Daryl Lease is an editorial writer at the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla. His e-mail address is daryl.lease@herald-trib.com.

It was an unforgettably Looney Tunes moment in our nation's long-running debate over tobacco: R.J. Reynolds President Andrew Schindler, reluctantly defending his company and his industry against a growing heap of lawsuits, calmly declared in a Florida courtroom in 1997 that cigarettes are no more addictive than carrots.

To his credit, the attorney interrogating Schindler did not respond, as many of us might have, with the obvious: "Bah-hah-hah-hah." Instead, he asked a rather subdued follow-up question: "Carrot addiction?''

"Yes," the wascally Schindler explained. "There was British research on carrots."

Wisely, the tobacco industry chose not to make this research -- presumably known as the Fudd Report -- part of its long-term legal strategy. But blessedly, the outlandish tales foisted on us by Schindler and his colleagues through the years have not been forgotten. They are now being put to use in Florida and elsewhere in aggressive, irreverent media campaigns designed to snuff out underage smoking.

Teens respond to 'The Truth'

After years of dangling carrots at us, duplicitous tobacco executives are at last getting the stick. And it is a rather sharp stick, at that. Florida's anti-smoking campaign, dubbed "The Truth," uses billboards and TV and radio commercials to mock and belittle the tobacco industry for decades of half-truths and flat-out lies.

Teen smoking in Florida has been cut in half

The ads, designed with the help of teenagers, are provocative and often unsettling. One much-talked-about TV commercial shows a devilish emcee bestowing "the demon award" on the tobacco industry for tallying the highest number of youth kills in one year. A billboard shows a tubby man in a bikini, accompanied by this caption: "No wonder tobacco executives have to hide behind sexy models."

The in-your-face style appears to work quite well. Last week, Florida officials released the results of an annual survey on teen smoking. The numbers were stunning: Over the past two years, smoking has dropped 54% among middle-school students and 24% among high-school students.

The decline was so dramatic that state officials asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to double-check the numbers. The feds confirmed that the survey of more than 23,000 students was accurate.

"Our interpretation of this data can be summed up in one word," Florida Health Department Secretary Bob Brooks told the Miami Herald. "Wow."

Ordinarily, decreases in teen smoking are slow and modest. These declines are also notable because they parallel the start of "The Truth" campaign and run counter to a nationwide increase in teen smoking.

Those last two points are causing health advocates to tout "The Truth" as the reason for Florida's low numbers. They have good cause to do so. According to the Herald, 95% of the students who participated in the survey said they were familiar with the ad campaign. "The Truth" appears to be hitting home.

It is little wonder, really. "The Truth" skips the lectures and the scolding that teens through the ages have detested. Instead, the ad campaign gives teens the opportunity to explain to other teens -- in creative, eye-catching ways -- just how artfully the tobacco industry manipulates them and reaps profits at the expense of their own health. Teens hate to be manipulated and lied to nearly as much as they hate to be lectured and scolded.

Still a powerful special interest

Despite its successes, "The Truth" is not without its detractors. Last year, the Florida Legislature cut the ad campaign's $26.6-million budget to $12 million.

That is still a pile of money, but it is not much when measured against the $5.2 billion the tobacco industry spends on advertising annually, including $268 million in Florida.

To most observers, the cutback was rather befuddling. Bear in mind that the commercials were not funded by tax dollars but by money from Florida's $13-billion legal settlement with tobacco companies. Bear in mind, too, that an early survey indicated the campaign was already having an effect on smoking rates.

One opinion poll showed that 75% of the state's residents favored maintaining the first-year level of funding. The majority of GOP lawmakers, whose party controls the statehouse, also said they wanted no cuts, as did Gov. Jeb Bush. "It's like running a political campaign," he said. "You've got to make sure your message hits the audience."

The Marlboro Man may be wheezy, but he still exerts considerable influence in Tallahassee and elsewhere. When it came time to vote, many Florida legislators apparently remembered old, and still potentially lucrative, alliances. Tobacco lobbyists denied they had anything to do with slashing spending for "The Truth," but they made no secret of the fact that they hated the ads.

The tobacco industry is continuing its fight against "The Truth" on the national stage. The American Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit group created with money from the industry's 1998 settlement, plans to spend $1.5 billion on a national campaign modeled on Florida's program. Its early days have been stormy, thanks to tobacco companies.

Last month, cigarette makers -- arguing that the ads vilified them -- convinced the foundation's governing board to yank two of its first four anti-smoking commercials from the air. One ad depicted teenagers piling body bags outside Philip Morris headquarters in Manhattan; the other ad showed teenagers trying to interview tobacco officials with lie detectors.

The foundation's leaders are vowing to press forward, but the early cave-in does not bode well.

Time to take the stick to Big Tobacco

Federal officials, meanwhile, are urging states to spend 25% of their tobacco settlements on anti-smoking campaigns, including billboards and TV and radio campaigns. States are spending an average of only 7%.

A major investment is critical to the nation's long-running battle against cancer. Health experts estimate that 80% of smokers take up the habit when they are teenagers. If, as the Florida program suggests, we can talk them out of starting in their teen years, they are unlikely ever to smoke. The ads created by the teens and their advertising-agency advisers are undoubtedly abrasive, but if ever there has been a cause for fighting fire with fire, this is it.

Through the years, the tobacco industry has poured billions of dollars into efforts to hook teenagers -- some as young as 13 years old, according to one infamous RJR memo -- on smoking. And through the years, we have seen the results of our cajoling and threatening the tobacco companies to walk away from their next generation of victims.

The carrot clearly hasn't worked. The stick, in the form of "The Truth," does. Let's use it.