Should Your State Have a Public Health Law Center?

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (S4) ◽  
pp. 58-59
Author(s):  
Jill Moore ◽  
Marice Ashe ◽  
Patricia Gray ◽  
Doug Blanke
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
National Network ◽  
College Of Law ◽  
Control Community ◽  
Strategic Advice ◽  
Public Health Practitioners

The Tobacco Control Legal Consortium is a national “network” designed to tap expertise about tobacco control legislation and to leverage existing resources. Based at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Consortium supports local counsel with research, strategic advice, sample materials and pleadings, and amicus briefs. The Consortium’s priorities are to support capacity nationally, to offer education, and to perform outreach activities to a variety of audiences.The Consortium seeks to advance policy change by making legal expertise more readily available to the tobacco control community. Legal issues are inevitably involved in policy change. The Consortium does not provide legal representation, but conducts analysis and research. They publish on important and emerging legal issues as well as on specific cases, assist in the development of legislation, and train public health practitioners and policy makers on recurring legal issues.

Health

2019 ◽  
pp. 354-362
Author(s):  
Gian Luca Burci
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Health It ◽  
Health Governance ◽  
Illicit Trade ◽  
Normative Development ◽  
Control Community ◽  
Public Health Officials ◽  
Regulatory Measures

This chapter provides an overview of the conception, negotiation, and normative development of the WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (FCTC) based on the professional experience of the author, a former Legal Counsel of WHO. The FCTC must be appreciated against the background of the normative role of WHO and its reluctance to use international lawmaking as a tool for global health governance. The FCTC is a groundbreaking instrument for the protection and promotion of public health; it was conceived as a framework convention in order to accommodate diverse regulatory measures at national and international levels and to create a normative space to facilitate progressive agreement on evidence-based interventions. The negotiation of the convention as well as of its Protocol on Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products was influenced by the relative lack of treaty-making experience on the part of public health officials in national delegations and by the uncompromising hostility of the tobacco control community against the tobacco industry. The resulting tension with strong commercial interests linked to tobacco trade led to a number of difficult and sometimes awkward compromises. At the same time, it led to the establishment of a strong institutional framework that has been instrumental in developing the FCTC through the adoption of far-reaching guidelines and the monitoring of compliance. Notwithstanding its success, there has been no serious discussion in WHO on the negotiation of new conventions, and the FCTC may remain an isolated achievement enabled by a unique set of circumstances.

From Tobacco to Obesity Prevention Policies: A Framework for Implementing Community-Driven Policy Change

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 856-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Walter ◽  
Kelly Dumke ◽  
Ariana Oliva ◽  
Emily Caesar ◽  
Zoë Phillips ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Obesity Prevention ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Prevention Policies ◽  
Community Residents

Efforts to reverse the obesity epidemic require policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change strategies. Despite the availability of evidence-based and other promising PSE interventions, limited evidence exists on the “how-to” of transitioning them into practice. For the past 13 years, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has been building capacity among community residents and other stakeholders to create effective community coalitions and to implement well-designed policy strategy campaigns using an evidence-based approach to policy change, the policy adoption model (PAM). Implementing a phase-based approach to policy change, the PAM was initially used to support the passage of over 140 tobacco control and prevention policies in Los Angeles County. Following these successes, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health applied the PAM to obesity prevention, operationalizing the policy process by training community residents and other stakeholders on the use of the model. The PAM has shown to be helpful in promoting PSE change in tobacco control and obesity prevention, suggesting a local-level model potentially applicable to other fields of public health seeking sustainable, community-driven policy change.

scholarly journals The Transformation of UK Tobacco Control

2019 ◽  
pp. 84-103
Author(s):  
Paul Cairney
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Behavioural Change ◽  
Policy Instrument ◽  
Smoking Ban ◽  
Policy Environment ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Evidence Based Model

The UK has one of the most comprehensive set of tobacco controls in the world. For public health advocates, its experience is an ‘evidence-based’ model for tobacco control across the globe, and for alcohol and obesity policies in the UK. In Scotland, policy-makers often described the ‘smoking ban’ as legislation so innovative that it helped justify devolution. These broad and specific experiences allow us to identify and explain different types of success. The UK’s success relates to smoking ‘denormalization’ and reduction, and the explanation comes partly from the ways in which policy-makers framed tobacco as a public health epidemic and produced a policy environment conducive to policy change. The ‘smoking ban’ success relates to the implementation and behavioural change that is lacking in most other countries. The explanation comes from the ‘window of opportunity’ for specific policy change, and the design of the policy instrument backed by the prioritization of its delivery by key public bodies. The overall lesson, particularly for advocates of evidence-informed policymaking, is that evidence only ‘wins the day’ when it helps reframe debate, produce a conducive policy environment, and actors exploit ‘windows of opportunity’ for specific reforms. In most countries, this did not happen.

scholarly journals Preemption in Tobacco Control: A Framework for Other Areas of Public Health

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Crosbie ◽  
Laura A. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Tobacco Control ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Local Policy ◽  
Media Advocacy ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Health Community ◽  
Control Community ◽  
New Policies ◽  
Front Groups

Preemption—when a higher level of government limits the authority of a lower level to enact new policies—has been devastating to tobacco control. We developed a preemption framework based on this experience for anticipating and responding to the possibility of preemption in other public health areas. We analyzed peer-reviewed literature, reports, and government documents pertaining to tobacco control preemption. We triangulated data and thematically analyzed them. Since the 1980s, tobacco companies have attempted to secure state preemption through front groups, lobbying key policymakers, inserting preemption into other legislation, and issuing legal threats and challenges. The tobacco control community responded by creating awareness of preemption through media advocacy, educating policymakers, mobilizing national collaborations, and expanding networks with the legal community. Ten of the 25 state smoke-free preemption laws have been fully repealed. Repeal, however, took an average of 11 years. State preemption has been detrimental to tobacco control by dividing the health community, weakening local authority, chilling public education and debate, and slowing local policy diffusion. Health scholars, advocates, and policymakers should use the framework to anticipate and prevent industry use of preemption in other public health areas.

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