science

Truth Initiative

Truth Initiative is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Truth Initiative rather than just read about it. In short: Truth Initiative (formerly the American Legacy Foundation or Legacy) is a nonprofit tobacco control organization "dedicated to achieving a culture where all youth and young adults reject tobacco". It was established in March 1999 as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement between the attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia and five United States territories, and the tobacco industry.

Key takeaways

Truth Initiative belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Truth Initiative to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Truth Initiative from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Truth Initiative (formerly the American Legacy Foundation or Legacy) is a nonprofit tobacco control organization "dedicated to achieving a culture where all youth and young adults reject tobacco". It was established in March 1999 as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement between the attorneys general of 46 states, the District of Columbia and five United States territories, and the tobacco industry. Truth Initiative is best known for its youth smoking prevention campaign. Its other primary aims include conducting tobacco control research and policy studies, organizing community and youth engagement programs and developing digital cessation and prevention products, including through revenue-generating models. The organization changed its name from the American Legacy Foundation to Truth Initiative on September 8, 2015, to align its name with that of its Truth campaign. As of 2016, the organization had more than $957 million in assets and a staff of 133 based primarily in its Washington, D.C., office.

History Truth Initiative was founded in 1999 as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA). The MSA was announced in 1998, resolving the lawsuits brought by 46 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and five territories against the major U.S. cigarette companies, to recover state Medicaid and other costs from caring for sick smokers. The four other states settled separately. The tobacco industry agreed to pay the states billions of dollars in perpetuity, making the MSA the then-largest civil litigation settlement in U.S. history. The states directed that a portion of the money they received from the settlement should be used to establish a national public health foundation dedicated to prevent youth smoking and helping smokers quit: the American Legacy Foundation, now Truth Initiative. In 2018, the Truth Initiative partnered with Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Ad Council to combat opioid addiction.

Activities

Truth Campaign

Truth Initiative's signature program is its Truth campaign, a youth smoking prevention mass media public education program that has been widely credited with contributing to a significant drop in teen smoking. In 2000, 23% of American 8th, 10th and 12th graders smoked. As of 2016, that figure was 6%. The campaign exposed tobacco industry practices as well as the health effects and social consequences of smoking.

Truth Initiative Schroeder Institute Researchers in the Truth Initiative Schroeder Institute publish dozens of peer-reviewed research articles each year with the goal of identifying methods to minimize the harms of tobacco use, measure the effectiveness of interventions and identify best practices for tobacco control. Research is also done to assess the Truth campaign's efforts, both pre-and post-market, including the use of the longitudinal Truth Longitudinal Cohort (TLC) survey of more than 10,000 young people and a continuous tracking study to assess campaign awareness and message receptivity. In the early 2000s the American Legacy Foundation (as the Truth Initiative was then known) gave around $10 million of the settlement funds it managed to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to help it formalize and expand the collection of internal tobacco industry documents that its library already hosted; the collection was then named the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. As of May 2017, the library contained 14.7 million internal documents (nearly 89 million pages) created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales and scientific research activities.

Community and Youth Engagement Truth Initiative provides individuals, coalitions, and organizations information and methods to reduce tobacco use in their communities. The organization trains and educates young people interested in tobacco control and partners with community-serving organizations to reduce tobacco use. This includes a grant program for community colleges and historically black colleges and universities to create tobacco-free campuses. Examples of youth activism programs include:

National Summit on Youth Activism: A training program for high school students that provides activism strategies, media training and approaches to community engagement Youth Activism Fellowship: A year-long training program for young adults that prepares participants to carry out a tobacco control project in his or her community These community engagement programs are often an "on the ground" extension of the Truth campaign's work. Supporters of the campaign are called upon to support other anti-tobacco issues, such as a 2017 rally outside a Walgreens shareholders meeting in New York that was organized to pressure the pharmacy's board of directors to stop selling tobacco in its stores.

Innovations, 2008-2017 The innovations center within Truth Initiative designs, builds and markets digital smoking cessation and prevention products that are centered around online social networks, text messaging and web and mobile applications. Any revenue generated by the innovations programs helps support other work at the organization. Examples of these programs include:

BecomeAnEX: Created in 2008, BecomeAnEX is a free online resource for individuals who want to quit smoking. Its website hosts a community forum and features blogs written by other smokers and ex-smokers that discuss quit strategies, challenges and successes. In addition to the online community, the site offers cessation tools, counseling, medication information and other cessation support services. EX Program: Launched in 2017 in collaboration with Mayo Clinic, the EX Program is a digital quit smoking program based on BecomeAnEx that health systems, health plans and employers can purchase and offer to their employees and members. In April 2025, EX Program announced its exclusive partnership with Blip, an emerging FDA-approved nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) brand targeting young adults. This Is Quitting: Designed for young adults, This Is Quitting is a mobile app that relays evidence-based text messages and other user-generated content to assist users in the process of quitting smoking.

Leadership

Staff As of 2018, Truth Initiative was led by a senior leadership team with representatives from each of its functional program areas. Headed by CEO and President Kathy Crosby, this team included:

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Truth Initiative

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Truth Initiative claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Truth Initiative before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Truth Initiative ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Truth Initiative

In research: Truth Initiative appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Truth Initiative in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Truth Initiative is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1999 establishments in the United States, 501(c)(3) organizations, Smoking in the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Truth Initiative outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Truth Initiative in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Truth Initiative means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Truth Initiative out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Truth Initiative in simple terms?

Why does Truth Initiative matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Truth Initiative?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Truth Initiative.