For a decade, since voters there approved a referendum question raising the state's cigarette excise tax and assigning a portion of the revenue to a campaign to reduce tobacco use, California has been a cockpit of conflict between public health forces and the tobacco industry. For most of that time, Stanton Glantz, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has been an important figure in the struggle. This is his history of it, written with Edith Balbach, Director of the Community Health Program at Tufts University in Boston.

For readers of this journal, Tobacco war is most useful not for its accounts of tobacco industry perfidy, but for describing the evolution of tactics used by health advocates to counter the industry's political strategy. In California, the war has been fought at the local and state levels, and in the electoral, legislative, and administrative arenas.

The authors' main theme is that tobacco control advocates most effectively influence public policy by mobilising public opinion, rather than employing traditional lobbying techniques. Glantz and Balbach repeatedly …