Proposition 29 passing

The $1-a-pack cigarette tax holds a slim lead.

A measure to raise California’s cigarette tax by $1 per pack was clinging to a narrow lead Tuesday night, but with less than half of the votes counted, its victory was less than certain.

Tobacco companies poured nearly $47 million into defeating Proposition 29, a tax increase that would raise $810 million a year for cancer research and smoking cessation programs. If the measure passes, it would give California — which currently has a lower tobacco tax than 32 other states — the 16th-highest cigarette tax in the nation.

It is the second time in six years that voters were asked to increase the state’s current 87-cent-a-pack tax; in 2006, a similar hike was defeated at the ballot box.

The vote would be a huge win for the public health groups that sponsored the measure, including the American Cancer Society. They have repeatedly tried — and failed — to persuade lawmakers to raise the tax on tobacco products, said the group’s California vice president, Jim Knox. Those groups raised about $11.2 million for the campaign.

“The Legislature has definitively demonstrated it is not going to raise the tobacco tax. We tried 33 times in the last 30 years … and only one passed, a mere 2-cent increase in 1993,” Knox said. “That’s why we had to go the initiative route.”

It was a hard-fought campaign for both sides. In March, before the opposition began blanketing the radio and television airwaves with critical advertisements, 67 percent of probable voters told pollsters they were likely to support the measure; by the end of May, that support had plummeted by 14 points, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

Opponents, led by tobacco giant Philip Morris — which donated $27.5 million to the campaign — attacked the measure in part because it would create a committee charged with handing out the research dollars under Prop. 29. They called that group an “unaccountable bureaucracy dominated by political appointees,” and also argued that there was nothing to prevent those research dollars from flowing out of California.

Proponents argued that the measure would decrease health care costs over the long term by helping to curb smoking in California.

Smoking rates have steadily fallen in the Golden State since antismoking efforts began in the 1980s. Just 12 percent of California adults were smokers in 2010, down from 26 percent in 1984, according to the California Department of Public Health.