Like tobacco, gambling is a risky, urge-driven lifestyle choice with serious health, social and economic consequences, while simultaneously representing a lucrative global industry shaped by powerful commercial interests. In 2024, the Lancet Public Health Commission on Gambling called for public health-motivated interventions in gambling activity, including prohibitions or restrictions on “ … access, promotion, marketing, and sponsorship.” As the first set of universal norms to govern a lifestyle risk, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (‘FCTC’) has set a benchmark for universal population-led public health norms that address the sale and supply of tobacco products. To investigate the potential for transposition of the FCTC’s model to gambling, this paper examines the critical strategies of tobacco control norms. It evaluates them against the features of gambling regulation, taking a first step towards examining the “fit” of the FCTC as a normative model for common, internationally agreed public health-motivated measures of gambling control. It finds that while some normative elements may be transferable from tobacco control, fundamental differences between the highly targeted interventions of tobacco law and the broader regulatory objectives of gambling control frameworks make a direct transposition of norms problematic.

Tobacco control policies are complex with the potential for significant health effects. The public health actors and regulators who design, influence, and implement these policies place a high value on the evidence base that underpins them, engaging in scientific and applied debates about how to evaluate the success of existing policies and justify new actions. To investigate the construction of this evidence base, we conducted interviews with 40 individuals involved in formulating, advising, and implementing flavour restrictions for tobacco products. Our interviews inform case studies of six jurisdictions in three US states, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands. We find that tobacco policy stakeholders, which include regulators and public health personnel, play a vital role as data integrators in the construction of this evidence base: they bring together disparate types and sources of information to create synthetic evaluations of tobacco control policies that incorporate the complexity of the policy environment and differential impacts on population subgroups. Significantly, data integration is not easy to replicate or automate; should these positions be lost due to funding cuts as political priorities shift in the US and globally, the capacity they add to our policymaking and research systems will be difficult to restore.

Tobacco use causes over 8 million deaths annually, with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) bearing most of the burden. In Botswana, tobacco use prevalence rose from 17.6% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2024. Despite this, tobacco control infrastructure remains limited. Tobacco Control Resource Centers (TCRCs) have been established to consolidate provider training, research, and dissemination of tobacco control resources. The World Health Organization (WHO) Centre for Tobacco Control in Africa (CTCA), a regional TCRC, has a cross-country mandate that could be further strengthened through complementary, country-specific support. We applied the Community Engagement Studio (CES) methodology to co-design of a Botswana-based TCRC-assessing acceptability, priorities, potential challenges, and implementation strategies. In July 2025, 12 stakeholders from the Botswana Smoking Abstinence Reinforcement Trial (BSMART), a NIH-funded study aimed at integrating smoking cessation interventions in HIV clinics, participated in a 2-hour CES. Stakeholders endorsed the need for a national TCRC, prioritizing provider training, dissemination, and cessation services. Sustainable financing emerged as a key challenge, prompting proposals for diversified funding models. We successfully conducted a CES to guide the co-design of a Botswana-based TCRC, illustrating the acceptability of a national TCRC and how CES can be leveraged to strengthen tobacco control infrastructure in Botswana.

Interest group influence represents the Higgs boson of contemporary social research. Scholars have tried to define and measure influence for decades: tens of different definitions are used in the literature and as many methods to measure it can be found. The literature has recently converged towards an agreement on how to study interest group influence: preference attainment. The latter has monopolised the research in the literature in the last years. Yet, a discussion on what preference attainment is, what it does and what it does not is still missing in the literature. This works aims to fill this gap by providing a theoretical and methodological informed discussion on interest group influence and preference attainment. In so doing, I propose a novel method to apply preference attainment in an effective and efficient manner.

Liberal neutrality compels governments to respect individual preferences. Yet health-promotion campaigns, such as modern tobacco control policies, often seek to cultivate a preference for a healthy lifestyle. Liberal theorists have attempted to justify these policies by appealing to the concept of ‘means paternalism’, whereby these policies align with existing preferences. In contrast, this article argues that shaping preferences can be not only permissible but also morally required. Governments can preserve neutrality while influencing preferences by promoting generic goods valued in diverse societies and considering the preference-formation of future generations. This argument provides a stronger rationale for tobacco control policies.

Opinions vary in Japan on whether smoking is deviant today, but the behavior, once widely accepted, faces increasing regulation. Recent reforms, moving beyond reliance on nonsmokers' tolerance and smokers' etiquette, impose stricter and more detailed rules on smoking, along with penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government's promotional materials note, the reforms move “from manners to rules” (manā kara rūru e). The evolution of Japan's smoking regulations exemplifies a shift toward more legalistic modes of social control. Historically, Japanese governance relied on non-binding “soft law,” administrative guidance, and societal cooperation. Legalistic governance, in contrast, hinges on formal rules and proceduralized enforcement mechanisms. This article, drawing on twenty-eight interviews and qualitative analysis of policy deliberations, advocacy organization documents, court rulings, and Japanese news coverage, traces how societal actors contributed to this legalistic turn. Tobacco control advocates filed lawsuits, pursued voluntary changes through local activities, and provided information subsidies to policymakers while lobbying for local and national reforms. They thereby helped de-normalize smoking and render it regulatable. By uncovering bottom-up drivers of legalistic governance and the strategies through which societal actors influence regulatory style, this paper contributes to scholarship on governance, policy diffusion, and law and social change.

Smokeless tobacco use among Indian women is increasing despite prevention efforts. Evolutionary theories suggest that reproductive-aged women should be more concerned about immediate threats to reproduction than threats to survival occurring late in life. This study therefore compared an anti-tobacco intervention that emphasized near-term reproductive harms to one involving general harms occurring later in life. Scheduled Tribal women (N = 92) from Karnataka, India participated in this study. At baseline, women reported tobacco use and knowledge of harms, provided a saliva sample to assess use, and randomly viewed either a general harms presentation (GHP) or reproductive harms presentation (RHP). At followup, women reported their use, knowledge of harms and intentions to quit, and provided another saliva sample. At baseline, participants were aware of general harms but not reproductive harms. Both interventions increased knowledge of harms. Women in the RHP condition did not list more harms than women in the GHP condition, however, and the RHP was not more effective in reducing tobacco use than the GHP. In the RHP condition fetal health was particularly salient. In the GHP condition, oral health was highly salient, aligning with the local disease ecology and research on tobacco use and attractiveness.

This article explores the internationalisation of tobacco control as a case study in the history of international health regulation. Contrary to the existing literature on the topic, it argues that the history of international anti-smoking efforts is longer and richer than the making of the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in the early twenty-first century. It thereby echoes the point made by other scholars about the importance of history when making sense of contemporary global health. Specifically, the article shows how the internationalisation of tobacco control started in the 1950s through informal contacts between scientists working on cancer research and how these initial interactions were followed by a growing number of more formal initiatives, from the World Conferences on Tobacco or Health to the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. Rather than arranging these efforts in a linear narrative of progress culminating with the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, we take anthropological claims about global health’s uneven terrain seriously and portray a history of international tobacco control marked by ruptures and discontinuities. Specifically, we identify three successive periods, with each of them characterised by specific understandings of international action, tobacco control expertise, advocacy networks and funding strategies.

This article forges a link between support for European integration and adoption of tobacco advertisement restrictions in Swiss cantons. Leaning on the policy diffusion literature, this article argues that the more voters support deeper European integration, the more likely cantonal governments are to restrict tobacco advertising. Policymakers use voters’ support for more European integration as a signal that they support regulatory policies that are strongly associated with the European Union (EU) in the political and media debate, such as tobacco advertisement bans. This effect ought to be especially strong in the absence of adverse economic interests, such as the presence of the tobacco industry. To buttress these claims, the present article uses statistical analysis, specifically event-history analysis. Apart from the insights about Swiss tobacco control policy, this article contributes to our understanding of indirect EU influence on cantonal policymaking and policy diffusion.