SALLY FAITH DORFMAN (director of Public Health and Education for the Medical Society for the State of New York): My preliminary question is for Dr Eriksen. You mentioned that increased funding will be made available to the state health department. The Medical Society has worked very closely with the state for years; I hate to think the money will go only to managed care. There are many physicians who are not exclusively involved with managed care. Managed care is very problematic these days. If everything is getting funded through managed care, that may leave out a lot of avenues for constructive actions, although we do recognise managed care as an important entity.

I should like to express my concerns over some of the advertisements that were presented. I recognise that I am totally out of touch with the generation that you are aiming to reach. I recognise that sexuality is a major issue for teenagers and pre-teenagers, but to pander to their greatest insecurities seems to me to be doing a terrible disservice to young women. To be calling a young woman who is a smoker a “garbage face”, and to imply that she is not going to get a date, or her boyfriend is not going to kiss her, only increases her already shaky self-esteem. We know that the girls who are smoking are probably the ones with the low self-esteem in the first place. Does this just make everything worse for that kid whose mother probably also smokes? Is she going to think of herself and her family as “trash”? What are we doing to these kids? What are we telling them? What other messages are we sending them? Are we saying that the most important thing in life is to have a boyfriend when you are 10, …