To our colleagues in the global tobacco control movement:

For nearly fifty years, we have been struggling with the twentieth century's brown plague: tobacco use. As we begin this new century, we face both a dark forecast and a new bright hope.

The dark forecast? This voracious devourer of health and life threatens hundreds of millions of new victims, especially in the developing world. The bright hope? We have now learned—through our failures as much as our successes—how to fight tobacco.

This lesson was hard won. At first, we believed that the verdict of science, and public awareness of that verdict, would not only compel tobacco users to quit, but also impel governments to take appropriate action to control tobacco use.

But we were wrong. We did not, could not, imagine the depths to which the international tobacco industry would descend to deny, deceive, bully, undermine, and confuse public understanding and government action. Nor could we imagine the extent to which governments would fail to act as conscience demands.

While we engaged in public health education, the tobacco lobby engaged in relentless, often corrupt, politics. Slowly, we learned that tobacco control would require strategic political responses to the tobacco industry's political action and the government's inaction.

Across the globe, experienced leaders emerged who had learned advocacy skills and strategies to overcome tobacco-industry resistance and government inertia. They have won the enactment and enforcement of comprehensive tobacco control policies that science tells us will halt the spread of the tobacco pandemic.

The American Cancer Society, the International Union Against Cancer, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the many wise and experienced colleagues who contributed to this lengthy project are deeply pleased to offer this series of guides, "Strategy Planning for Tobacco control Advocacy," to the global tobacco control community.

We hope you will share the lessons you learn from your own advocacy efforts with us so that we can continue to revise and update both the written guides and the companion website.

I began this letter with the challenge and the hope for global tobacco control in the twenty-first century. I'll end with a quote from Dr. Erich Fromm, the great social psychologist, who wrote that hope is "a decisive element in any effort to bring about social change." But such hope "is neither passive waiting . . . nor the disguise of phrase making and adventurism, of disregard for reality, and of forcing what cannot be forced."

True hope, wrote Fromm, "is like the crouched tiger, which will jump only when the moment for jumping has come." For the global tobacco control movement in every country of the world, "the moment for jumping has come!"

John R. Seffrin, PhD
CEO, American Cancer Society
President, International Union Against Cancer