Building love and justice, ending harms: A framework for abolishing the tobacco and nicotine industry

Abstract

The tobacco and nicotine industry, embedded in colonial exploitation and racialised harm, remains a leading cause of preventable disease, death, and intergenerational trauma. This article presents a transformative abolitionist public health framework, grounded in Indigenous-led principles of sovereignty, truth-telling, love, and justice. It aims to dismantle the structural drivers of harm perpetuated by the industry. We centre abolition as a moral and ethical imperative, but also as a practical necessity to uphold the human right to health, restore Indigenous authority, and eliminate systems that commodify addiction and death. Drawing on Indigenous health paradigms and abolitionist theory, we outline practical, policy-facing pathways to abolition. These include divesting from harm, reinvesting in care, defunding industry influence, and embedding reparative justice. Examples include legal liability mechanisms, profit caps, truth-telling commissions, trade reform, and Indigenous-led health infrastructure. We distinguish abolition from prohibition, framing it as a strategic, relational, and system-wide response that invests in life-affirming alternatives rather than punitive control. At the heart of this framework is love, a radical commitment to healing, collective well-being, and restoring power and agency to communities most harmed. Rather than placing responsibility on individuals, this framework offers a systems-wide approach to public health that targets the structural drivers of harm. This article contributes a new model for health-generative public policy, advancing abolition as an urgent strategy for equity, truth, and planetary and human health.