000 state, county, and native legal guidelines limit smoking throughout the USA. Grownup smoking charges have fallen from 40–45% within the Nineteen Seventies to roughly 9-10% right this moment. Smokefree flights are so regular that vacationers underneath forty have by no means identified something completely different. Tens of millions of individuals are alive who might need died due to the results of secondhand smoke and smoking, as a result of Pete Hanauer and a small group of like-minded Californians determined that clear air was price preventing for in 1976 and set in movement a motion that prompted a sea change for America.
The Technique That Modified Every part
Inside a yr of ANR’s founding, Pete and his colleagues achieved one thing historic: in 1977, Berkeley, California turned the primary group in the USA to go an area clear indoor air ordinance. It was a modest regulation by right this moment’s requirements. It didn’t ban smoking in all places. However it established the precept and extra importantly, it proved the technique. Pete had recognized one thing that might turn into ANR’s defining perception and its strongest aggressive benefit towards the tobacco {industry}: go native.
On the state and federal degree, Massive Tobacco’s cash dominated. Lobbyists, marketing campaign contributions, and industry-funded analysis crowded out public well being voices at each flip. Pete co-authored two statewide California poll initiatives within the late Nineteen Seventies, and each have been defeated—the tobacco {industry} spent $6 million alone to kill Proposition 5. It was a disappointing end result. However Pete drew a lesson from it.
On the native degree, the calculus was completely different. Metropolis councils and county boards have been extra accessible to abnormal residents. Business opposition, whereas nonetheless current, had much less attain. A neighborhood activist with a compelling story might stroll right into a metropolis council assembly and really be heard. And when one metropolis handed a regulation, neighboring cities took discover. The mannequin might replicate itself, organically, throughout the nation. ANR’s mannequin ordinance and steering rolled out throughout the nation, as group after group, put smokefree insurance policies in place, and America’s tradition of smoking started to alter.
Pete served as Treasurer and chief political strategist for ANR’s statewide campaigns, and when the tobacco {industry} tried to repeal San Francisco’s landmark office smoking ordinance by referendum — inserting it on the poll as Proposition P — Pete led the profitable protection. The {industry} threw cash at it, however the ordinance survived.
By 1995, California turned the primary state within the nation to go complete statewide smokefree laws, eliminating secondhand smoke from practically all workplaces and indoor public areas. By 1998, that safety prolonged to eating places, bars, and gaming amenities. The local-first blueprint that Pete helped design had scaled all the way in which to Sacramento.
The Guidebook That Multiplied the Motion
As municipalities throughout California started passing smokefree ordinances, and as advocates in different states began calling CNR for assist, Pete and his colleagues acknowledged a necessity: there needed to be a option to switch what they’d discovered; the methods, the speaking factors, the political techniques, the authorized frameworks, to individuals ranging from scratch in communities they’d by no means visited.
In 1986, Pete co-authored ANR’s reply to that want: “Legislative Approaches to a Smoke Free Society.” It was the motion’s first formal advocacy guidebook, a sensible, replicable handbook for communities that needed to go their very own smokefree legal guidelines however didn’t know the place to start. It codified ten years of hard-won classes: tips on how to construct coalitions, tips on how to counter {industry} arguments, tips on how to body the difficulty for various audiences, tips on how to navigate the political course of on the native degree. In the identical yr it was revealed, the U.S. Surgeon Normal launched a landmark report on the well being penalties of involuntary smoking, the primary to make a definitive assertion that merely separating people who smoke from nonsmokers in the identical air area was not sufficient. 100% smokefree environments have been the one actual answer.
The Surgeon Normal’s science and ANR’s guidebook collectively ignited a wave of smokefree restaurant legal guidelines throughout the nation. And 4 years later, on February 25, 1990, the prohibition on smoking on home flights took impact, a hard-won victory that ANR had helped make doable, working alongside tenacious flight attendants like Patty Younger, who have been prepared to talk publicly about what it meant to spend their careers respiration poisonous secondhand smoke. These flight attendants have been dying of most cancers, and the harms of secondhand smoke have been actual. For a lot of People, that first smokefree flight was the primary time that they had ever skilled a very smokefree indoor setting. It constructed public urge for food for extra. Pete’s guidebook was the handbook that helped communities seize that second. This ebook lives on right this moment in ANR’s Clearing the Air information, and in each coaching and convening ANR and ANRF produces.
The Folks Who Stood With Him
Pete by no means did this alone, and he was fast to say so. Two figures he singled out who’ve sadly handed away are Tim Moder, an area Berkeley advocate who provided up his residence for the primary gatherings of advocates. He had a printing machine and even printed ANR’s first supplies. Pete additionally recalled Paul Loveday, an legal professional whose work figured prominently within the constructing of the authorized framework to help smokefree indoor air ordinances.
Two different individuals who helped form the smokefree motion have been Dr. Stan Glantz and Sharon Eubanks. Pete spoke about each at his retirement-and they present the breadth of the coalition he helped construct:
Pete met Stanton Glantz at a 1978 planning assembly for the statewide initiative marketing campaign. Glantz confirmed up uninvited, launched himself, and requested —as Pete’s instructed it— “the dumbest query I’ve ever heard.” Which was, “whether or not there was something he might do to assist.” The room erupted in laughter when Pete recounted it, as a result of everybody current knew what “a bit assist” from Stan Glantz had amounted to: he turned the foremost scientific authority on the cardiovascular results of each first and secondhand smoke, was a key determine within the Cigarette Papers, a frequent and devastating professional witness towards the tobacco {industry}, and ultimately President of ANR for 4 years.
Sharon Eubanks was the Division of Justice legal professional who led the federal RICO lawsuit towards the main tobacco corporations, the case that resulted in a federal decide declaring the {industry} had engaged in a long time of fraud and racketeering. Pete was characteristically clear-eyed about her contribution: “Many within the tobacco management motion are disillusioned that we didn’t get all of the treatments we requested for. However Sharon’s work branded the tobacco {industry} as racketeers and it outlined the tobacco {industry} endlessly as a duplicitous {industry}.”
The Cigarette Papers: Baring the Reality Behind the Smoking Business
By the early Nineties, Pete had turn into a central determine within the nationwide tobacco management motion as a trusted political strategist, a authorized thoughts, an individual whom colleagues knew they might name. That belief positioned him on the middle of one of the consequential doc disclosures in American public well being historical past.
In Could of 1994, confidential paperwork from tobacco firm Brown & Williamson started arriving on the College of California, San Francisco addressed partially to Stan Glantz, underneath an nameless pseudonym: “Mr. Butts,” a reference to the character within the sketch Doonesbury. The paperwork, despatched by whistleblower Merrell Williams Jr., contained one thing the tobacco {industry} had spent a long time and billions of {dollars} to suppress: proof that thirty years earlier, the {industry} had identified that nicotine was addictive and that smoking prompted most cancers. A proof that that they had intentionally withheld that info from the general public.
Pete had additionally beforehand helped his colleague, UCSF professor Stanton Glantz, deliver one other suppressed reality to the general public: “Loss of life within the West,“ a documentary that Philip Morris had legally silenced, which Pete and Stan helped get into public palms. Now, with the Brown & Williamson paperwork, the stakes have been even greater.
Pete, Glantz, and several other colleagues analyzed the leaked papers and co-authored “The Cigarette Papers,” a complete exposé that journalists instantly acknowledged as, “the Pentagon Papers of tobacco.” The comparability was apt. Just like the Pentagon Papers, this was a case of an establishment of monumental energy having systematically deceived the general public on a matter of life and dying. The reality got here to mild.
The tobacco {industry} fought again ferociously. Brown & Williamson threatened to sue any publishing home that printed the ebook, and one after one other, publishers declined. The corporate stationed non-public investigators at the us library to watch each one that walked into the part housing the paperwork. In the meantime, Congressman Henry Waxman of California learn parts of the papers instantly into the Congressional File, placing them completely within the public area. Glantz housed them at the us library, and posted them on-line, arguing efficiently that that they had turn into a part of the general public report. Finally, the College of California Press revealed the ebook.
The firestorm that adopted helped gas the large federal RICO lawsuit towards the tobacco {industry}, led years later by legal professional Sharon Eubanks (presently ANR’s Board Chair), a case Pete described within the warmest phrases: “It’s not doable to overstate the significance of what Sharon did in bringing the profitable federal lawsuit towards the tobacco {industry}. Sharon’s work branded the tobacco {industry} as racketeers and it outlined the tobacco {industry} endlessly as a duplicitous {industry}.”
The Database: A Completely different Type of Dedication
After retiring from his place as a authorized editor at Bancroft Whitney in 2001, Pete joined the employees of the ANR Basis and started what would turn into greater than sixteen years of quiet, important, irreplaceable work. His title was Senior Coverage Analyst. His job was to trace, analyze, and catalog each smokefree regulation handed anyplace in the USA, feeding the outcomes into what ultimately turned the ANR Basis’s U.S. Tobacco Management Legal guidelines Database©, probably the most complete useful resource of its type within the nation and a mannequin for different public well being regulation databases. ANR obtained new legal guidelines each week, and Pete analyzed each one, insisting on getting into them into the database himself.
At his retirement celebration in January 2018, surrounded by household, ANR donors, board members, employees, and colleagues, Pete tried to clarify why this work, so unglamorous in comparison with the courtroom battles and political campaigns of his earlier years, had given him such deep satisfaction.
“My principal work at ANR was analyzing tobacco management legal guidelines,” he mentioned. “I might analyze a regulation after which enter it into our database. Each time I entered one, I obtained a repair. Who wants a nicotine repair after I might get a repair telling me that what we’d began out to do 40 some odd years in the past was being replicated day after day after day, all throughout the nation. And it’s a nice feeling to know that we have been saving lives with each single regulation that handed.”
That’s Pete Hanauer summed up. Not boasting, however the profound, day by day satisfaction of realizing that the work of tobacco management was having an impact, that the motion he had been impressed to begin due to a smoke-filled restaurant in Berkeley had rippled outward till it touched each nook of the nation.
He additionally spoke that night about what the bigger arc meant to him. “I take into account myself fortunate certainly to have been a part of a social motion that was so profitable. After I began in 1974, there have been 31 legal guidelines proscribing smoking — and none associated to workplaces, eating places or bars.
At the moment there are greater than 11,000 (in 2018, now in 2026 over 13,000) state, county, or native legal guidelines proscribing smoking. Fifty-eight % (in 2018, now in 2026 66.8%) of the U.S. inhabitants is roofed with a complete regulation, and a majority of states are actually coated. It’s been an amazing thrill to see it occur through the years.”
What Pete Hanauer Helped Construct
The numbers are spectacular and enormous: grownup smoking charges in the USA have fallen from 40–45% within the Nineteen Seventies to roughly 9% right this moment. 66.8% of the U.S. inhabitants now lives in a group protected by native or statewide smokefree office, restaurant, and bar legal guidelines. Each home flight is smokefree. Do you keep in mind what it was prefer to journey in a smoky airplane? At the moment’s youthful generations have benefitted from the wholesome circumstances indoors, having by no means skilled what it’s prefer to be in an enclosed area with clouds of cigarette smoke. The CDC credit smokefree legal guidelines instantly for the dramatic decline in secondhand smoke publicity over the previous three a long time.
America spends roughly $225 billion every year treating smoking-related sickness. Each regulation that handed, each ordinance Pete entered into the database, was a step towards reclaiming a few of these {dollars} for prevention as a substitute of struggling.
And but the work isn’t completed. At the moment, 37.2% of American employees are nonetheless uncovered to secondhand smoke within the office, most of them in casinos. The tobacco {industry} has morphed and expanded into e-cigarettes, vapor, pouches, heated nicotine merchandise, and hashish. New threats to smokefree protections are rising yearly with the arrival of cigar bars and marijuana legalization. ANR’s smokefree legal guidelines map is not blue and gray, however a brand new coloration was launched to replicate CO, CA, and MI; locations the place marijuana legalization has led to the reintroduction of indoor smoking. So ANR continues to be preventing, nonetheless going native, nonetheless monitoring each regulation, nonetheless amplifying the voices of employees who haven’t but been protected.
Pete closed his remarks at his retirement with a attribute mixture of satisfaction and impatience. “I simply hope it doesn’t take one other 50 years to be sure that everybody can breathe clear air in workplaces and public locations.”
Extraordinary Legacy
In our fiftieth anniversary reflection we describe how a half-century of advocacy had actually been constructed on: “abnormal individuals doing extraordinary issues—secretaries, regulation ebook editors, flight attendants, musicians, on line casino employees, and individuals who care about their group.”
Regulation ebook editors: actually a nod to Pete, the person who spent his days enhancing authorized volumes at Bancroft Whitney, and his evenings and weekends constructing a motion that modified the tradition of smoking in the USA. Pete Hanauer obtained the American Lung Affiliation’s Unsung Hero Award in 2002, introduced to him by former U.S. Surgeon Normal C. Everett Koop, cementing his legacy of excellent works, and his {powerful} affect.
What Pete and his colleagues set in movement is written into the authorized codes of hundreds of American communities, encoded in a database he tended with day by day devotion for years, carried ahead by a motion he helped discovered and that continues to battle on.
The smokefree world that almost all People now take without any consideration of their places of work, their eating places, their airports, their flights, was not inevitable. The smokefree motion was constructed by advocates and attorneys and researchers and abnormal residents who determined clear air was price preventing for, that public well being insurance policies like smokefree indoor air are vital means to guard individuals of every kind, together with a quiet man from Berkeley, California, who simply needed to breathe.
People for Nonsmokers’ Rights (ANR) is celebrating 50 years of advocacy in 2026. To study extra about ANR’s work and help the continued battle for smokefree air for all employees take into account turning into a member right this moment.
