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Creatively Combatting Tobacco Use

The recent CVS announcement that the chain would stop selling tobacco products, prompted some thoughts on how best to reduce tobacco use. Public education and advocacy are sometimes put to good use, at least it seems that way. I wonder if some lateral thinking, or just some systematic investigation of the topic can lead to some better programs?

The CVS decision may spark the desire to lobby other firms, to get them to stop carrying tobacco products too. This approach might appeal to activists, but has some challenges:

1. Access to decision makers
2. Shareholder concerns over profits
3. Lack of an alternative source of revenue, that makes sense for that business
4. C-level executives' natural conservatism about changing business strategy

So, maybe working on corporate executives is not the best possible tactic. Maybe reducing the number of places that sell tobacco, through pressure is not the best strategy at all. What other strategies and tactics might be available?

Other options that activists use today include lobbying local governments to implement smoking restrictions (smoke-free bars and restaurants), running PSAs about the costs of smoking, lobbying the federal government, and ad campaigns designed to undermine the "cool factor" of smoking. These tactics have a common focus - the user. The strategy here is to get the user to change his or her behavior. In some cases, activists try to act directly on the user, and in other cases on places that people smoke.

What other options are there? Could tobacco farmers be encouraged to grow other crops? Possibly, though the farmers would point out that tobacco is lucrative and no one has pointed out a realistic way to generate the same income.

The preceding paragraph suggests another tactic - cut tobacco production by helping producers find other ways to make good money.

Another approach to the question might focus on one type of tobacco user. Perhaps a tobacco campaign aimed at preteens, to turn them off of smoking. Parents could be targeted for some anti-tobacco advertising too. Instead of a simplistic message about teen smoking, maybe there needs to be information on how to steer kids away from tobacco use. There must be some behavioral research that's applicable. Someone needs to translate this research into simple instructions for parents.

Another behavior change/education effort might focus on adults who have stopped smoking but find their willpower faltering. Maybe there is no good information available on how to get through those spells. If the information were available, and ex-smokers knew about the information, this approach might help some people stay off of tobacco.

What approach to combatting tobacco use would give us the most bang for the buck? That question really contains two related questions:

How can we keep the most people from taking up tobacco use, for a given investment?
How can we prevent the most damage from tobacco use, for a given level of investment?

The first question deals with rates of tobacco use. The second question concerns the best way to prevent damage across all types of current and former tobacco use.

This post is an example, in text form, of using a concept map to come up with new approaches to reducing tobacco use.
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