Upstream Healthy Public Policy: Lessons from the Battle of Tobacco

Many consider public health and politics to be entirely separate worlds. Public health activities are generally well-motivated by public interest, perceived as value-free, scientific, and devoid of partisan preference. Politics, in contrast, can be viewed as a distasteful activity involving self-interested pressure groups, misuse of state power, and influence of money on national decisions. Public health and politics are inappropriate bedfellows if politics is reduced to party politics. Politics, of course, involves more than just party activities; it concerns the structure, distribution, and effects of power in society. Which groups pattern the social order? What are their sources of influence? How do they retain privileged status? What social effects result from the policies these groups shape? Viewed in this broader sense, politics is essential for effective public health and thus is the inescapable context of public health interventions. To disregard sociopolitical determinants of health is to relegate public health to prevention and promotion of individual risk behaviors. If public health is to be more successful in the 21st century, it must comprehend the magnitude of the forces against it and the strategies used to engineer its defeat. Public health interventions in the new millennium must be appropriate to their sociocultural context.