Author: Stanton Glantz
Position: Professor of Medicine
Institution: UC San Francisco
E-mail: glantz@medicine.ucsf.edu
Submitted Date: October 26, 2008
Published Date: October 29, 2008
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.

The reason that we described the nature and key messages of the California Tobacco Control Program is that they do, in fact, matter. Increasing distrust of the tobacco industry is a strong predictor of smoking behavior as is creation of smokefree environments (see citations in our original paper).

Weaker programs, or programs focused on children, would not be expected to show the same magnitude benefits that the California Program demonstrated.

The fact that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer has been established since 1986, when the US Surgeon General published "The Health Consequences of Involuntary Smoking." Many additional disease have been added to the list of those caused by secondhand smoke since then, most importantly, heart disease.