Audience: Epidemiologists, tobacco control scientists and advocates, health professionals, and health policy makers. Key Points: The California comprehensive tobacco control program has had continuous substantial funding since 1990 and has focused on changing social norms around smoking. We will discuss evidence of its success (including comparisons to other key states) on preventing initiation, decreasing consumption, and increasing cessation.

Tobacco industry promotional expenditure for cigarette discounts grew exponentially over the past 15 years. We hypothesize that this new strategy targets smokers trying to quit or reduce consumption and young people who have experimented but not progressed to full dependent smoking. We present early evidence for our hypothesis that this discounting is influencing quitting and uptake behavior.

It has been suggested that the marketing of cessation products by pharmaceutical companies may be influencing adolescent beliefs about quitting as well as smokers trying to quit. We present evidence on beliefs and practices of California adults and adolescents regarding nicotine replacement therapy.

Finally, we will present the evidence for a differential impact of each of these influences on population sub-groups identified by race and ethnicity. Learning Objectives: Audience will be able to assess the long term impact of tobacco control programs at the population level and what are the measures of success of these programs and are the influences of the tobacco and pharmaceutical . Benefits: this presentation will benefit current and future tobacco control professionals in terms of learning the strengths of programs and areas of success in tobacco control program as well as the approaches carried out to undermine such successes at the population level.