Welcome to the launch of the Citizens' Commission to Protect the Truth.

The screeching halt followed by silence that we just experienced is not a technical problem. It is a symbol of a current danger to our nation's children and teens if the American Legacy Foundation's truth® campaign is extinguished. We are here today to keep that campaign alive.

The battle to end smoking is all about kids. 90 percent of adult smokers are hooked before age 19. More than five million children and teens are regular smokers. As early as 8th grade, one out of three children has already tried cigarettes.

For most of the 1990's, the rate of smoking among high schoolers hovered between 28 and 36 percent.

In 2000, the American Legacy Foundation started telling the truth® with its powerful media campaign aimed at children and teens, as you saw in the sample of ads we just watched. Over the next two years cigarette smoking among high school students fell from 28 percent to 22.9 percent--a drop of more than one million smokers. That's one million children who did not become replacement smokers.

Telling the truth® works. An article in the American Journal of Public Health in June 2002 found an increase in anti-tobacco attitudes and beliefs among twelve to seventeen year olds exposed to the truth® campaign.

In releasing its 2002 national survey of 50,000 8th, 10th, and 12th graders funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Monitoring the Future recognized the importance of the truth® campaign in the sharp decline in cigarette smoking among such teens.

But the American Legacy Foundation's truth® campaign is in jeopardy. This campaign has been funded by the big tobacco companies--Philip Morris (Altria), Lorillard, Brown and Williamson, and RJ Reynolds. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with the states required these companies to provide 300 million dollars a year to the Public Education Fund. That Fund finances the truth® campaign. The payments are required only if the participating tobacco companies control 99.05 percent of the cigarette market. Their share has dropped below that but remains comfortably above 90 percent. The American Legacy Foundation has repeatedly called on the big tobacco companies to continue funding the truth® campaign. Those companies have not responded.

We cannot let big tobacco destroy the most effective media campaign we have to curb smoking by children and teens. That is why for the first time in our nation's history, all former Secretaries of Health, Education, and Welfare and of Health and Human Services, all former U.S. Surgeons General, and all former Directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from every administration, Republican and Democrat, since the days of Lyndon Johnson, have come together in this Citizens' Commission to Protect the Truth. We have one goal: to keep the truth® campaign alive in order to end smoking by our nation's children and teens. Alongside me you can see the photos of all the distinguished public servants who form this Commission.

First, we intend to demonstrate the commitment of Americans to smoking prevention by gathering at least one million signatures to our petition, urging the tobacco companies to continue making payments to the Public Education Fund under the Master Settlement Agreement. If the tobacco companies were to give the Public Education Fund only a cent-and-a-half per pack of the 20 billion packs of cigarettes they sell each year in the United States, the truth® campaign could continue at its current 300 million dollar level.

To help gather these signatures, we have established a website www.protectthetruth.org. Concerned Americans can go to our website and click on sign the petition. We invite every American concerned about smoking by children and teens to sign on.

Second, the Commission intends to file amicus briefs in litigation pending against the tobacco companies across the country. We want to bring to the attention of presiding judges the importance of funding the truth® campaign. We want these judges, as one of the remedies for the misconduct of the tobacco companies, to order funding for the truth® campaign. Michael Hefter--a partner at Dewey Ballantine and one of the nation's top anti tobacco litigators--will lead the Commission's efforts on this front. We appreciate the pro bono commitment of this distinguished law firm.

All of us urge the tobacco companies to continue to support the Public Education Fund, which finances the American Legacy Foundation's truth® campaign.

We ask big tobacco: When all is said and done, isn't the health of our children worth a penny-and-a-half per pack?

On behalf of the nation's former Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Surgeons General and Directors of the CDC, I say to big tobacco executives and CEOs: If your words are not just rhetoric, then fund the truth® campaign.

If your written statements are worth more than the ink they are written with, then fund the truth® campaign.

If you truly want to end smoking by children and teens, then fund the truth® campaign.

On behalf of these national health leaders, I ask all Americans who want to stop children and teens from smoking to join us. If you are sick of smoking enslaving our children before the truth can free them, sign our petition and send a message to big tobacco to put their money where their mouth is, that the measure of their sincerity is their willingness to continue funding the most effective media campaign ever devised to discourage teen smoking.

Join with the nation's health leaders to protect the truth and to send a message to the big tobacco executives that it's not their lips we are reading, it's their deeds we are watching.

Cigarettes will kill 440,000 Americans this year alone. Let us make sure that today's children will not become tomorrow's replacement smokers.

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