Envisioning tobacco’s ‘endgame’
March 16, 2024 – Laws prohibiting the sale of tobacco products to people born after a certain year—reflecting the concept of a Tobacco-Free Generation (TFG)—are likely to gain steam in the months and years to come, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Howard Koh.
In March, Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) upheld the town of Brookline’s TFG law—the first of its kind in the U.S. The law, which went into effect in September 2021 and remained in force during a legal challenge, prohibited the sale of tobacco to anyone born on or after January 1, 2000. In a May 7 article in Health Affairs, Koh, Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health Leadership, and co-author Michael Fiore, professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and the founding director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention, wrote that the SJC decision could have national and global ramifications.
Since the SJC decision, they noted, several other Massachusetts towns have passed their own TFG laws, and such laws are being considered in a number of U.S. states and in several other countries. “We believe that by implementing and enforcing this [TFG] policy, community leaders can steadily increase the proportion of the population that is tobacco-free,” Koh and Fiore wrote.
Koh and Fiore noted that, since most tobacco users start as kids, TFG laws can reverse that trend because they would effectively raise the legal purchase age for tobacco products year after year.
“After more than a century of devastation, the dawn of the tobacco endgame has finally arrived,” the co-authors wrote. “While Massachusetts represents the epicenter of this historic change toward a new normal, all of society and can take notice and take action. Now is the time for leaders in the U.S. and indeed around the world to dare to envision the end of the tobacco epidemic once and for all.”
Read the Health Affairs article: The Tobacco Endgame Begins
