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.