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We examined the tobacco industry's rhetoric to frame personal responsibility arguments. The industry rarely uses the phrase "personal responsibility" explicitly, but rather "freedom of choice." When freedom of choice is used in the context of litigation, the industry means that those who choose to smoke are solely to blame for their injuries. When used in the industry's public relations messages, it grounds its meaning in the concept of liberty and the right to smoke. The courtroom "blame rhetoric" has influenced the industry's larger public relations message to shift responsibility away from the tobacco companies and onto their customers. Understanding the rhetoric and framing that the industry employs is essential to combating this tactic, and we apply this comprehension to other industries that act as disease vectors.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act exempted menthol from a flavoring additive ban, tasking the Tobacco Products Safety Advisory Committee to advise on the scientific evidence on menthol. To inform future tobacco control efforts, we examined the public debate from 2008 to 2011 over the exemption. Health advocates regularly warned of menthol's public health damages, but inconsistently invoked the health disparities borne by African American smokers. Tobacco industry spokespeople insisted that making menthol available put them on the side of African Americans' struggle for justice and enlisted civil rights groups to help them make that case. In future debates, public health must prioritize and invest in the leadership of communities most affected by health harms to ensure a strong, unrelenting voice in support of health equity.

The tobacco industry consistently frames smoking as a personal issue rather than the responsibility of cigarette companies. To identify when personal responsibility framing became a major element of the tobacco industry's discourse, we analyzed news coverage from 1966 to 1991. Industry representatives began to regularly use these arguments in 1977. By the mid 1980s, this frame dominated the industry's public arguments. This chronology illustrates that the tobacco industry's use of personal responsibility rhetoric in public preceded the ascension of personal responsibility rhetoric commonly associated with the Reagan Administration in the 1980s.

Tobacco control's unparalleled success comes partly from advocates broadening the focus of responsibility beyond the smoker to include industry and government. To learn how this might apply to other issues, we examined how early tobacco control events were framed in news, legislative testimony, and internal tobacco industry documents. Early debate about tobacco is stunning for its absence of the personal responsibility rhetoric prominent today, focused instead on the health harms from cigarettes. The accountability of government, rather than the industry or individual smokers, is mentioned often; solutions focused not on whether government had a responsibility to act, but on how to act. Tobacco lessons can guide advocates fighting the food and beverage industry, but must be reinterpreted in current political contexts.

The growing casino industry in the U.S. is built on a model of profitability that bears very close resemblance to two other industries: the tobacco industry and the opioid pain medication industry. While it is rather obvious that all three industries have demonstrated the ability to be consistently profitable, the models used to achieve that profitability are remarkably similar. All three industries began with addictive products. Through investments in research and development, they continually refined their product designs to emphasize and amplify addiction as a design element in order to increase profits. In each case, aggressive and deceptive marketing tactics were employed to target vulnerable populations and to normalize their addictive products despite the risks they posed to consumers. In each case, these products created substantial social costs. For the tobacco industry this includes the premature deaths of nearly half a million Americans annually, an enormous healthcare burden, and a substantial loss of productivity. For the opioid pain medication industry this includes thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of overdoses and an illicit market for other opioids that create enormous healthcare and criminal justice expenditures funded by tax dollars. The casino industry's products do not directly cause physical harm such as lung cancer or opioid overdose. Rather, this industry's products are designed to induce consumers to get in "the zone" and "play to extinction." The impacts on communities caused by casinos are latent, much like the lung cancer that appears in a smoker a quarter century after she takes her first of more than a million puffs. An addicted gambler will potentially experience bankruptcy, divorce, unemployment, and perhaps engage in embezzlement or larceny to keep gambling. The volume of such individuals reduces civic engagement and family stability in communities located in the vicinity of casinos. Other social costs include loss of productivity and healthcare costs associated with comorbidities related to the addiction to casino industry products. The accumulation of social costs and misery caused by highly profitable industries may provoke responses in social attitudes and policy. Over the past twenty-five years or so, federal, state, and local policies have regulated and reduced the impact of tobacco industry products. Litigation, too, has had an impact not only on tobacco industry profits but also in increasing transparency regarding tobacco industry behavior through discovery and whistleblower testimony. Such transparency has contributed to a denormalization of that industry's business model. More recently, the opioid crisis, driven by the opioid pain medication industry, has initiated policymaking as well as thousands of lawsuits against industry leaders. The casino industry, highly reliant upon electronic gambling machines designed to addict consumers may soon find itself in a very defensive legal and policy posture much like the tobacco and opioid pain medication industries which share its business model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]