The symbolic and the material in tobacco control: both matter

For many years, those who care about promoting health acted as though cigarettes fell from the sky and our job was merely to keep kids from picking them up while telling those who did that it was bad for them. Some still see it that way. But the end of the last century pulled back the curtain on the tobacco industry and its global conspiracy to protect its profits at the expense of millions of lives. The collective narrative about tobacco began then to shift as we understood that what we once saw as bad choices made by individuals was an industrially produced disease epidemic on a scale never before seen.1–6 As knowledge about the tobacco industry's behaviour grew, the tobacco control movement was spurred to achieve enormous progress in reducing tobacco use. But even highly optimistic projections suggest that the epidemic cannot be ended with current measures.7 ,8 And ending , not merely containing, is what we must do. Achieving this will require both material (policies, programmes, practices) and symbolic (frames, narratives, images) resources. The immediate global priority remains full implementation of the measures of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. That is material work that must be done, and done now. However, at …