MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- The Ramsey County District Court created the Minnesota Partnership for Action Against Tobacco in 1998 to help Minnesotan' s stop smoking, but the largely unregulated group has chosen a different path.

The Star Tribune reports in Sunday' s editions that the MPAAT with a budget of $202 million from the tobacco settlement -- has pursued prohibition as its centerpiece, providing more than $1 million for campaigns to pass no-smoking ordinances. Those ordinances have mostly failed, dividing communities in the process. The newspaper reports the group has operated with little or no accountability and has given most of its grant money to organizations in which a third many of its own board members hold high level positions. MPAAT has won praise for its eye-catching, $5.5 million ad campaigns on second-hand smoke and quitting smoking -- " cessation" in MPAAT jargon. But its most successful effort to directly help smokers quit dates to 1998 -- a giveaway of donated nicotine patches that cost it just $50, 000. Even that modest gesture won' t be repeated. The idea to " slap a patch" on any Minnesotan who wants one, as one official put it, has been discarded. MPAAT' s only current cessation effort is a $551, 000 telephone " help line" that refers insured smokers to their insurance companies, while sending others brochures with tips on how to quit. Early on, the group told the court that it would conduct a thorough, widely publicized study of Minnesota smokers before deciding on a course of action. The $223, 000 survey was intended to measure Minnesota adults' attitudes toward smoking and establish a baseline by which to measure future progress. It was commissioned, conducted, completed, analyzed -- and never released, or even presented to the board. The newspaper obtained the results after making a formal request. That survey indicated Minnesotans were split down the middle on the importance of smoke-free restaurants. Eight out of 10 respondents already worked in smoke-free offices and factories. For smokers who' d quit or cut down, the key issues were health, the cost of cigarettes and being a role model for their children. Dr. Richard Hurt, MPAAT' s board chairman and one of the pre-eminent smoking cessation experts in the country, defends the organization' s work and the 21 unpaid board members who oversee it. " I think most everything we have done to date has something to do with stopping smoking, " said Hurt, director of the Mayo Clinic' s Nicotine Dependence Center in Rochester. Hurt and MPAAT essentially get to grade themselves, though. Former Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III and others instrumental in the group' s creation walled it off from most oversight. MPAAT must only send a progress report to the court and the Legislature every two years. The Legislature can' t touch MPAAT' s budget or operations. And a biannual review by the state legislative auditor examines mainly financial issues, not MPAAT' s programs. " MPAAT doesn' t have to behave like a state organization, " said the group' s executive director, David Willoughby. " Between the ... auditor and the court, they allow us to do our business this way." Legislative Auditor James Nobles disagreed. " We' ve done a financial audit there and only looked at some aspects of their operations, " he said. " You can' t take the absence of criticism as approval." Mike Ciresi, the Minneapolis lawyer who led the state' s lawsuit against the tobacco industry and helped negotiate the settlement that created MPAAT, is puzzled by its new path. " I envisioned a significant cessation component and people would get help to quit, not intervention to the exclusion of cessation, " Ciresi said. Attorney General Mike Hatch, who has oversight over nonprofits, also was critical about MPAAT' s direction. " They have become so pure in ideology that they are arrogant, and they have forgotten their mission, " Hatch said in an interview. " Try to get people to stop smoking; don' t force people. Zealotry is bad no matter what the issue is." Hatch said his office will review MPAAT' s operation but did not elaborate. MPAAT ultimately answers to Ramsey County District Court, but no judge there can comment on the organization, because its court file remains open. MPAAT' s next scheduled report of activities to the court is due in January 2002. MPAAT' s legal counsel, Tom Pursell, responds to the criticism by reiterating that MPAAT was intended to be free from government control. He also defended the group' s prerogative to set its own course, despite the explicit cessation language in the court order that created it. Asked Pursell, " What makes you think that . . . this money was supposed to be spent to slap patches on people?"

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