The global fight for smoke-free public places.

November 2, 2004, was a successful day for smoke-free policies in Columbus, Ohio; Lincoln, New Jersey; Copperas Cove, Texas; Winooski, Vermont; Wausau, Wisconsin; and many other cities and towns across the United States. They either upheld smoke-free workplace laws that were under threat or introduced new ones. The spread of these laws follows the recent success seen in New York City where over a period of 1 year, smoking prevalence has declined by 11 percent, due to a combination of efforts: smoke-free workplace laws, increased access to tobacco cessation methods, and tobacco tax increases. Progress is not restricted to the USA. Over the last few years, nationwide bans on smoking in public places have been introduced in countries as divergent as Ireland, Norway, Montenegro, Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, South Korea and several cities in China and even Japan. Despite considerable opposition from the tobacco industry, this progress is now unstoppable. The tobacco industry had long feared that populations would recognize that breathing other people’s smoke would become unacceptable and would translate in time into lost profits for them. That time is getting nearer, but many in the tobacco industry continue to deny that exposure to tobacco kills and harms the health of adults and children. They offer ineffective separation policies as alternatives. While 5 million tobacco users die each year because of their use of tobacco products, additional tens of thousands of deaths, and more preventable disease occur in exposed nonsmokers. Michael Givel (1) describes the lengths to which the tobacco industry went to avoid adoption and use of E-codes for environ-