Smoking among American adults fell by half between 1950 and 2002, yet smoking on U.S. movie screens reached historic heights in 2002, topping levels observed a half century earlier. Tobacco's comeback in movies has serious public health implications, because smoking on screen stimulates...

This paper was written for The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 Years of Progress. A Report of the Surgeon General.  Using documents from the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu) it examines the tobacco industry’s response to three key Surgeon...