The American Medical Association, Chicago, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), Princeton, N.J., planned, organized and conducted the 11^th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health, which was held in August 2000.

This was the first time since 1975 that the World Conference on Tobacco OR Health, widely recognized as an important forum for international collaboration on tobacco control, had been held in the United States.

Key Results

• The 11^th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health, "Promoting A Future Without Tobacco," the largest tobacco-control conference in history, took place in Chicago on August 6–11, 2000. The conference was the venue for release of "Reducing Tobacco Use: A Report of the Surgeon General."
  
  The three major themes of the conference program were:
  1. Are We Winning? Appraising Progress and Celebrating Success
  2. Nicotine: The Present and the Future
  3. Advocacy in Action: How to Mobilize Tobacco Control Activities within Countries and Create a Global Advocacy Movement.
  
  More than 5,000 people representing more than 173 countries attended the conference. Key dignitaries attending included:
  • Honorary Conference Co-Chairs World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland, M.D.
  • Former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, M.D.
  • Canadian Health Minister Allan Rock, L.L.B.
  • Then-U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.
• The conference partially or totally subsidized 127 Conference Scholars from developing countries and 173 Leadership Scholars, some from developing countries, who also took part in a preconference three-day skill building training program.
• Conference planners awarded 41 seed grants of up to $10,000 apiece for community-based tobacco-control projects gleaned from this pool of scholars, and it initiated the inaugural Luther L. Terry Awards, the first international awards for exemplary leadership in tobacco control.
• The national and international media covered the conference, with a total of 153 reporters from 94 media outlets in attendance.

Funding
RWJF provided partial support for the conference through four grants totaling $1,991,873 between May 1996 and December 2002.