In response to the suggestion that CANCHID institute a dialogue on Tobacco Reduction Stratagies, CANCHID received the following opinion posting from a subscriber on a commercial network (@delphi.com): ------ start of post ------ I don't think it is any of my business of (if) you smoke, frankly. This is a topic that is much overdone. ------end of post------ This message from the ListManager is to remind subscribers that CANCHID is a list devoted to education and research and is not a soap box for simple statements of opinion. I address this message to the increasing number of subscribers who come from commercial sites (@aol, @delphi, etc.). This is an open forum on research and education topics as they apply to health in international development. It is not a "letters to the editor" venue. In the case of Tobacco Demand reduction strategies, the World Bank and a host of other funding and research institutions, as well as public health agencies, have concluded on the weight of the evidence that the consumption of tobacco is a social problem beyond the freedom of the individual to do damage to one's self. If, on the other hand, a subscriber feels that there are errors in the evidence or the analysis, the subscriber is welcomed to raise the level of the discussion. However, subscribers are discourage from lowering the level of the discussion. CANCHID is a jointly provided service from the Canadian University Consortium on Health in International Development (CUCHID) and the Distributed Knowledge Project (DKProj) at York University. CANCHID will be run as a public listserv so long as it is not abused. Should the incidence of commercial postings and gratuitous unnecessary postings grow, it will be proposed that CANCHID become a private listserv, echoing its traffic to a READ-ONLY public site. It is our hope that new subscribers will understand this point. It is not without some consternation that listserv managers have turned AOL into a verb (transitive) when they speak of having been AOLed by postings from new @aol subscribers. Private opinions about the posting from the ListManager should be directed to the manager and not the list. Sam Lanfranco < [log in to unmask] >