Happy New Year! We hope you had a relaxing holiday. We are deeply saddened by the devastating loss and destruction caused by the fires in Los Angeles. During this challenging time, please know that we hold our colleagues in LA close in our thoughts and prayers.
Although we are facing many uncertainties ahead of us, I want to highlight some of the major achievements during the last twelve months in tobacco control. In 2024, we saw that cigarette smoking continued to decline among people with behavioral health conditions, and youth cigarette smoking reached the lowest level ever recorded by the FDA at 1.4%.
While these achievements give us reason to celebrate, our work is far from over. In 2024, we also saw a wide gap in tobacco use between those with and without behavioral health conditions. Cigarette discontinuation rates continued to lag among populations who faced intersectional inequities across race/ethnicity, income, gender, sexual orientation, and behavioral health. People who smoked menthol cigarettes were less successful in quitting smoking despite attempting to quit more than those who smoked nonmenthol cigarettes.
That’s why, in 2025, SCLC is more committed than ever to reducing disparities in tobacco use and increasing cessation through community partnerships. Let’s build on the momentum we saw in 2024 to create a more ambitious agenda to promote health equity.
To lay the groundwork for what’s next, I’d like to recap some of the work SCLC completed in 2024 and a discuss a few upcoming developments for 2025.
SCLC’s Strategic Plan
SCLC began its strategic planning process in 2024, which involved re-envisioning our mission and vision, obtaining internal and external stakeholder input, and mapping out a new five-year plan more closely aligned with our goals. To better align our efforts with the changing landscape of tobacco products and tobacco control policy and regulation, we developed three pillars of work to guide SCLC’s projects and collaborations. Each pillar will help move our work toward Collective Impact, 1 a framework that allows like-minded organizations to collaborate on a shared agenda to solve complex social problems. Our three pillars of work now include:
- Education and capacity building
- Implementation and research
- Community engagement
This five-year (2025-2030) working strategic plan provides us with a roadmap with clear strategies, measurable objectives to track progress, and actionable steps to turn our plans into reality. We are eager to partner with you in these efforts. A high-level overview of our new strategic plan can be found here.
SCLC’s Fall 2024 Reconvening of the National Partnership on Behavioral Health and Tobacco Use
The National Partnership on Behavioral Health and Tobacco Use is a partnership of 22 organizations from tobacco control, public health, government, and behavioral health sectors, committed to reducing large gaps in access to tobacco treatment in behavioral health populations. The 22 partners convened in person in October 2024, embarking on a path towards Collective Impact, and coalesced into three working groups:
- Communications and Messaging
- Education, Treatment Resources, and Guidelines
- Systems and Settings that Engage Priority Populations
The partnership is also working on:
- Adapting our existing toolkit and educational resources to integrate an intersectionality framework2
- Writing a framework paper on the National Partnership model to achieve collective impact in reducing tobacco use in behavioral health populations
- Administering a survey to understand partnerships with people with lived experience of tobacco use and behavioral health conditions
- Convening a lived experience board
SCLC will provide backbone support and conduct this work with our partners. I am looking forward to providing an update on this work later this year.
National Behavioral Health Network Community of Practice
As part of our ongoing work with the National Council on Mental Wellbeing, our team partnered with the National Behavioral Health Network and the National LGBT Cancer Network on their Community of Practice, “Cancer Health System’s Change”. Our team served as faculty for the Community of Practice participants from 9 states, providing coaching, technical assistance on action planning, cessation, and taking facilities tobacco-free.
California Center for Tobacco Cessation (CaCTC)
CaCTC, SCLC’s California-specific project, hosted several regional trainings in 2024 including two Behavioral Health Regional Trainings in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties. In partnership with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, we hosted a Tobacco Treatment Specialists training. In addition, CaCTC conducted two other analytic projects in 2024. To understand perspectives on integrating trauma-informed tobacco cessation treatment into community mental health practice, we conducted key informant interviews with participants who attended our 2023 Trauma, Addiction, Mental Health, and Recovery trainings. We also conducted an analysis of the data from the 2021-2022 California Health Interview Survey to understand the association of intersecting identities of sexual orientation and race and ethnicity on tobacco use, quit attempts, and perceptions of access to and quality of healthcare. We found disparities in tobacco cessation and healthcare access across the intersections of race/ethnicity and sexual orientation, which will inform our future efforts with California’s Medi-Cal Managed Care Programs to better reach and address unmet tobacco treatment needs among these intersectional populations in California. I am looking forward to sharing the results of these two projects later this year.
We also held several Ask the Expert Sessions, of which I want to highlight the following:
SCLC’s Robust Offering of Webinars
We hosted several webinars in 2024, spanning topics from policies around menthol tobacco to tobacco cessation in priority populations, of which I’d like to highlight the ones that were held towards the end of 2024.
- The Bridge Model: Comprehensive compassionate community-based healthcare model
- Empowering Futures: Culturally Tailored Commercial Tobacco Cessation Programs in American Indian and Alaska Native Communities
- The Curious Science of Cravings
- The Cancer Moonshot: What’s Menthol and Emotional Brain Training Got To Do With It? Everything!
New Developments for 2025
Our team is working on new opportunities with our partners focused on criminal legal system-involved populations as well as young adult populations around tobacco, cannabis, and other related substance use. We will be putting into action our strategic plan focused on education and capacity building, implementation and research, and community engagement.
In the near-term, please be sure to check out these two upcoming events:
SCLC’s January Webinar – Cessation Updates: Year in Review
We will be launching our inaugural “Cessation Updates: Year in Review” webinar. SCLC’s annual cessation updates will review past-year trends in tobacco cessation as well as advances and opportunities in tobacco cessation among disproportionately impacted populations. For the 2024 review, we will review data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study on population trends in discontinuing tobacco products and attempting to quit tobacco products. We will also focus on tobacco cessation and anti-smoking interventions for sexual and gender minority populations in the US.
- Register now for 2024 Cessation Updates: Year in Review on January 29, 2025 10:00am to 11:15am PT.
It’s About a Billion Lives Annual Symposium
In partnership with the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, we are co-hosting “It’s About a Billion Lives Annual Symposium” on Friday, April 11, 2025. Join us for a full-day, in-person event to learn about the latest trends and research shaping the future of tobacco control.
On behalf of the team here at SCLC, we wish you an amazing, enriching, and productive 2025. Please reach out for collaborations, partnerships, and/or if we can be of any assistance in your tobacco control efforts.
References
1. Collective Impact Forum. What is Collective Impact. Available at: https://collectiveimpactforum.org/what-is-collective-impact/. Accessed on January 9, 2025.
2. Bowleg L. The problem with the phrase women and minorities: intersectionality-an important theoretical framework for public health. Am J Public Health. Jul 2012;102(7):1267-73. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2012.300750