Students Working Against Tobacco
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Students Working Against Tobacco or SWAT is the name of independent groups across the United States who work to educate and unite students against the alleged manipulation and targeting of youth by tobacco companies. Each division of SWAT is managed independently from state-to-state.
The state of Florida was the first state to win the "Big Tobacco" lawsuits in 1997. The now late Gov. Lawton Chiles vowed that the money won in the suits would go to fund a state program to prevent youth smoking. This program developed in SWAT, Students Working Against Tobacco, in Florida schools in 1998. Other such programs exist with different names in Michigan and New York just to name a few. Funding for Florida SWAT was constantly being cut after Gov. Chiles. In 2003, the Florida government cut the SWAT budget entirely. One student, Jacob Baime, rallied students and even one of the all-star lawyers that won the Big Tobacco lawsuit in the first place to sue Gov. Jeb Bush for misallocation of funding. A press conference was held with Baime and the lawyer at a hotel next door to the conference center hosting a large state-funded SWAT convention in Tampa. Needless to say, during special session, the Florida State Legislature gave back a sixteenth of the SWAT budget- enough to keep it growing on the grassroots level.
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