Sustaining Tobacco Control Coalitions Amid Declining Resources

reached earlier, individual settlements against tobacco companies. Mississippi settled in October 1997 for $62 million to recoup smoking-attributable medical expenditures (Moore v. the American Tobacco Co. et al., 1997). Mississippi’s funding for tobacco prevention was high from the beginning. Regardless of source, tobacco-control program funding helps. In states with higher comprehensive prevention programs in 2001, significantly fewer people smoked (Gross, Soffer, Bach, Rajkumar, & Forman, 2002). Further-more, funding for tobacco-control programs tended to correlate inversely with rate of smoking-related and lung cancer deaths (Gross et al., 2002). Mass media campaigns that are well-funded, aggressive, and well-executed can lower smoking among youth and adults (Wilbur, 2004)