ABSTRACT
While tobacco has been used in various fonns for hundreds of years, the large majority of diseases caused by it in the industrialized nations and increasingly in other parts of the world, are the result of habitual cigarette smoking. Although cigarette use began to gain momentum towards the end of the last century, the dangers of smoking started to become apparent some fifty years later. Thus the anti-smoking movement - the epidemiology and other scientific evidence demonstrating the harmfulness of smoking, together with the development of health policy designed to reduce it-is a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century.
