PLATTSBURGH -- Tobacco has been an integral part of people's lives for centuries, but it has only been the blink of an eye since modern society has stressed the need to curb our addiction to tobacco products.

In fact, it was not that long ago that people smoked inside bars and restaurants, public buildings and even while on the job. Smoking was an accepted norm of society, and the evils of second-hand smoke were not considered.

"When I started my career in health care, smoking was an accepted practice in the workplace," said Paula Calkins-Lacombe, director of the Clinton County Health Department, as she welcomed health-care professionals from across the region to a recent workshop on smoking cessation.

She was there, she told the participants, when the Health Department first started to put up no-smoking signs in the workplace, well before law supported that practice.

"We were ahead of our time," she said. "I commend everyone in this room for taking up the fight despite the economic pressures we still feel today."

ONCE THE NORM

Sponsored by the Adirondack Tobacco Free Network, the Tri-County Tobacco Conference and Plattsburgh State, the workshop was used by health-care professionals to discuss ways to promote community involvement in smoking-cessation policies.

"Back in 1988, the tobacco tax in New York state was 21 cents," said Russell Sciandra, director for the Center for a Tobacco Free New York, alluding to the recent increase of $1.25 per pack that has pushed New York's tobacco-tax rate to the top of the national list.

"There was no tobacco-program budget."

Smoking, he added, was allowed almost everywhere except inside elevators two decades ago, and the penalty for selling tobacco products to teens and youth was a misdemeanor.

Sciandra, a legislative lobbyist specializing in tobacco issues, described the development of public stop-smoking campaigns, comparing early incentives that targeted individual smokers to the more recent strategies targeting communities rather than individuals.

There was a study in the late 1980s and early '90s, he said, that showed stop-smoking campaigns had little impact on changing the smoker's perspective.

"It was kind of depressing," he said. "The problem was that we were still targeting individuals and weren't making system-level changes."

One of the problems facing a smoking-cessation plan was that smoking had strong cultural support, unlike other issues fought by public-health campaigns, such as tuberculosis or AIDS, he noted.

Tobacco companies themselves also lie between smoking and cessation, he said.