• New York Times, Friday, July 9, 2010 10:40 AM

Duff Wilson reports that federal officials want to revive antismoking advertising to counter some of the impact of the tobacco industry's $12 billion worth of marketing firepower and the surging popularity of the likes of hookah bars and smokeless nicotine products.

"People are getting the image that it's cool to use nicotine as a drug," Terry F. Pechacek, associate director for science in the Office on Smoking and Health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells Wilson. "We need to bring back our voice, our antismoking mass media campaign."

The CDC's biannual survey of more than 10,000 high school students shows that 19.5% smoke. Rates plummeted from 34.8% in 1995 to 21.9% in 2003 but are stagnant, Pechacek says. One-third of high school smokers is expected to die prematurely of tobacco-related disease and a New England Journal of Medicine commentary this week warns, "by assuming that the tobacco war has been won, we risk consigning millions of Americans to premature death."

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