Teenagers are getting the message that they are being duped big time by the tobacco industry. Angered, they're spreading the truth to their friends and schoolmates. They're taking the three needed "Rs" of their age — rebellion, respect, and risk — and becoming their own best defense against the mighty advertising dollar of the tobacco industry.

Two years ago at age 14, Jacob Baime saw an ad on a local television station in Tampa that made him furious. It was a Florida Truth campaign in which teens talked about how tobacco ads are aimed specifically at young people.

"I was completely enraged," Baime exclaims, "that the tobacco industry was targeting kids like me, my generation. It's wrong!"

Truth campaign is a nationwide teen tobacco prevention program designed to explain to kids how the tobacco industry ensures its future market by targeting youth. In the Florida Truth ad, teens told Big Tobacco, "We're stronger than you, smarter than you. We just want to say, 'hi,' because you'll be hearing a lot from us."

Concerned, Baime immediately looked up on the Internet how kids could get involved, and discovered www.wholetruth.com, www.gen-swat.com, and his favorite, www.tobaccofreekids.org. Wanting to stand up for teenagers and ultimately save lives, he joined Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT), the messengers of the Truth campaign.

Why did this message about smoking affect Baime so deeply?

Teenagers believe they have enough people telling them what to do. So sometimes they turn a deaf ear to warnings about tobacco-related health risks "eons" of years away. But they get it when they see teens are being targeted as victims.

"Everyone knows from kindergarten that smoking is bad," says Baime. "But, those programs that focus on the health issue are not nearly as effective as letting kids know how the tobacco industry is manipulating youth."

"By nature," Baime explains, "we teenagers are rebellious, and when we're told an industry is manipulating us, we want to do something about it."

So he got angry, even though he's never been a smoker and his family doesn't smoke. Now at 16, he's a veteran on the Florida frontlines: active in SWAT, president of the Florida American Cancer Society Teens, and trying to keep funding available for tobacco prevention.

Baime was one of the recent state youth representatives who spoke at a press conference outside the state capitol in Tallahassee concerning budget cuts for tobacco prevention programs. He boldly reminded the legislature, "Who is more important, Big Tobacco or Florida's kids?"

"The Florida legislature is going to be cutting the budget from $37 million to $15 million for the Florida Tobacco Control program," Baime says." This program includes the youth prevention development and community partnership, and the marketing component through the Truth campaign."

But, as an avid amateur meteorologist who enjoys studying the power of storms, and an aspiring political scientist who expects to weather the storms of being a public servant, Baime believes teens will persevere in their fight against Big Tobacco.

In Florida, there are nearly 52,000 members in SWAT. Since being established in 1998, Florida's youth smoking rates have been reduced by 47%.

Baime explains the key components to any successful youth anti-tobacco program:

• Stay focused on the main message of youth being manipulated
• Run the program empowered by youth

Teens are involved in every component of SWAT, including marketing. The youth brand management team works with a marketing agency to produce posters, commercials, and other materials to increase youth awareness and involvement.

In Florida, a SWAT board of directors is made up of 67 youths — one teenager from every county in Florida — who are elected by their fellow students. Tamara Gibson, 17, of Palm Coast, serves as a passionate chair of this board, and represented Florida at the national Truth summit held in Seattle, Wash.

Gibson, a biology major and aspiring plastic surgeon who had once tried smoking in middle school, explains that for teens, this is a "war of changing attitudes and lifestyles in order to increase tobacco prevention and reduction."

She encourages her generation to get involved, and believes that, "even if you work to save just one person, it's a good thing. From there we can make a difference to our families, community, state, and nation."

SWAT teams in each county form clubs in the schools. The school clubs allow tobacco users to join.

"Smokers are not the enemy," Baime explains, "they're being manipulated by the tobacco industry. We stand up for smokers, too." In his school club, one student stopped smoking and got his father to stop as well.

Since November 1998, the tobacco industry can't advertise in youth magazines, billboards, or television. However, the industry is getting kids to smoke through increased advertising in local convenience stores, popular adult magazines like Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone, sponsoring sports events, and through discreet advertising in movies.

But SWAT is even taking on Hollywood. Truth campaigns are exposing how the tobacco industry pays for actors to smoke their brands, for billboards that appear in the background, and more.

Each day more than $18 million is being spent by tobacco companies to promote their products, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Nearly 35% of high school students and 15% of middle school students use some form of tobacco, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It's no wonder that the tobacco industry targets teens. Ninety percent of adult tobacco users started their habit before they were 18 years old, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Baime wants his generation not to be discouraged.

"The fight against Big Tobacco is a huge one — one of the biggest battles the youth of our nation will ever face — but it is a fight that we can win. We have a very powerful weapon on our side…the truth."