Preemption and public health: The long- and short-(term) of it

Twenty years ago, state preemption emerged as the greatest challenge to the success of the burgeoning tobacco control movement. Hundreds, and ultimately thousands, of cities and counties adopted increasingly strong local smoking ordinances while Congress considered the Airline Smoking Ban. The tobacco industry's elegantly simple response was a national strategy to promote state preemption of local smokefree policy. Today, the successful tobacco control movement opposes federal and state preemption. However, preemption and local control have become nearly universal issues across other health and public health arenas, from alcohol policy to obesity prevention to injury prevention. Preemption, once passed, is also very difficult to repeal. To make fully informed, strategic decisions about preemptive legislative proposals, the public health community should consider all of preemption's short-term and long-term consequences, including its impact on grassroots movement building. Preemption and Movement Building in Public Health (PMB) is a research and professional education project examining preemption as a strategic decision and, specifically, preemption's impact on state and local grassroots movements. This session will cover the methods and initial findings of the research, including key informant interviews conducted between February and April 2010, regarding the impact of preemption on public health and health policy.