Tobacco Industry
The tobacco industry uses deceitful tactics to sell its harmful, addictive products. Vital Strategies exposes these tactics, creates counternarratives that challenge industry disinformation, and supports stakeholders with tools and resources to address industry interference in policies that reduce tobacco consumption around the world.
Research and Resources to Reveal Insidious Industry Tactics and Counter-interference
The tobacco industry deploys vast resources to create an environment favorable to selling addictive, harmful products to as many people around the world as possible. We conduct research and produce resources to combat these tactics in order to save lives.
Our global industry watchdog, STOP, is a network of academic and public health organizations dedicated to exposing the tobacco industry’s efforts to derail tobacco control and hook a new generation of users. STOP collaborates with researchers, advocates and journalists on groundbreaking investigations that expose questionable payments to politicians, potential complicity in illicit trade, undisclosed lobbying and secretly funded research.
Our strategic communication team highlights industry strategies, making complex issues accessible to governments and consumers. STOP also provides sustained counternarratives to industry disinformation and equips stakeholders with evidence they need to counter industry interference.
For example, the Global Tobacco Industry Interference Index, an international scorecard of 100 countries, is a key advocacy tool to expose global patterns of industry interference in government policy and how well governments are resisting industry influence.
Our Canary service provides insights into digital marketing strategies the industry deploys to hook new customers, including youth. Canary analyzes marketing activity, uncovers insidious campaigns and provides stakeholders with dashboards of powerful, actionable data. It decodes the tobacco promotion playbook: tracking message framing, influencer strategies and emotional hooks used to promote harmful products.
The Behavioral Insights Lab helps partners understand the psychology of industry interference: how industry narratives shape public perceptions, influence media coverage, create confusion among the public and delay policy action. This intelligence supports faster, better-targeted counter industry campaigns.
Supporting Partners to Expose and Counter Industry Activities
Vital Strategies’ Tobacco Industry Interference Grants Program provides funding for organizations that address the industry’s role in the tobacco epidemic. We fund short-term, targeted projects exposing and countering tobacco industry activities that undermine public health policies.
We also work with partners to develop good governance guidelines that prevent conflicts of interest between policymakers and the tobacco industry, advancing Article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which protects public health policies from tobacco industry interference.
Comprehensive Industry Monitoring and Response
The tobacco industry causes harm across its entire supply chain and tries to delay or stop any policy that might reduce consumption. We aim to expose the damage the industry causes and the playbook it uses.
We work to track and counter industry activities across all policy areas, including taxation, smoke-free environments, advertising bans, new product regulations and more. This entails monitoring industry activity at the country level and detecting patterns in industry tactics and messaging across countries. From alerting stakeholders about industry courses targeting medical professionals to documenting industry front groups, we act with partners to resist industry influence everywhere.
Addiction in Every Pocket: Nicotine Pouches and the Seeds of a New Youth Epidemic
Nicotine pouch sales have increased by 660% since 2020. STOP’s campaign on nicotine pouches exposes the tobacco industry’s efforts to plant the seeds of a new youth epidemic.
