The Smoking and Tobacco Use program sits within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national public health agency of the United States. Its work centers on a single message backed by decades of evidence: tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease, disability, and death in the country. The program translates that finding into data, guidance, and prevention tools that the public, clinicians, and policymakers can act on.

Much of what the program offers is information that no private company has the mandate or the reach to assemble. It tracks how many adults still smoke cigarettes, how youth tobacco and vaping rates shift year to year, and how exposure to secondhand smoke breaks down across different groups. These figures come from large national surveys and are released through channels such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency's long-running scientific bulletin.

One of the more practical resources is the STATE System, short for State Tobacco Activities Tracking and Evaluation. It pulls together state-level information on tobacco laws, tax rates, program funding, and prevalence, then presents it in a form that researchers and state health officials can query directly. For anyone studying how policy and outcomes connect, it removes a lot of guesswork.

The cessation side of the program is built for two audiences at once. People who want to quit can call the national quitline at 1-800-QUIT-NOW, which routes callers to free coaching run by their own state. Healthcare providers get clinical tools, patient-care guidance, and counseling materials meant to fit into a normal office visit. The agency does not sell any of this; the materials exist to be used and shared.

Topic coverage runs across the products people actually encounter. There are dedicated sections on cigarette smoking, e-cigarettes and vaping, secondhand smoke, menthol products, and the broader group of other tobacco items such as cigars and smokeless tobacco. Each section sticks to what the science shows about health effects rather than offering opinions, which is part of why clinicians and journalists lean on the material.

The program is also the home for the Surgeon General's reports on tobacco, a series that stretches back to the landmark 1964 report linking smoking to cancer. Those reports are dense, peer-reviewed summaries of the evidence, and the agency keeps them available for free download. When a question comes up about what is genuinely established versus merely claimed, these documents tend to settle it.

Why does any of this belong in a curated business directory? Because the value of a directory rises and falls on the quality of the sources it points to. A federal agency that gathers tobacco data under a public mandate, with no product to push, is exactly the kind of primary source that researchers, health writers, and program planners want to find quickly. Listing it alongside other vetted entries saves people from sorting through commercial pages that blur information and sales.

The audience is broad on purpose. A graduate student needs the prevalence tables. A county health department needs the policy tracking. A parent worried about a teenager's vaping needs plain-language fact sheets. A reporter on deadline needs a citation that will hold up. The program is structured so each of those visitors can land on the right material without wading through the others.

Trust here rests on a few concrete things. The data collection methods are documented and repeated over time, so trends can be compared honestly rather than cherry-picked. The reports go through scientific review before release. And the agency operates under public accountability, which means its numbers are subject to scrutiny in a way private estimates rarely are. That combination is hard to match outside government public health.

For contact, the agency's main public line is CDC-INFO at 800-232-4636, which fields general health questions and can direct callers to the right program. The headquarters address is 1600 Clifton Road NE in Atlanta, Georgia. The tobacco program's web home at cdc.gov/tobacco is the front door to everything described above.

It helps to be clear about what the program is not. It is not a treatment clinic, and it does not enroll people in cessation programs itself; the quitline hands that off to state services. It is not a regulator of tobacco products either, since that authority sits with a separate federal body. What it does is measure, explain, and equip. Knowing that boundary helps a directory user reach the program for the right reasons and look elsewhere for the rest.

Anyone maintaining a business directory in the health and wellness space will find this a steady anchor entry. The agency does not change its mission with the seasons, its resources stay free, and the data refreshes on a predictable schedule. That reliability is worth more in a reference listing than any amount of promotional shine, and it is the reason the program earns a place among trusted public-health resources.

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