This time it must match its rhetoric with action. There are many reasons why we are holding our applause. It seems that every time there is a threat to the tobacco industry, it rolls out some sort of pseudo- legislative solution or public relations campaign to give the appearance that it is changing its ways. We saw this four decades ago and we are seeing it now. The industry has been using these smokescreens for so long, it is embedded in its culture.
Recent examples are the youth access campaigns the tobacco industry rolled out in the nineties.
In fact, they were so ineffective that youth smoking increased from 27.5 percent in 1991 to 36.4 percent in 1997. Because none of them were enforced, nor did they tell teens about the dangers of smoking. Both of these elements are necessary for a successful antismoking campaign. Let us look back to 1964, about ten years after public concerns about tobacco and health first gained prominence. This is a battle we are still fighting.