Tobacco Control in Industrialized Nations: The Limits of Public Health Achievement

In 1999 Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General of the World Health Organization, painted a stark picture of the global toll in morbidity and mortality that could be expected from tobacco consumption. “Tobacco-related diseases are spreading like an epidemic and are likely to be killing 10 million people a year around 2020.” The warning was coterminous with the drafting by the WHO of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a treaty designed to interrupt and reverse the “epidemic’s” course. In the next decades attention to the impact of tobacco will shift to the less developed and rapidly modernizing nation. At this juncture it would be useful to review the almost half-century long public health campaign to confront tobacco in the industrialized nations. This analysis is drawn from a broader examination of the global picture of tobacco control at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.