the British Doctors Study, a study of some 40 thousand doctors over 20 years, confirmed the link, based on which the government issued advice that smoking and lung cancer rates were related. In 1964 the United States Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health demonstrated the relationship between smoking and cancer. Further reports confirmed this link in the 1980s and concluded in 1986 that passive smoking was also harmful. As scientific evidence mounted in the 1980s, tobacco companies claimed contributory negligence as the adverse health effects were previously unknown or lacked substantial credibility. Health authorities sided with these claims up until 1998, from which they reversed their position. The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, originally between the four largest US tobacco companies and the Attorneys General of 46 states, restricted certain types of tobacco advertisement and required payments for health compensation; which later amounted to the largest civil settlement in United States history. From 1965 to 2006, rates of smoking in the United States have declined from 42% to 20.8%. A significant majority of those who quit were professional, affluent men. Despite this decrease in the prevalence of consumption, the average number of cigarettes consumed per person per day increased from 22 in 1954 to 30 in 1978. This paradoxical event suggests that those who quit smoked less, while those who continued to smoke moved to smoke more light cigarettes. This trend has been paralleled by many industrialized nations as rates have either leveled-off or declined. In the developing countries, however, tobacco consumption continues to rise at 3.4% in 2002. In Africa, smoking is in most areas considered to be modern, and many of the strong adverse opinions that prevail in the West receive much less attention. Today Russia leads as the top consumer of tobacco followed by Indonesia, Laos, Ukraine, Belarus, Greece, Jordan, and China. At the global scale, initial ideas of an international convention towards the prevention of tobacco had been initiated in the World Health Assembly (WHA) in 1996. In 1998, along with the successful election of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland as the Director-General, the World Health Organization set tobacco control as its leading health concern and has begun a program known as the Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) in order to reduce rates of consumption in the developing world. However, it was not until 2003 that the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was accepted in WHA and