Peter G. Sparber

Peter G. Sparber was a Tobacco Institute Vice President in the 1980s who worked on combatting legislated and voluntary workplace smoking restrictions. Sparber also worked on a Tobacco Institute program to attack the insurance industry and undermine non-smoker discounts on insurance premiums, and a program to form a coalition to publicly portray public health adovcates as intolerant, anti-social and in need of help.

Between 1986 and 1989, Peter Sparber of the Tobacco Institute gave a speech discussing the Institute's plans to take a more "aggressive posture" against public health efforts to control tobacco. Sparber discussed "mobilizing smokers" to go "head-to-head against the anti-smokers." He described the purpose of the Center for Indoor Air Research (to provide science for the industry's scientific witnesses), and plans to form a group (headed by a celebrity spokesman) that would portray public health advocates as extreme, anti-social and over-reacting to life's small annoyances: "The coalition would sponsor research demonstrating that over-reactions [to being forced to breathe secondhand smoke] are abnormal and anti-social."

Sparber stated, "We will never be able to say that ETS is not harmful...The question is, when will we have solid, credible evidence that concerns about ETS are unfounded?"

Sparber went on to form his own lobbying firm, Sparber and Associates, Inc.. In 1993, Sparber and Associates, Inc. recommended that the Tobacco Institute portray restaurant workers as public health problems rather than victims: "Since restaurant workers are largely incapable of speaking out for themselves, we believe the only way that the 'restaurant workers as victims of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke]' issue can grow is if the anti-smokers can generate sympathy for them. The best way of countering the antis, is to encourage third parties to increase public awareness of the public health threat posed by restaurant workers. It may be hard to generate public concern over restaurant worker exposure to ETS, when the public is more concerned about contracting rare, Central American strains of tuberculosis from restaurant workers."

In 1998, Sparber worked for the Washingon think tank the Heartland Institute.