It's definitely a much more complicated thing for chemicals. On tobacco, the research since 1969 has caught up, and now everybody does understand that it's very cancer-causing and extremely risky, but there is research out there to show that different things are cancer-causing and so on.
As for research on its successes, one thing that it's definitely been very successful with is getting industry to change its practices, to substitute safer chemicals, and to at least reduce the use of the more toxic chemicals they use. There's definitely a lot of research about that in Europe. California has a lot of research, and Massachusetts does too, as do many other places.