Prohibition no, abolition yes! Rethinking how we talk about ending the cigarette epidemic
- PMID: 35241615
- DOI: 10.1136/tobaccocontrol-2021-056577
Prohibition no, abolition yes! Rethinking how we talk about ending the cigarette epidemic
Abstract
As public health advocates struggle over how best to end the cigarette epidemic, one persistent obstacle to developing appropriate policies has been the lingering spectre of 'prohibition'. A misunderstanding of the USA's experience with the national ban on sales of alcohol more than a century ago has led even public health advocates to claim that we cannot end the sale of cigarettes because 'prohibition does not work': a ban on sales, we hear, would lead to crime and to black markets, among many other negatives. In this Special Communication, we show how the tobacco industry has carefully constructed and reinforced this imagined impossibility, creating a false analogy between cigarettes and alcohol. This improper analogy, with its multiple negative associations, continues to block intelligent thinking about how to end cigarette sales. Instead of prohibition, we propose abolition as a term that better captures what ending sales of the single most deadly consumer product in history will actually do: enhance human health and freedom.
Keywords: advocacy; denormalisation; end game; public policy; tobacco industry.
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.
Conflict of interest statement
Competing interests: REM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3324-2183, Professor Emerita, University of California, San Francisco; editor-in-chief, Tobacco Control Date: 31 July 2021. I have read and understood BMJ’s policy on declaration of interests and declare the following: personal financial interests: since 1997, I have been a faculty employee of the University of California, San Francisco. I am semi-retired and receive a pension from the University. My recall salary is provided by funds from the state of California and my research grant from the National Cancer Institute. I have received travel/accommodation expenses and consulting fees or honoraria from the US Department of Justice (for serving as a tobacco industry documents consultant for USA vs Philip Morris et al), WHO (for serving on the Expert Panel on Tobacco Industry Interference with Tobacco Control), American Legacy Foundation (for serving on an award selection panel), Clearway Minnesota (for serving as a grant proposal reviewer), US Centers for Disease Control (for consulting on a tobacco industry documents research project), NIH (for serving as a grant proposal reviewer) and Cancer Research UK (for preparing a report on views of the idea of a tobacco 'endgame'). I own one share each of Philip Morris International, Reynolds American and Altria stock for research and advocacy purposes and have participated in tobacco control advocacy. I receive an annual honorarium and reimbursement of travel/accommodation expenses from BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (for work as editor-in-chief of Tobacco Control). I have also received travel/accommodation expenses and honoraria for speaking to various public health groups. In addition, I have received funding for reviewing documents as a potential expert witness for plaintiffs’ legal cases involving tobacco industry activities. Organisational financial interests: within the last 5 years, I have received grant funding from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (research funds derived from the state tax on cigarettes) and the California Tobacco Control Program. RNP is a tenured faculty member at Stanford University and receives a salary. He also serves as an expert for plaintiffs in tobacco litigation, where the industry has been charged with fraud, conspiracy, negligence, racketeering and/or manufacture of a deadly product.
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