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In the faltering war against cigarettes, the latest battle cries are eye openers: prohibit smoking for anyone born after the year 2000; require a licence to buy cigarettes; nationalize the tobacco industry.

Or just make selling cigarettes illegal.

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All have been proposed as part of the “tobacco endgame,” a radical — and controversial — new approach to the smoking scourge that a select group of Canadian public-health experts will discuss later this year.

Endgame proponents note that a stubborn 20 per cent of the population continues to smoke — tens of thousands of them dying annually as a result — and argue the numbers are unlikely to decrease much under current anti-smoking policies.

So, they say, it’s time for innovative, out-of-the-box ideas that might just stamp out Western society’s biggest-single source of disease.

“We’ve got to do something,” says Rob Schwartz, executive director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. “I’m an academic, not an advocate, but when I have the data in my hands, I feel a moral responsibility to make it known.”