As part of its attempt to break sponsorship ties between tobacco agencies and community-based organizations, the American Lung Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties is seeking to present local research findings to the San Diego LGBT Pride board of directors and other GLBT organizations, urging them to establish official policies against accepting money from tobacco companies. Through a series of ads, the ALA has already partially disseminated the data to the GLBT community, gathered from a survey at last year’s San Diego LGBT Pride festival.

“Most agencies live on shoestring budgets and they can be very vulnerable towards free gifts of money from corporations,” said Susanna Concha-Garcia, community outreach manager for the Tobacco-Free Communities Grant and the American Lung Association of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “For the little amount of money that they get from tobacco sponsorship, there is a whole lot of disease and death and misery in the community. It would be nice to see some leadership individuals and organizations take a stand on this.”

ALA officials, however, said that they have been disappointed that organizers of San Diego LGBT Pride are not taking them up on their offer of a presentation about their research findings. “San Diego Pride already has a policy of not accepting tobacco company money,” said Suanne Pauley, executive director of San Diego LGBT Pride.

Despite their long history of not accepting tobacco sponsorship, Concha-Garcia wants Pride to establish a written policy regarding tobacco, which they have for other types of advertisement such as hard liquor, she said. “For us, it would be a leadership issue for the Pride festival to have a signed policy; an official, recognized policy [not accepting] tobacco money for sponsorship of Pride events or fundraising events and tobacco product distribution.”

San Francisco Pride was the first Pride organization to have an official policy against tobacco sponsorship and tobacco gift money, she added.

“Our strong LGBT organizations, agencies and advocacy individuals, I feel that they are our models in a sense and that they need to take a leadership role for the rest of us,” Concha-Garcia said. “It would be very important to have a strong leader organization have a formal policy against accepting tobacco sponsorship. I feel that once this begins to happen in San Diego, that we’ll soon see more organizations taking the same effect. Then people will understand that it’s not normal to smoke; that most smokers want to quit – it’s just a question of when; and that most smokers regret that they ever smoked.”

The ALA has reported a higher rate of smoking among GLBT communities than the national average. Statewide, 18 percent of Californians smoke, compared to anywhere from 25 to 49 percent of GLBT Californians, depending on which GLBT groups – urban, rural or a mixture – are surveyed. Large-scale GLBT community events like Pride festivals provide a fairly accurate cross-section of the GLBT community as a whole, which is why the ALA conducted their San Diego survey at last year’s Pride.

“Like any group that has issues of addiction, it has to do with individual issues of what they feel is the social norm behavior,” Concha-Garcia said about why GLBTs tend to smoke more than other groups. “A lot of LGBT people feel it’s normal to smoke. That’s what happened in the beginning, when we first started our education with the State of California, is that a lot of people thought that a lot of other people smoked, but when they found out that they really didn’t, that indicated to them that it really wasn’t normal. So we need to do the same thing with the LGBT community. Even though we might have a 35 to 45 [percent smoking] prevalence rate at the Pride festival, they need to know that that still means that 55 to 65 percent aren’t smoking… and that it isn’t the norm to smoke.”

Studies show that tobacco addiction is equal to, and by some estimates greater than, heroin and methadone addiction in its difficulty to overcome. Cigarettes contain over 4,000 chemicals and substances besides tobacco, including arsenic, ammonia, lead, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and formaldehyde, and up to 12 percent sugar.

“The only way to get a client base is to make the consumers addicted to the product,” Concha-Garcia noted.

Out of the 805 people surveyed by the ALA at San Diego’s Pride last year – 44 percent of whom were smokers – 80 percent felt that tobacco use is a problem among young adults, and 64 percent disagreed with tobacco companies targeting the GLBT community.

The survey found that San Diego’s GLBT youth, at 38 to 59 percent, had a higher rate of smoking than their heterosexual peers, who measure 28 to 35 percent.

“Especially among our LGBT youth, the initiation of smoking behaviors and chew behaviors is just skyrocketing,” Concha-Garcia said.

Whereas the national population is seeing an overall decrease in smoking rates, the rate of smoking among lesbian, bisexual and transgender women is increasing.

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2001 reported that fewer lesbians have health insurance than heterosexual women, possibly due to married women’s ability to be covered under spousal health insurance plans. Lack of insurance may cause lesbians to seek early treatment less often, Concha-Garcia said.

Sixty percent of those who responded to the local survey said they prefer smoking and nonsmoking areas at public events. Whether or not San Diego’s Pride festival will be smoke-free in the future, Pauley said, “You never know.”

“I’ve been a volunteer at Pride for many, many years,” Concha-Garcia said. “As a public health educator, trainer and advocate, I will continue to work in the LGBT community, both in tobacco and in health in the future – it’s something that won’t go away for me. … I’ve seen a lot of reports where the LGBT community is negatively categorized.”