Tobacco control: new resources, existing treaties, and emerging challenges

Tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the world.1 Three research papers in The BMJ examine smoking and efforts to deal with it, and these studies pose important questions about progress made and where to go next.

Hoffman and colleagues describe a new open access dataset, the International Cigarette Consumption Database (ICCD).2 In their paper (doi:10.1136/bmj.l2231), they chronicle an ambitious programme of work to identify, review, and report estimates of cigarette consumption from sales and other data in 214 countries (former and present). The ICCD includes 71 countries where reliable data were available from 1970 to 2015. It identifies a decline in cigarette consumption per capita in most countries in the past three decades, but also substantial increases in China and Indonesia, and a doubling of consumption in Russia in the years immediately after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This valuable dataset is now freely available and provides a tool for future research to assess trends and monitor the impact of interventions.

Although …