Tobacco control research: a journey of discovery in prevention and cessation.

My personal journey as a tobacco researcher started at the University of Northern Colorado where I was an assistant professor of psychology and helped a student with his master's thesis study on "rapid smoking." This therapy is a format of aversion counterconditioning, the purpose being to turn the previously pleasant experience of smoking into an aversive event. Subjects were asked to puff on their usual brand of cigarette every 6 seconds, and my job was to call out "smoke" to prompt the participant at the end of each interval. My first subject was puffing away on schedule, and within a few minutes he was turning blue, and I was dying from all of the smoke in the small unventilated clinic room. He grew suddenly nauseated and threw up as I grabbed the wastebasket, unprepared for this event. That was my introduction to tobacco cessation research. During my 30 years in the field, I have witnessed many changes. We have made significant progress in reducing the prevalence of tobacco use, yet it remains the number one preventable cause of death in the United States, implicated in over 430,000 deaths annually.''^ Each day, more than 3000 children and adolescents join the nearly 25% of adults who smoke cigarettes or use smokeless tobacco products.^ This paper will share personal perspectives about shifts in the focus and content