Preemption is the restriction or prohibition by state or federal law of the enactment or enforcement by lower jurisdictions of their own law in a given topic area.  Simply put, preemption wipes out local control – leaving local officials powerless to enact policies to protect the health and safety of their community.

Evidence demonstrates that such preemption of local tobacco regulation impairs efforts to protect the public health by:

• Eliminating local control of public health policy;
• Establishing weak public health standards that will be enormously difficult to strengthen in the future;
• Eliminating strong, community-based tobacco-control interventions; and
• Dividing tobacco-control coalitions when differences arise over the competing need for enactment of state tobacco-control interventions and the consequences of doing so in a manner that simultaneously preempts stronger local initiatives

The public health interests of the American people will be better served if legislative proposals that either explicitly or implicitly, preempts the authority of states, localities or federal health agencies to regulate tobacco products in the most effective manner are rejected.