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ensure accuracy. Ending the Tobacco Problem: A Blueprint for the
Nation has been entrenched in American society for so long that
it is extremely difficult to sort out the precise roles of
various commercial, medical, social, and cultural forces in
sustaining the tobacco problem. The tobacco industry’s forceful
strategies, however, have provided a powerful counterforce to
the public health effort. As the 2000 Surgeon General’s report
would later state, in admittedly simplified terms: “The history
of tobacco use can be thought of as a conflict between tobacco
as an agent of economic gain and tobacco as an agent of human
harm” (DHHS 2000). The medical establishment was initially slow
to embrace the imperatives of the growing findings about smoking
and heath. The tobacco industry, on the other hand, quickly
sprung into action in the