Abstract: This chapter considers the possibility of rapid cultural change as exemplified by attitudes toward race, gender, and other issues. The application of these precedents to climate change is an important point.

Chapter 2 lays the foundations for the study and further clarifies its scope. Unhealthy lifestyles are defined here as collective patterns of unhealthy behaviour, based on choices from options available to people according to their life chances. This definition highlights four key dimensions central to the book: the health risks associated with those behaviours, their consumable nature, their voluntary character and, finally, the relevance of social norms and structural factors. The chapter explores the health dimension in greater detail for each of the three categories of products studied here, tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy foods, clarifying the health risks to which consumers are exposed and introducing the central regulatory questions raised by each category.

Chapter 8 approaches diversity through cultural and moral lenses. It concerns the acceptance of EU intervention, the legitimacy of its action in a sensitive field, ripe with moral and ethical controversies. The EU’s approach can broadly be divided into three strands, which are not mutually exclusive. The first is the Europeanisation of choice, most apparent in tobacco regulation, where the EU has adopted a quasi-prohibitionist stance with seemingly broad support from Member States. Strikingly, this occurs in the absence, both legally and politically, of arguments grounded in individual rights and autonomy. The second is an approach of insulation, relevant to alcohol and certain ‘heritage’ foods, where national regulatory choices remain shielded from European influence, either because of the EU’s reluctance to act or because of political deadlock. The third concerns the application of proportionality in free movement cases, and the extent to which cultural and moral arguments are accommodated in the adjudication of national restrictive measures.

Chapter 4 provides an historical overview of the content and objectives of the EU’s policy on unhealthy lifestyles. It distinguishes two periods. The first spans from the early days of European integration until the entry into force of the Treaty of Maastricht, in 1993. It is a period of negative integration: unhealthy products are regulated mostly through the prism of the TFEU internal market freedoms. One cannot yet speak of an EU ‘policy’ on the matter, in the sense of a deliberate and coordinated action made in response to the health burden associated with unhealthy lifestyles. This changes post-Maastricht, the second period, with the recognition of a formal competence for the EU in health matters. Unhealthy lifestyles are singled out as one of the key priorities of EU health action and a greater role is given to positive integration, with the adoption of various horizontal legislative instruments. Different approaches emerged for the three categories of products: while the declared goal is to bring tobacco consumption to a near end, alcohol consumption is considered to be a natural part of human life, not to be overly discouraged, with food and nutrition positioned somewhere in between.

Chapter 5 continues the overview through a different analytical lens. It investigates the EU’s toolbox, describing and classifying the regulatory tools used by the EU legislature across the different lifestyles. It identifies four main types of interventions: ban and composition requirements, tax and price measures, rules on advertising and promotion and rules on mandatory and voluntary information. Beyond this systematic description and classification, the chapter serves three aims. First, it confronts the regulatory tools used with the stated objectives of EU lifestyle policy, assessing their adequacy and suggesting possible reforms. Second, it highlights the significant regulatory disparities existing between lifestyle risk factors, critically evaluating the justifications for such differential treatment. Third, it shows how health and internal market objectives are intertwined in EU lifestyle policy, generating legal frictions.

‘What is an e-cigarette?’ This ostensibly simple question is central to the classification and regulation of these popular and contested devices. From their first development, e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine via vaporisation of a liquid solution, were marketed and presented as like conventional cigarettes in crucial ways. Not only were they called electronic cigarettes, that is, a type of cigarette, but early models were designed to look like conventional cigarettes, including a tip which lit up when inhaled (Ozga et al., 2022). Moreover, the clouds of vapour they produced resembled smoke. Public health and tobacco control organisations quickly identified e-cigarettes as a threat to individual and population health. They emphasised the devices’ capacity to produce nicotine addiction (just like cigarettes), to undermine the denormalisation of smoking and to enable tobacco industry expansion (Bell & Keane, 2012; Berridge et al., 2023). The rapid rise of e-cigarette use (or vaping as it is now known) among young people has solidified and intensified this emphasis on harm. In contrast, supporters of their harm reduction potential highlight the fundamental difference of e-cigarettes from cigarettes: there is no combustion of tobacco involved in their use.

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

• Prescription medications are highly regulated to make sure they are as safe and effective as possible.

• The last decade has seen an emerging black market for prescription medications particularly from unscrupulous online pharmacies,

• Some of the products sold illegally by these pharmacies are poor quality counterfeits

• Tobacco is the largest killer of all the psychoactive drugs, but smoking rates are now falling.

• Electronic cigarettes are safer than tobacco smoking because they only contain nicotine and none of the other harmful chemicals found in tobacco.

• The aggressive marketing of electronic cigarettes to young people has rapidly driven up their use causing concern that they will result in a new generation addicted to nicotine.

• If you don’t smoke, don’t vape!

• Young people are drinking less, but tend to binge drink when they do drink

• Reduce the many risks of alcohol intoxication but pacing drinking, avoiding drinking, understanding alcohol ‘units’ and knowing how to put a friend in the recovery position.

• There is emerging research suggesting that some illegal psychoactive drugs, such as cannabis and some hallucinogens, may have therapeutic value, but further research is needed to understand their potential benefits.

Although rarely at the center of the most influential human historical narratives, the stories of human-plant interaction are nonetheless sporadically recorded in a variety of literary genres and other cultural media across nearly five centuries. This chapter aims to provide a contextual outline of our present human–plant culture as it developed in North America through the early nineteenth century, and to orient readers to the most frequently discussed texts, questions, and resources in the field. It introduces the early modern history of settler cash crops – cotton, sugar, and tobacco – and the longer history of changing agricultural practice during the early contact period. Early American literature in English – poetry, herbals, prose tracts, and instructional writing – was deeply engaged with the movement of indigenous and imported plant species as they flowed in and out of North America as rapidly as humans moved into the region from the rest of the globe.

• ◦ The Spanish raw tobacco market offers a story of two cartels that operated simultaneously. The first cartel operated on the seller side of the market. It was set up by the three agricultural unions that managed contract negotiations for the tobacco producers (“the producer representatives’ cartel”). The second cartel, on the buyer side, was formed by the purchasers of raw tobacco (“the processors cartel”).

• ◦ The case study tells a rich story of cartel formation. Government regulation sought to establish fair prices for tobacco producers through a system of production quotas. This led those producers to form a cartel to collectively negotiate with downstream tobacco processors. The processors formed their own cartel to counterbalance the one upstream. We then have regulation inducing one cartel which then inspires a second cartel.

• ◦ The processors’ cartel exemplifies some of the challenges in achieving effective collusion as well as the critical complementary role of monitoring and punishing mechanisms. The cartel was ineffective in its first two years in spite of a high level of market concentration and effective monitoring. Only when an internal compensation mechanism was put in place did firms comply with the collusive outcome.

This chapter explores several legal opinions (pl. fatāwa) from the minority theological and legal tradition known as Ibāḍism, as represented by the work of the modern Ibāḍī jurist Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ (d. 1401/1981). The Ibāḍiyya are usually regarded as the inheritors of the early Khārijite movement and are thus neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī. Important Ibāḍī communities are today found in Oman and in smaller numbers in North Africa (Jerba Island in Tunisia, the Jabal Nafūsa mountains of Libya and the M’zab valley in Algeria). Ibrāhīm Bayyūḍ was the most prominent figure of the so-called ‘Ibāḍī Rennaisance’ (al-Nahḍa al-Ibāḍiyya) of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in which the Ibāḍī community in M’zab sought to find a place for themselves in their Sunnī-dominated environment, leading to an upsurge of Ibāḍī legal and theological scholarship. The fatwās excerpted here discuss the lawfulness of television and radio, eating the meat of non-Muslims, Pepsi and Coca Cola, smoking and various drugs.