April 18- 19, 2024, ASH hosted the first National Tobacco Endgame Summit in Washington, DC. It was the culmination of over a year of planning and comes at an opportune and exciting time as endgame policies are being implemented worldwide, with three Massachusetts towns joining Brookline in implementing Nicotine-Free Generation (NFG) policies and the recent passage of a similar law in the United Kingdom House of Commons.
The Summit served as a transition point in the history of tobacco policies in the United States.
The concept of ending the tobacco epidemic rather than mitigating it, of going after the perpetrators rather than the victims, of drawing a line in the sand, has now moved to the mainstream. Yes, demand-focused policies will remain important as we dismantle the toxic edifice the tobacco industry has built over more than a century. But we have proof-of-concept for policies that seek to eliminate the commercial sale of tobacco products, and governments are taking notice.
When ASH launched Project Sunset in 2018, a Summit like this would have drawn a few dozen “radicals” and been ignored by the bulk of the public health community. Today, the most difficult aspect of Summit planning was that we had too few seats – everyone wanted to come.
That alone is cause for celebration, but we have higher aspirations for the Summit. Since the launch of Project Sunset, one by one partner organizations have joined the chorus calling for an end to commercial tobacco sales. Representatives of nearly every national tobacco policy group attended the Summit. Imagine if, at every level of government, whenever tobacco policy is discussed, the public health community was united in pushing for endgame. Not every jurisdiction is ready, of course, but that doesn’t mean plans can’t be put in place to get ready. We must envision it, and then make it happen.
ASH is extremely grateful to the following organizations for their support of the Summit: Truth Initiative, the American Heart Association, Kaiser Permanente, the National Cancer Institute, MDAnderson Cancer Center, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council. And to the Summit attendees: the work you do is instrumental in saving lives, and we are privileged and humbled that you would put that work on hold to help us plan for the end of the tobacco epidemic. ASH will do everything in its power to make that investment well worth it.
