Symposium Introduction: A Decade of the Tobacco Control Act: Progress, Setbacks, and the Future of Tobacco Control.

The landmark symposium, A Decade of the Tobacco Control Act: Progress, Setbacks, and the Future of Tobacco Control, organized by the Public Health Law Center and held in conjunction with the 2019 National Conference on Tobacco or Health, assessed the first 10 years of federal tobacco regulation. In this introduction to the symposium, the Public Health Law Center's executive director provides the context for insights by prominent experts from government, health organizations, and academia, acknowledging the mixed record of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation to date and suggesting that the agency's ultimate success or failure will be determined by the answers to three fundamental, but still unresolved, questions: What is the true goal of federal regulation? How boldly or cautiously will the FDA approach that goal? And who will the agency serve? The answers to those questions, he argues, will determine the prospects for progress in controlling the nation's leading cause of preventable death.

Science for hire: a tobacco industry strategy to influence public opinion on secondhand smoke.

A review of internal tobacco company documents reveals that members of the tobacco industry and its corporate attorneys created an international scientific consultants program to influence public opinion on environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). This program was shaped as a "product" to protect the industry from international threats of smoking restrictions. Additionally, this program was used to promote a scientific backdrop supporting the industry's position on ETS that differed from regulatory agencies and published scientific research. In this report, we detail the pervasive nature of the so-called ETS Consultants Program, outline the wide range of activities undertaken by the consultants, and highlight the role of the industry's corporate attorneys in creating and managing this program. We suggest heightened monitoring of industry-created scientific organizations, further tobacco document research, and wide dissemination of such work.