To our colleagues in the global tobacco control movement:

For nearly a half century we have been struggling with the 20th century's brown plague: tobacco use. As we begin this new century, we face both a grim forecast, and a new hope. The grim forecast? This voracious devourer of health and life threatens hundreds of millions of new victims, especially in the developing world. The source of hope? We have now learned—through our failures as much as our successes—how to fight tobacco.

These lessons were hard won. At first, we believed that the verdict of science, and public awareness of that verdict, would compel tobacco users to quit, and 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. Neither could we imagine the extent to which governments would fail to act as conscience demanded.

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

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

On behalf of 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, we are deeply pleased to offer this series of guides, Tobacco Control Strategy Planning to the global tobacco control community.

We hope that as you read these guides and learn new lessons in your advocacy efforts, that you will share these lessons with us, so that we can revise and upgrade both the written guides and the website.

We began this letter with the challenge and the hope for global tobacco control in the 21st century. We will 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." Today 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