Framing Nico-Colonialism and Nico-Genocide: A Critical Public Health Review of the Tobacco Industry’s Role as a Commercial Determinant of Health

Abstract

Background: Commercial tobacco and nicotine harms are often framed as issues of individual behaviour, product risk, or disease burden. Such framings can obscure the settler colonial and corporate structures that produce and sustain structural inequities and disproportionate harms among Indigenous peoples.

Aim: This critical essay (re)frames the commercial tobacco and nicotine industry as a structural mechanism of settler colonial violence, contributing to the systemic elimination of Indigenous peoples. It introduces the concepts of nico-colonialism and nico-genocide to name these harms with greater conceptual precision.

Critical analysis: Drawing on Indigenous scholarship, genocide theory, and critical public health, we examine how industry practices, including the commodification of sacred plants, engineered addiction, regulatory manipulation, and targeted harms, function as interlocking forms of biological, cultural, legal, and economic violence.

Contribution: Nico-colonialism describes the industry practices that sustain colonial control through addiction, policy interference, cultural appropriation, and commercial exploitation. Nico-genocide describes the cumulative outcomes of these practices, including addiction, premature death, cultural erasure, regulatory obstruction, and intergenerational harm.

Conclusion: We call for an abolitionist public health response centred on Indigenous sovereignty, truth-telling, accountability, community-led transformation, and the right to health. Abolition is positioned not as a metaphor, but as a public health necessity. By shifting from regulation to structural dismantlement, this paper contributes to decolonising public health responses to corporate harm.