Achieving Health Equity: Standing Together Against Commercial Tobacco & Nicotine, 2025ā2026ā
Objective 8: Counter the Tobacco and Cannabis Industries
Download Objective 8 (PDF).ā
Key Themes
- Tobacco companies produce an ever-changing lineup of products, including novel nicotine products, to normalize use and gain acceptability as partners.
- There is increasing overlap between the tobacco and cannabis industries, in both products and marketing tactics.
- Stopping industry influence on policy and countering industry tactics are essential to denormalizing and reducing tobacco and cannabis use.
Countering the tobacco industry is integral to ending the commercial tobacco epidemic. To keep its existing customers and hook new ones, the industry produces a constantly changing lineup of combustible, heated, aerosolized, and oral tobacco and nicotine products.1 Increasingly, the industry markets ātobacco-freeā products such as nicotine pouches,2 and even āzero nicotineā products such as nicotine-free dip and pouches, to try to downplay legitimate health concerns, normalize use, and maintain profits.
The tobacco industry encompasses a wide array of companies. Besides manufacturers, it includes transporters, distributers, retailers, and companies that provide industry finance and business services. It includes marketing, consulting, and media companies that advertise and enable tobacco product placement in movies and other media. It includes allied business groups, trade organizations, and industry front groups, such as the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, and tobacco retailer interest groups, such as the National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO) and the Hookah Chamber of Commerce. It also includes niche companies, such as those that sell and deliver tobacco products to students on college campuses. Countering the industry means addressing not just the big tobacco companies, but also these allied entities.āā