Matthew Myers

Matthew Myers is president and CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a leader in the fight to reduce tobacco use and its devastating consequences in the United States and around the world.One of the organization’s co-founders in 1996, he was initially executive vice president and legal counsel. Over the last 25 years, Myers has participated in virtually every major national tobacco-related legislative effort and has worked with state tobacco-prevention advocates.

Myers began his tobacco control work in 1980 when he joined the Federal Trade Commission and was responsible for the agency’s tobacco-related activity. Under his leadership the FTC in 1981 produced a report that led Congress to strengthen the warning labels on cigarettes and also initiated litigation against Brown and Williamson for deceptive low tar claims concerning Barclay cigarettes. Later, he was named the acting Deputy Assistant Director of the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices.

In his position at the Campaign, Myers helped to lead the Campaign’s effort to defend FDA’s assertion of jurisdiction over cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products in 1996. Myers then served as a close advisor to the State Attorneys General in the 1990s when they sued the tobacco industry.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids later led the effort that resulted in 2009 in the US Food and Drug Administration being given authority over the manufacture, marketing and sale of tobacco products, including a requirement that cigarette packages carry graphic health warnings covering the top 50% of the front and back of all cigarette packages.

Among many other roles, he served on the first advisory committee reporting to the WHO director general on tobacco issues in 1999 and, the next year, co-chaired a US presidential commission on economic issues in tobacco-farming communities. In 2004, Harvard’s School of Public Health awarded Myers the Julius B. Richmond Award for his advocacy in preventing tobacco-industry marketing to children.