Released on Tuesday to considerable comment from the media, this new report from the US Surgeon General reveals that smoking has become a leading killer of American women in just two generations. Women now account for 39 percent of the country's smoking-related deaths, more than doubling the proportion of 1965. While the rate of adult women smokers has not changed much, that of teenaged girls has...

Culled from the archives of Harper's Weekly, this online trove of visual material and articles deals with the controversy over the alleged health benefits and potential hazards of smoking. The site begins with an orienting essay by John Adler, the publisher of HarpWeek. The compilation itself is quite revealing, pointing out that, as early as 1862, tobacco addiction was a recognized problem, and...

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Tuesday released this 251-page monograph detailing the dangers of "low tar" cigarettes. The monograph, the thirteenth in NCI's Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph Series, reports findings that reductions in cancer rates are due to decreases in smoking prevalence not to changes in cigarette design, which according to NCI, have done little to address public...

The Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, founded in 1992 at the University of Wisconsin, has been a leader in researching tobacco dependence and its treatment, and their Web site contains information about their current and ongoing projects. Quite a bit of the site is devoted to providing educational material for the public, including a series of fact sheets on tobacco use in Wisconsin...

Sponsored and hosted by the University of California-San Francisco Library & Center for Knowledge Management, Department of Archives & Special Collections, this site offers a wealth of papers, unpublished documents, and electronic resources relevant to tobacco control issues (primarily in California). The final version of the archive will contain over 40 million pages of documents, but even now...

Released on August 2 by the World Health Organization (WHO), this 248-page report charges that leading tobacco companies undertook a long-running, sophisticated, and comprehensive effort to undermine the WHO's anti-smoking efforts worldwide. Based on industry documents that date back a decade, the report contends that tobacco companies attempted to use front organizations and groups to block the...