Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 23, 1991                   TAG: 9103230215
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

HEALTH GROUP URGES DUMPING OF TOBACCO STOCK

The campaign "is based on the moral contradiction of making a profit by killing people," said Anne Marie O'Keefe, a member of the board of the Tobacco Divestment Project in Boston.

The Tobacco Divestment Project launched a nationwide campaign in May. Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and City University of New York are among the institutions that have announced they would sell all of their tobacco holdings.

So have the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation of California, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of New Jersey and the Rockefeller Family Fund of New York, said Brad Krevor, executive director of the Tobacco Divestment Project.

"I really see this as a snowballing thing," said Deborah McLellan, the anti-tobacco coordinator for the public health association.

The association has sent letters to deans of public health schools urging them to sell tobacco stocks. The letters will go next to deans of medical schools, she said.

Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean of the Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, said: "It was incompatible for the school to be making profits on the sale of tobacco, given the fact that smoking . . . is the greatest single preventable cause of death, disability and disease today."

"The real addictor isn't nicotine - it's money," said Krevor. "In order to bring some sanity and effective control to what's happening in this country, we have to attack squarely the obscene profitability of tobacco."

Brennan Dawson, a spokeswoman for the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying and public relations organization, said stocks are not issued by tobacco companies, but by their corporate parent companies.

"There are no tobacco stocks," she said.

The public health association said the aim of the campaign is "to free Americans from tobacco addiction and to promote a smoke-free society. It champions a single proposition: That as individuals and as members of institutions we should not profit from tobacco addiction."

Krevor said the divestment project plans to lobby state legislators for laws prohibiting ownership of tobacco stocks by state pension funds. Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are already debating such laws, he said.