TY - JOUR T1 - Questions and answers JF - Tobacco Control JO - Tob Control SP - S22 LP - S24 DO - 10.1136/tc.4.suppl2.S22 VL - 4 IS - Suppl 2 A2 - , Y1 - 1995/09/01 UR - http://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/4/Suppl_2/S22.abstract N2 - ELLEN R GRITZ: What I would like to ask you to address is the political and economic realities behind your charge to this audience, given the tremendous power that the tobacco industry continues to wield?JOSEPH A CALIF ANO : There are political realities. The industry has more money than we will ever have. But I think we have tremendous opportunities with the media, particularly with respect to television, both local and national, bolstered by the fact that the industry cannot advertise cigarettes on television. It is a key reason why television reporters are so good at covering this subject, and we ought to try and get them to cover it more.We do two things at the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA). We run demonstration programmes, and we do studies designed to illuminate these problems and help inform our people. We are going system by system. We have almost finished an analysis of the cost of substance abuse to the health care system. We have done inpatient Medicaid hospital costs, some of which I mentioned. We have done inpatient Medicare hospital costs. By the middle of this year, we shall be releasing a report on the cost of tobacco, drugs, and alcohol to the health care system.We have begun an analysis of the costs to the legal system, and we have just developed a protocol for the costs to business, and after that we will go after education. We have to demonstrate these relationships.JOHN R HUGHES: CASA has done an excellent job of taking scientific information to raise consciousness and awareness about drug abuse problems, but I would suggest that we, in this audience, face the same problem with our friends working on substance abuse problems.We know that tobacco accounts for … ER -