ABSTRACT
At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done - then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. Frances Hodgson Burnett. (A Secret Garden)
When people of good will get together and speak from their head and heart, and share their ideas for the future, good things happen. (Tobacco grower)
We've learned that you have to do something different to get something different. (Health advocate)
The two groups have proved that a coalition is stronger than the two parts acting separately; we can walk side by side to promote public health. (Tobacco grower)
We have the potential to become something even more powerful ... literally changing the course of history. (Health advocate)
Introduction
Tobacco farming and public health concerns may seem entire incompatible. Indeed, for many years the relationship between tobacco farming and public health communities in the United States could best be described as both distant and antagonistic. In the mid-1990s American farmers stormed tobacco state1 capitals and Washington, D.C. with armies of tractors to protest the possibility of Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regulation of tobacco products, which was (and remains) the tobacco control advocates' highest priority. At the same time,
health-friendly legislators in Congress periodically introduced legislation to weaken or dismantle the federally-administered tobacco program,2 the maintenance of which was (and remains) the highest priority of tobacco farmers. As late as Spring, 1997, a prominent public health advocate described the nascent relationship between tobacco growers and public health advocates by asserting There is no common ground'.3 She was correct in one sense, in that common ground is not to be found just by looking; like the farmland that produces the golden leaf, common ground needs the hard work of cultivation. That she was incorrect in the most important sense has been demonstrated many times since then:
• On March 18, 1998, when a press conference featuring three tobacco grower leaders and four public health leaders announced the 'Core Principles Statement between the Public Health Community and the Tobacco Producers Community'. Since that time over 70 organizations and many prominent individuals endorsed those Core Principles, including major tobacco farm and public health organizations and individuals ranging from then-President Bill Clinton to former President Jimmy Carter to evangelist Pat Robertson.
