Released on Tuesday to considerable comment from the media, this new report from the US Surgeon General reveals that smoking has become a leading killer of American women in just two generations. Women now account for 39 percent of the country's smoking-related deaths, more than doubling the proportion of 1965. While the rate of adult women smokers has not changed much, that of teenaged girls has...

This Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Web site contains a press release about the recent findings from BNL scientists that smoking reduces levels of a critical enzyme (MAO B) not only in the brain, but in the peripheral organs as well (kidneys, heart, lungs, and spleen). The press release includes images of whole body PET scans showing the distribution of the radiolabeled enzyme in the bodies...

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Tuesday released this 251-page monograph detailing the dangers of "low tar" cigarettes. The monograph, the thirteenth in NCI's Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph Series, reports findings that reductions in cancer rates are due to decreases in smoking prevalence not to changes in cigarette design, which according to NCI, have done little to address public...

The Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, founded in 1992 at the University of Wisconsin, has been a leader in researching tobacco dependence and its treatment, and their Web site contains information about their current and ongoing projects. Quite a bit of the site is devoted to providing educational material for the public, including a series of fact sheets on tobacco use in Wisconsin...

The Digital Library of the University of California--San Francisco has made scanned images of their Brown and Williamson Tobacco Archive available on the Web. The documents consist primarily of scientific studies on the addictive nature of nicotine and other health effects of tobacco smoke. The materials have been the subject of a suit in San Francisco Superior Court in which Brown & Williamson...